Post Seron Documentation - Raven Analysis

FROM: Seiya Sumeragi
TO: Blaze of Glory Posting Board
SUBJECT: Raven - Post Battle Detailed Analysis

In the last days of the Siege of Seron, the Blaze of Glory and Gray Keep had an encounter with Raven, the Right Hand of Reven, one of the Void's chief emissaries. She led a personal charge in an attempt to crush Gray Keep's last line of defense as our forces struggled to regroup in the wake of the loss of our shielding.

She was stopped by direct intervention from Lady Zaea, the creator of Origold and a number of other worlds, who was fighting at our side to repay a prior favor. Zaea tragically did not survive the fight. While she stopped Raven's charge, Raven remained alive and fled the scene as further intervention from Captain Takamachi became imminent.

This battle established several facts right away.

1: Raven does not have human levels of vulnerability. She sustained a full bite from a great dragon into her chest, and loss of an arm, without flinching.

2: Raven is capable of dealing blows powerful enough to pierce even the body of a high dragon or demigod-level being. She battles on a level that could be termed Godslayer.

After the Siege of Seron was fully resolved, I took the liberty of going back and performing a detailed examination of the arm that Raven lost in the battle. From this, I was able to determine several further items of interest.

1: Even accounting for the effects of lying outside and then sitting in cold storage, the blood in the arm was unusually black and full of decay. It was as though her body was dead even before she came here, though her flesh was intact.

2: There were magical "gaps," places where it was obvious that the flesh should normally be linked or bound to some kind of spell. However, the spell was severed, possibly when the limb was.

3: There were no traces of the Gift of Dimensional Space Magic that I was able to discern.

A few immediate possibilities present themselves, but I find it difficult to draw definite conclusions from the study performed here. It is entirely possible that she could be inhabiting the body of a dead person, or that she could in fact be a dead person herself, animated through magical means. Likewise, there are still a number of other undetermined variables that could lead to entirely different conclusions. Please keep this in mind when dealing with the possibility of a second encounter.

In addition to the research above, the events leading up to Seron - the calamities within the Miranda system that meant to serve as a 'distraction', were assumed to be caused by the sudden disappearance of the system's shared pantheon of 'gods.' While an intimidating thought, Void propaganda has suggested Raven may have been involved in their removal, making her a more pressing figure to look into.

Working off simplistic searches in the Marshalship databases availed in little. Results are about 30 or so races with human proportions and wings, like Raven. 26 of these races have combat styles that large weapons such as axes can be used with. 9 of these races are in dimensions influenced by the Void. However, on closer inspection of these, nothing more relates. A detailed look might suggest that Raven isn't even part of such a 'race', so much as an anomaly.

Working off that assumption, searching for files that mentioned anomalies on an individual basis, cross referenced with Void activities. This narrowed down things substantially, to one file in particular, attached below.

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It comes up with a charcoal sketch from a very low-tech low-wide use magic planet that the Void visited ~3 years ago. The sketch is old and bloodstained, and is noted as being left in the aftermath of a bloody rebellion that started after the Agamemnon was spotted on the planet and left the largest country of the planet's entire nobility completely and rather messily slaughtered. It's otherwise a very unremarkable dimension, only apparently on record BECAUSE Reven's forces were spotted there once. The Agamemnon pulled out quickly after the nobility's slaughter, no reports of diplomacy or anything. The planet wasn't high tech enough to be aware of any other planets, so it never gave itself a name. It's just labeled by the Marshalship as planet Alpha in Dimension 108.
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Raven was never sighted before this incident, and likewise, the end result of the Void's approach seems to suggest that they weren't there simply for their usual judgments. Had that been the case, it seems more likely they'd have tried to establish some presence or system after being 'saviors' from a harsh monarchy, if that were even the case. I consider it more likely they were there for something else. Currently this is the closest thing we have to a lead on finding out more about Raven. Expect further efforts to unravel this.