Here’s a short introduction to my piece of fiction “Wandelaar van de Duisternis”, that I wrote about when describing the catharsis of creative writing. What started as a concept for a short story is rapidly evolving into a sizeable full-length novel with potential ideas for a number of additional stories using the same characters and setting.

A murder of crows rose into the air as I approached the stream. They cursed me loudly for the disturbance, their raucous voices harsh and strident, watching my progress through dead eyes; but I ignored them.

The stream was a slurry of brackish water, choked with limp pondweed, and it smelled foul. A thin layer of some oily substance rippled on the surface, reflecting the dark clouds roiling in the sky. A few dead fish floated on the top. Fortunately, I knew this land, and I’d had the foresight to bring fresh drinking water with me: I paused for a moment to take a sip from my canteen before continuing.

As I moved closer to the water’s edge, I saw that the crows had been pecking at the corpse of a rabbit. It lay half in and half out of the water, in a pool of blood, and with its guts spread across the rocks and tufts of dark grass. One skeletal bird had put an eyeball from the rabbit in its own eye socket, and it rolled and bounced as the bird bobbed its head watching my progress, like a drunkard staring sightlessly in every direction.

I stepped across the stagnant stream, and continued on my way toward a copse of leafless trees, following the faint line of a track that seemed to lead gradually upward to some low hills. I needed to get away from the stream to somewhere more isolated. A quick glance at my watch, the only reminder of how time flowed back in the world of the living: forty minutes until my first scheduled check-in, and I wanted to find somewhere less exposed where it would be safer to make my contact. There were other denizens of this dark land that were less innocuous than these scavengers. Behind me, the crows returned to their rabbit.