HOL Ravenclaw

When you wake up, you find yourself lying on the ground inside the palace’s grand room. Mitri is leaning over you, with countless white bears all around. Their attention is focused on you.

“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” Someone asks. The voice is firm, but gently. Brittle, but not unkind.

You try to lift yourself to look around, but a dizziness overcomes you.

Allowing Mitri to help you settle back down again, you lay in stillness a bit longer as he explains to the room what brought you here. Primarily he speaks to the owner of the voice you’d heard, whom you assume by her exceptional attire and obvious position of respect must be the Dowager Empress he’d told you of who has been searching high and low for the heir.

There are many different reactions when the bears hear you’ve come to help. Some are grateful, while others appear indifferent, or suspicious. But these all are replaced with cries of fear and growls of anger as Mitri hurries on to explain that the evil sorcerer, Ghastputin, has been right on your tails. That there’s reason to believe his arrival is imminent.

As if it had been rehearsed, every last flaming torch around the room begins to flare up. One by one, they each turn chartreuse green while swelling to triple in height, then disappear with a deafening, shattering sound similar to an endless stream of glass breaking. Billows of dark smoke fill the room as the enormous hall is swept into darkness.

Once all the crashing has given way, the commotion of furious and terrified voices that remains is a short lived and welcome relief before a different round of booming begins to reverberate all around. The sound penetrates deep into your bones.

From the center of the room, the figure of a tall man begins to materialize. You wouldn’t know this were it not for the fact that his sickly, sallow skin gives of a yellow radiance, expanding an orb of dim light for quite some distance in all directions.

Still lying on the ground, you’re completely frozen in fear at the sight of this man’s sunken grey eyes glinting in the light of the moon that permeates through the high windows. His hair reaches the ground, and his long beard frames a twisted smile of menacing, serrated teeth.

He turns in your direction, limping in uneven steps toward you, and the memory from the train comes flooding back.

A searing pain blazes across the back of your head.

As you realize that you’ve seen this man before, the smoke dissipates to reveal that ghoulish monsters have entered the palace with their master.

Task:
Post a Collage below including the following imagery:

• Someone to represent the dark sorcerer
• Monster(s) from the underworld to do his bidding
• A grand room suitable for a feast or dance
• Any polar bear(s) present

Alternatively you may share your Opinion of one of the most terrifying monsters (real or imagined) in 100 words or more.

This task is worth 15 beans/sapphires, with an additional 15 bonus beans/sapphires for completing all Week Three tasks by end of activity. Deadline is 11:59pm (HOL time) on Thursday December 21st.

One of the most terrifying creatures I've ever discovered are Wendigo. The first time I heard of such a thing was from the game Until Dawn. At the time, I thought it was just another creepy monster made up for a story. However, it's a mythological creature of many North American and Canadian native people. Wendigos go by many spellings varieties, such as Windigo, Wheetigo, and Wittikka. These creatures are described as the phantom of hunger, stalking the forests in search of humans to consume. They can take on different forms, like a werewolf, shape-shifting at will, which makes it all the more terrifying.

A monster that I think is very terrifying and is probably the one I fear most is a lethifold, also known as “a living shroud”. The reason for this being that it can blend into any shadow and even look like a shadow when keeping still. It loves to creep into houses and homes from underneath the doors at night, into the victims beds, while they sleep and cover them like a sheet, causing suffocation as it consumes. That is terrifying. It cannot be stunned or jinxed and a Patronus charm is the only known spell against it so if it has you, you better hope to be able to cast it non-verbally.