Sigil: City of Doors

In darkness beneath the dream, far below, until you reach the blackened waters of forgetfulness. Beneath the surface a deep tremor knocks in the night.

A flicker and a dim red light.

Far below can be seen a dusky wood without moonlight and without stars.

A little boy and a little girl walk together through the woods holding hands. Quiet and afraid they shake nervously. A moment before it had been a pretty woods with autumn leaves and a warm yellow glow but somehow things had changed.

Ahead of them they found a cottage. Dark and empty it looked, for a second.
The two of them looked at each other then back again.
The chimney now had smoke drifting up from it and inside, a red flicker of light from a fire.
The cottage was the only place of colour in the whole woodlands for all else was dark and lost.

“Let’s go in.” Said the little boy.
The girl looked and watched a shadow move past the window, a bent over figure with a hooked nose and a pointy chin.

“No! No I don’t like it, I don't want to go.” She cried and pulled away from her brother’s hand.
“There’s nowhere else to go.” He said and walked towards the cottage beckoning his sister to follow.
The boy opened the door and looked inside and even though the girl had not followed him she seemed to be close by the cottage anyway, watching him enter.
The door shut with only a crack of light as the girl watched the cottage, breathing heavily.
She could feel her heart punching her chest from the inside. A sensation that paralysed her and made her unable to move.
From the cottage she could make out her brother talking and the sound of an old woman's voice so quiet she could not hear what it was saying. Soon there was silence followed by a terrible whining noise, quiet and distant but the only sound around.

It died away in time and the smoke from the chimney began to grow thicker and blacker.
The little girl began to cough and rub her eyes. It was horrible.
She stepped towards the door unable to say her brotherÂ’s name for the fear in her. Her every movement weak and shakey.
Looking in she saw a cauldron in a fire place, big and bubbling it was. The rest of the room was bathed in light of dim and unnatural colours. Sweeties and cakes adorned an old wooden table and fizzy drinks in old glass bottles.
The girl turned to walk back out but the door was shut behind her and would not budge.
Her legs became weak and started to shake as she walked across the room to the cauldron.

A floor board creaked and she winced.

Something bobbing in the water caught her attention. She drew closer and closer trying not to make a sound. Her eyes wild and staring around the room full of old furniture and pretty trinkets.
She reached her hand out to touch the cauldron but then jumped back as she realised that bobbing in the cauldron's dark broth was hair... hair on the top of a head.
The girl tried to scream but no sound would come out of her mouth. She tried to run but her feet were cemented to the floor and then in her hysteria she saw it.
The hag was standing by a door to a kitchen on her left, staring at her. A dark silhouette of messy hair and wretched old clothing, it began to step towards her, slowly into the light from the fire beneath the cauldron.

“Don’t cry pretty, don’t cry. Come to Betsy, come have a lolly pop, that’s right, yes hmm.. yes, have one, have it, HAVE IT!” The hag crept forward bombarding the child with offers, her lips thin and horrid showing gums and dark stained teeth, her nose hooked with a wart and her chin equally alike. She lashed out forward and grabbed the child by the wrists, strength like a giant, unbreakable and unfightable. She laughed and cackled, her eyes yellow and pale staring deep into the eyes of the little girl.


Somewhere in Sigil, in a lovely house in the LadyÂ’s ward, the cries of a mother and child could be heard as she sat by her daughterÂ’s bed cradling the child in her arms. The little girl was screaming until her voice went dry, flailing whilst her mother tried to calm her down but nothing could console the poor girl.
The mother turned to a worried father as he entered the room. “I can’t wake her, I can’t wake her! Nothing will wake her up!”
The father stood with his hands on his head then froze in terror as he looked to an empty bed on the other side of the room. “Where is Timmy?”
The two froze, the girl still screaming and flailing in her motherÂ’s limp arms.

“Where in the nine hells is Timmy?!”

TimmyÂ’s sister Taya sat in bed staring across the room at TimmyÂ’s bed. Every night it was the same ritual. Trying to sleep, but being too afraid. Glyphs and wards covered the outside of her bedroom door and the faint glow of them shone through the gap between the frame. Her parents were falling to bits. Nobody knew where Timmy had gone. They were all looking for him in Sigil but Taya knew the hag had taken him. Nobody listened and nobody cared what she thought.
Slowly she sobbed, nodding off to sleep and then she heard a voice in the dark.

“..Taya...help...”

She looked around, “Timmy? Where are you?”
“Taya... help me...” It whispered quiet as a mouse.

Taya got up and walked towards TimmyÂ’s bed.
“Taya... help Taya, I’m stuck...”

Taya looked at the bed where the voice was coming from, the only thing there was TimmyÂ’s teddy.
She bent down and looked under the bed for a moment. There was nothing the voice could be coming from.

“Taya... it’s me, help me Taya.”
Taya looked at the Teddy for a second and picked it up holding it to her ear.
“Help Taya... take me to mum and dad... help...”
Taya looked in shock, it was Timmy, he was in the Teddy bear.
“Timmy, what the?”

The little girl opened her bedroom door and ran down the corridor to her parents who were sat around a table in the kitchen.

“Mum, Dad! Look it’s Timmy! He’s in the bear!”
“Taya please! Go back to bed we can’t take any more of this, it’s bad enough witho...”
TayaÂ’s father was cut off by her mother bursting into tears.
“Look what you’ve done, do you see what your mother is going through!”
Taya held the Teddy tight, her eyes watering. “But Timmy.”
“STOP IT!”

BANG BANG BANG!

A loud knock came at the door. TayaÂ’s mother halted her crying and looked up in shock. Her father turned his head at the force of the knock.
Taya began to shake, there was something not right.

“I don’t like it, don’t open the door.” She said.

