Ch6: In a World of Broken Things

The City. The Man in Red. The Prisoner

His eyes snapped open, reality catching up to him as he was brought back to present time. Darius ran a finger across the scar on his chest. A single bullet had been fired that day, but now, years later, he still wore the scar, a memory from a forgotten time.

It was dawning.        

When the fire had been put out, he checked that Sheth was by his side and, as always, it was. During the years since he created it, it had become like a friend to Darius, like an extension of himself. It had served him well ever since that late summer’s night when he lost her. Darius took a deep breath, and took the first step of the day, not knowing what waited him in the village ahead.

When it came into view, it surprised him. It wasn’t just a village, a small band of farms which had huddled together around a landmark or a water source to survive; this was far larger than that.

This was a complete city.

Darius hadn’t visited a real city for a great many months… or had it been longer than that? He did not know. The days and weeks had blended together, so he could not be sure. He could see hundreds of houses, some bigger than others, but they were all gathered around some sort of platform in stone, it was large enough to be seen from a great distance away.

The small hope, that he would find a real bed, a warm meal and maybe even some information, was quickly faded when he thought of what had happened to the other villages. The plague had only been getting worse so far, and why should a larger city be any better? Darius started his descent from the desert hill he had climbed, towards the city. It was a treacherous journey down, the sand was too loose to have a firm foothold, making Darius lose control of the speed easily. By the time he reached the foot of the hill, he had been fighting hard to keep his balance, which was made worse when the ground changed to  compacted sand.
Darius was lucky to walk away with nothing but a sore body after that fall.

As he got closer to the city, he noticed that although most of the buildings were of wood, like in the smaller villages, there were also stone houses closer to the platform he had seen. Could it be that the platform was some sort of market place? Maybe a sort of gathering place… It was safe to say that it was a place of great importance for the city, and so, the stone houses must be for people of almost equal importance. Darius took a sip from his waterskin, and started the final stretch to the city of Cordale.

“Long ago, this would have been considered to be a road” Darius thought as he walked over a part of the landscape where the sand was more compact than elsewhere. Maybe there had even been a stone road here back before this part of the world went to hell.

A gateway had collapsed long ago where the road ended and the city started, now it was just a rumble of buried stone. Long ago guards might have greeted him, saluting the tired ranger after his long journey from distant lands. The gateway had been wide enough for two carts to run along sideways, while still leaving room for people walking on foot, Darius saw as he carefully climbed past the rumble that had once been the arched roof. There were small entrances with rotted, wooden doors on either side of the pathway. Rooms for the guards on duty that was long gone. Darius tried opening one of the doors but with half of it being buried in the sand, it would not move an inch. So he tried shoving himself against the wood, putting all his weight into it and with a startled yell he not only managed to enter the room, but he went straight through the rotted wood. As he got up, confused and off balance, he brushed away the sand and stared at the gaping hole in the door which he had entered through.  Rot was one thing, but this had left the door merely a shell… as if the interior itself hadn’t just been eaten away at, but disappeared entirely, leaving only the appearance of a door,  without any substance.

Searching the small room took no more than a few minutes and proved fruitless… not that he knew what he was looking for, anything would do at this stage of the journey. He had barely any water left, his shelter no more than tattered cloth, and his flint and tinder was worn thin.  Yet the room only seemed to contain a small sand filled hearth for cold nights, a broken table and what seemed to be a chess board entirely in polished stone, however all the pieces for it seemed to be gone. After the quick search, Darius sighed and continued to the room on the opposite side.

This room yielded a minor discovery, for even if it contained the same furniture and such as the other room, this one contained a weapon rack. Hope rose within Darius, but just for a second because the blades that were shown there were rusted and unusable, it’d be too much of a pain to carry them with him to take them, and it’d break at the first sign of a fight. Darius let the blades rest while he exited and continued into the city.

Wooden houses claimed this part of the city, for this was not like one of the fancier districts closer to the platform that he had seen from far away. Not to say that this was the poor part of town, way back when it had had the pleasant glow from open Inns, roaring laughter and music playing down the streets. There had been brothels with their girls walking along the alleys and streets, flirting with this merchant and that. This had been the part of town that citizen and travelers alike went to enjoy a drink, a friendly game of dice, a drunken fight, or company for the lonely night. Darius, of course, didn’t know any of this. This part of the world was foreign to him, and the city looked as if it had been abandoned for many long and hard years.

He knocked on the wood of some of the buildings and noticed that it all had the same quality as the door to the guard post, hollow and frail. As Darius walked down one of the larger streets, with cobblestone beneath a layer of sand, he came upon one of the larger buildings of this part of the city. A sign hang outside on rusted hinges, and the letters were long gone, but it seemed to have been a store long ago. The insides looked not unlike his own store back in Marles, and for a second he seemed to have stepped into one of his dreams or memories.  He shook his head to be clear of the feeling of nostalgia because he knew that pain would follow along those memories.

Darius were so caught up suppressing memories of a forgotten time that he almost missed something very obvious and something unsettling about the store. A minute went by, all while Darius fiddled with a tool laying on the counter, rusted to uselessness, but as he glanced towards the back of the store, behind the brittle counter there lay something peculiar. Something that made little sense to the him.

A loaf of bread.
In this world of broken things,
in this land of plague,
in this time of decay,

Nothing could have seemed more peculiar, more unsettling, more unreal, than that loaf of bread.

