Blackfeather Woods Reset Me

Last week had flashed by in a series of disorienting and disconcerting images.. Life had been in a steep descent for so long he couldn't even remember who he'd been before the madness had ensued, and going back to normal was by now a huge improbability.

There was no record in Damien's memory of the month before that. Not a single image, not a feeling but coldness and void. He'd surely been dragged there by Sithis himself, the punishment for his infidelity and his disobedience. Perhaps just revenge for his incompetence or his dissatisfying management of the Brotherhood; or was it mercy? a break from life, a taste of true peace and fulfillment under his sense-depriving shade?

There was only one thing for sure, and it was that the old arrogant, self-serving, narcissistic Damien that once roamed Mundus. This was a new creature, a rotten, famished, instinct-driven beast, with little else than his scars to serve as vestige of what he'd been.

And there he was again, creeping in the shadows of his sacred motherland, getting those flashes again, of smells he thought recognized, of faces he couldn't find and feelings he'd once felt. But it was all a shapeless mass of information that vaguely resembled a memory.

His nose dragged him back to the red place, the blood-blessed grove, which had once been his sanctuary. But his eyes took the lead from that point. His eyes and his mind, pushing away the noise and diving in the silence that reigned. There seemed to be no one around, not for miles, and that didn't seem to fit. Blackfeather Woods wasn't exactly the kind of place that vibrates with life, but there had always been a constant feeling, a presence that surrounded you, that choked and blinded your rationality and overwhelmed you with fear. That was no more. There was only silence, red and him.

A croak pulled sunken white eyes around, gluing them to an ivory shape that soon had him creeping closer. The raven flew off after realizing Damien wasn't stopping at a safe distance, and once again Damien was left alone in the silence. The shape was actually a skull, one re-claimed by nature, tangled in vines and covered with moss and little shrooms. Around it was what Damien had failed to identify as an altar, with stones placed around it in a circle, yet screwed up from negligence.

That skull had been the only piece of it all that had managed to spark a true memory within Damien's mind.

Trying to get back to writing is awkward
Please do not reply to this thread yet, since I just realized the setting is way too ambiguous to work