Her father stood up and put his hand on the hilt of a silver sword he kept in the umbrella rack next to the door and calmly cracked the door open.
As soon as he did, four gnarly, grey, hagged, old fingers wrapped around the door frame and a face that paralysed Taya peered in through the gap.

“mmm..yes... hmm, let Betsy in, hmm... wants it, Betsy wants the Teddy!” The comment was followed by a terrible cackle and before Taya’s father could get the door shut or the sword fully drawn from the rack the door blasted open in a cloud of flies and purple energies.
Taya watched her father launch across the room and hit the wall before dropping to the floor and then it came in, the Hag.

“Hello Pretty.” It said with her crinkled old face all warty and full of fractured grey teeth.
The hag back handed TayaÂ’s mother down through the kitchen table as she tried to get up and run. Her strength was like that of an ogre or giant but she was just a horrible hunched old woman with messy hair and torn old fairy cloths.

“Give us the Teddy, yes, give it! GIVE IT NOW! .... Betsy wants it, please?”

She cackles and laughed as she came towards Taya and grabbed at her with her horrible hands.

Her nails caught TayaÂ’s cloths and tore them as the little girl ran back through the house towards her room.
Taya managed to slip away and ran as fast as she could, stumbling and falling catching herself on the walls and managing to fly forwards into her room. She tried to scream but there was no sound. She grabbed the door and slammed it shut in the HagÂ’s face.

“Now that’s not very nice.” Muttered the old woman from the other side of the door. “IS IT!” She screamed.

“Just want the teddy, Betsy does, just the teddy bear.”

Taya fell back onto her bed clutching TimmyÂ’s teddy. She could hear screaming that sounded like her own but she was not trying anymore. She covered her head and curled up rocking back and forth waiting for it to all go away.

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In TayaÂ’s room her mother sat holding the girl, who was screaming in terror. She had been asleep for weeks unable to wake and every now and then would break into the screaming.
There seemed nothing could be done to stop it except hold her and wait.
Slowly she calmed down and all was silent. Her mother and father lay on the bed either side of her.

They looked at each other in despair. There had been no leads on Timmy either and all seemed hopeless. Nobody cared, they were just a poor family in the Hive. Nobody cared about this sort of thing until it happened to someone from the LadyÂ’s Ward.
Several hours later in the light of day the two woke up and looked across the bed at each other again.

“Taya?” Her father said looking around.
TayaÂ’s mother got up and looked around the room.
“Where is she?” He asked and got up walking out of the room to look.
“Taya, where are you? Don’t mess around sweetheart...”
But Taya was gone, just like Timmy 'and all the others.'

In darkness beneath the dream, far below, beneath the blackened waters of forgetfulness. A deep tremor knocks beneath the mind. A familiar sound haunting to the dreamer but in this place incomprehendable.

A flicker and a dim red light.

Far below can be seen a speck in the darkness a dusky wood without moonlight and without stars.

The trees move, disturbed by something. They sway, a moving point in this windless place.

All is grey, all is empty.

At the edge of the woods opens a clearing in the dark. Grass sways and ahead is only the blackend sky, something is missing but the dreamer cannot remember.

Ahead is a cliff edge opening into a chasm deep and far.

A shape stands there. A tall figure holds the body of a woman above his head and throws her into the void. The figure fades and all is gone.

A moth flutters through the grass to the cliff edge and over. It flutters down past a waterfall of shadow and down, deep down into the crevace.

Far beneath, it flits over the darkest water. A still lake fed by the trickle of shadows that in another mind was life giving water.
The moth falls into the water and squirms on the surface.

Uncomfortable feelings fill the place, in it's enormity this small event is the only thing that matters, but even this matters not.

The moth fades like all other memories here and the water is empty once more except for the ripples that travel the lake.

Something stirs beneath the water, but like dark oil, nothing can be seen until it rises from beneath.

A female form beautiful and powerful, she rises. The black of the water covers her like a glistening vaneer. Her dark hair clings to her pale skin covering the intimacies of her form. Every curve is full and alluring. Her presence is the manifestation of forgotten desires. The moment every man is spent and free from his lust. The moment of forgotten beauty, it comes here to her.

And so she is spent. She walks from the water up the shore. Her pale toes cut into the black sands. Perfect and beautiful her feet. Her eyes are closed.

She wanders up the long hill on the far side of the crevace to reach the shallow peak on the other side.

Something haunts the black sky. Something is missing but the dreamer knows not what. The absence in itself is a presence more menacing than any manifestation.

Emptiness surrounds her as she climbs naked to the peak of the hills and wanders into the rocky hills beyond.

The woman's journey ends, a jutting cliff at the edge of the land atop a great sea, a peninsula of rock extends high over the ocean. She stands looking out into the empty dark, reaching up, she holds her hands to the emptiness of the dark sky.

Something is missing.

That something is her.

Her light is gone, but she cannot shine. She is forgotten.

Forsaken by herself, she falls to her knees and screams but there is no sound.

Her skin wrinkles and shrivels, her face wisens and she becomes old and hagged.

A sound, a deep sound. A knock deep and far beneath echoes through this place.

"What have you made?" He thinks and whispers to himself as he awakens in his bed.

Dark is the room but close and real. His breath moves the air, it's sharp echo present and palpable in his ears. He feels the passing of time return.

So long... His life feels like a memory, so complete but so far behind this moment. How long has he been in this place?

Lucidity from the madness for a moment.

"I have been waiting." Comes her voice in the dark.

Fear fills him and his aged body cannot respond. He panics in the bed too old and weak to even cry out.

The hag grabs his throat and lifts his withered body slighty pulling the pillow from beneath his head and dropping him back onto the cold sheets beneath.

"No..." He aches out. His last word before she pushes the pillow into his face.

"Yeeesssss...." She says, dry and menacing in her satisfaction.