He could see the steam rising from it, so it couldn’t have been left out for long, yet to him, the thought of humans inhabiting this fundamentally broken city was alien. It couldn’t be. The wood couldn’t be used in its decaying state, the iron too rusted to be used… Yet there it was… A single loaf of bread threw the very existence of this city out of balance.

It seemed to take long hours before he recovered, but that was only to his malnourished and dehydrated mind; it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. He shook his head and was about to take a step to investigate, when he heard something that he must have neglected to hear the last minutes: hushed voices coming from the main street.

“No no no! You idiot! Can’t you see?! NOBODY comes from there… Again you were just seeing things!”

It was a male voice, although deranged heavily. It almost seemed as if he was talking with too much saliva in his mouth. It had been weeks since Darius had heard talking and it stunned him to the point that he didn’t think of hiding until it was almost too late. Darius scrambled across the wooden floor towards where a cabinet had fallen over, making a knee high barrier towards the inside of the shop, while he had the outwards facing wall to his back; it was as good of a hiding place as he was likely to get. The voices were still hushed, but Darius could hear how they were getting closer to the shop… Had he had any luck, they might have walked by it… But as faith would have it, Darius was a very unfortunate man.

“No no no! Hear me, hear me!” a second voice said right outside the house. “It was crawling through the gate! Me saw! Me saw! It was another! It looked as gross as the others…”

Again it was a male voice, but this one seemed younger, with a voice that sounded drier than the sand they stepped on. The voice seemed utterly disgusted by the creature it had seen, and Darius wondered through the fear he felt in his hiding spot if there was creatures in this desert that he had not yet encountered. So far it had seemed pretty desolate…

The sound of bare feet on wood floor caused Darius to freeze and hold his breath where he lay in hiding; he did not intend to get caught… Caught doing what? It was hardly breaking and entering when the store didn’t even have a door; although he had been hurt for much less. The strangers’ conversation seemed to have been reduced to grunts and snorts. Darius had heard of trolls when he was younger; fat, ugly things that ate children who were bad, but those were just fairy tales right? In this demented world he lived in he could not be certain.

“Hey, hey, hey, Snuff? You see that?! Momma’s been making that, that, that… Ehh… Those things… Ehhh…” He seemed to lose that train of thought and went back to grunting something that almost resembled words while walking towards the counter where the loaf lay. They would eat the bread, and then leave, thus leaving Darius with just the memories of it to satisfy his hunger… No… He could feel his desperation rising within him… Perhaps it was the fact that he had not eaten in such a long time… Perhaps it was that the hunt had been too long… or perhaps the hunter was just tired of being passive and never getting anything back from the world…

Darius knew he only had one shot at this and so with a deep breath, he stood up and got his first good look at the strangers. Their red strained eyes seemed shocked to see him, but it was Darius that was the most shocked. They were… human… or at least looked partly human… Their skin was a sickly pale green,  with patches on their mostly nude bodies that revealed open, red wounds. One was larger than the other, with patches of brown hair on his head and some sort of green fluid running out from the edges of his mouth. The smaller one was crouched down, supporting himself with his hand on the floor, looking at him disgusted but excited.

Darius hesitated for half a second before firing Sheth. Two shots, aimed to maim the two males so to not be any trouble to him; he was still not entirely comfortable with shooting to kill targets that had done him no harm. They both fell, if not from the damage, then from the pure force of the bullet…. However he had not entirely thought about the noise that the revolver had made and for a second, the world was quiet, resting in the echo from the gun…

Then, there were screams from far in the city…

Quickly realizing his mistake, Darius turned to flee this city of the damned, only to see that he was not alone…

In the doorway, a man in bright red stood, watching him. He was not like those two he had met. He seemed healthy, with intelligent eyes, and rich clothes. His skin seemed to be a healthy pale too… The only thing truly unsettling about him was his smile. It was too calm and collected, as if nothing was wrong with what he had seen, nor the screams coming closer and closer.

“Son… You aren’t from around here, are you…?” He grinned and nodded towards the two strangers 

Darius had shot. Unwilling to turn his back on the man in red, Darius glanced back only to see the two rise again, a part of their shoulders’ torn off from the shot, but otherwise not even noticing it.

“See! See! See! Me said me saw!” The smaller one giggled, and that was the last thing Darius saw before everything went black.

His head was pounding, his body hurt with every breath, and he could feel dried blood on multiple places on his body. Darius couldn’t believe that he was alive, but at that moment he wished he would have been. Surely the only reason that he was still alive was so that he could die in a more painful manner.  Darius was on his knees, and as soon as he regained his vision he saw that it was stone beneath him, not sand.

Hundreds of those… human like things… covered the sides around the large stone platform, crowding around the two prisoners.

Darius looked up and around, because he had registered that he was not the only on his knees with his hands tied; however he had not registered who it was, nor had his disoriented mind marveled over seeing someone else like him caught in a very similar manner. It was a man, younger than him, but strong, with dirty black hair that hid his face as he was sitting with his chin against his chest,  as if sleeping. He too was tied with his hands behind his back, waiting the judgment of his captors.

A low, dry, throaty chuckle could suddenly be heard from the other prisoner before he spat blood on the stones beneath him. He looked up and over towards Darius, grinning madly through his mess of a hair. He seemed even madder than their captors, with blood stained teeth and awaiting a similar doom, but Darius paid no mind to this; he was frozen in rage and fear.

“Looks like we’re in quite the mess, hm?” The mad man said in his dry voice, so unlike the voice Darius had heard so long ago, rich and joyful.

Darwin looked into Darius’ eyes with the same grin as before.

“What do you say about getting out of here alive, hm?”