GRIMoire

Welcome to the GRIMoire. Kingdom of Grim. If the pun in the name made you shudder on your way in; good. Everything is as planned.

Contrary to any expectation based upon the name, there's a distinct lack of anything much to do with books in here, magical or otherwise. Instead there's clocks. So many clocks. Parts of clocks. Is that an hourglass? Okay, whatever.

It looks a little like a city, albeit very dark and lit entirely by neon lights by the looks of things. Parts of this apparently-a-city definitely look more like the inside of a clock, or inside a clocktower, and there's a few areas you can see that look distinctly like the inside of an hourglass and you get the feeling that falling through the hole in it would be unpleasant.

If the sizing of everything would remain consistent it would help a lot, but it seems like that's unlikely to happen. What you thought was a bridge is in fact a clock arm. You notice this because it moved. Bridges shouldn't move, you don't think.

As confusing as it is, there's an aura of fun and excitement in the air. What kind of Stygian lives in this weird place?

Under the excitement you can feel... fear? Sadness? It's unclear, but there's a definite vibe of being out of time. Maybe running out of time. You might have already run out of time, which is a little scary.

You'd ask someone, but the figures around you don't seem to really be there. They're blurry and out of focus, as if they're moving a lot faster than you are, or you're moving much faster than they are. This poses a problem.

That feels very much like that's going to be your experience with everything in this place.

You'd think there would be some main roads around here, but every path you find seems to be an alleyway of some kind. They're a little labyrinthian, but at least they're interesting. Every single window has reflections of clocks in it, sometimes just one clock and sometimes so many clocks you can't even count them, the strangest thing about them is that there are no clocks around for the windows to reflect, only the reflections themselves. That doesn't seem quite right.

How did you get up here? You're pretty sure you were just walking along an alleyway, or maybe a hallway, but now you're up on the roofs of what seem to be empty high-rise buildings instead of down on the ground. That's alright, it looks pretty up here. You thought it was night-time, but it's not actually, it seems to be dusk. Or maybe dawn? That strange dark-light sky of halfway between day and night whichever way.

All the roofs look very much like clock faces instead of, you know, actual roofs. The clock arms seem to clip through walls as if they're a glitch in a videogame, and you just walked straight through a wall without even really noticing, so either the walls aren't really where they appear to be or you're not where you appear to be. You're not sure which option is better. You can see that everything seems to stretch for miles and miles, right to the horizon. Is there a horizon? It's entirely possible that's another clock actually.

This place is definitely called the time fields. How do you know that? You have no idea. No one told you. When you ended up walking here you just knew that that's what this place is called.

You have a sneaking suspicion that this is actually the sky? Or what passes for the sky here. Some parts of this area don't seem to have a floor, which is a little terrifying, especially as you can still stand on it. It sounds like glass, so does that mean it can break? You don't want to test the theory. There's more clock arms here, massive ones that stretch an obscenely long way, and there's curved lines like the face of a clock all over the place which seem to act like paths.

They do all intersect with each other in an unsettling way, as they seem to criss-cross but never interfere with one another, and that shouldn't be possible.

Grim is the stygian who rules over this place. She doesn't introduce herself as much as she invites herself into your personal space and ignores any protests you give.

She matches the chaos of this place perfectly. Every single thing out of her mouth seems like it was said specifically to goad you into some form of reaction, with very little care for whether you'd be angry or not. While very clearly a miniature stygian, she's so in her element that you get the feeling you'd be outmatched if you started a fight. She seems to know exactly where that line of thought went in your head, making a show of how unfairly stacked in her favour everything is.

As irritating as she is, or at least is making herself be, she's not bad company and an invitation to join in some shenanigans can't be any worse than getting more lost on your own.