I.

I.

She was gone and he was all alone, trapped in a maelstrom of people. People who were so tall, compared to him, that it was like a sea of moving trees with shoes clapping against the pavement in an ear-splitting cacophony.

He whirled around, trying to catch a glimpse of the blue skirt with flowers and the white-laced sandals that his mother had worn, but he could not see her at all. Tears ran down his cheeks as he realised that he was lost forever and would never feel her warmth again, but then he heard it, a voice calling his name.

Jakob! Jakob, where are you!?

Mother! Im right here! he screamed back at the top of his lungs.

Suddenly he heard the sounds of someone running towards him, and the maelstrom of people within which he found himself started breaking apart, as his mother came to find him.

Just as he spotted her white-strapped sandals and bare legs amidst the forest of towering people, Jakob felt the ground drop away from under his feet and saw a darkness coalescing around him, robbing the world of light.

He seemed to fall for a long time in the pitch-blackness. The pull of gravity grew stronger-and-stronger, robbing him of the air in his lungs and threatening to tear him asunder. He would have cried out, had it not been impossible.

Jakob gasped in surprise as his feet found solid ground beneath them, and his knees buckled with impotent fright.

His vision returned, awakened by the dim light that met him. It stung his eyes as though he had been in that all-consuming dark for days.

With hooded eyes, he scanned his surroundings, immediately overwhelmed by the things that he saw. The scents and stenches of many things pleasant and abhorrent assailed his nostrils. The light that scarcely illuminated his surroundings seemed to grow directly from the walls, as though an invading fungus left to fester in the cracks between the large stones from which the room had been built.

Beneath him, where his knees rested on the cold and rough stones, was a slick and viscous black water that ever-so-slightly reflected the green, purple, and blue fluorescent hues of the fungus lights.

Then his ears seemed to regain their sense and he realised he was not alone, as a powerful rhythmic breathing came from a colossal shadow at his back, as well as the rare wheeze of something hidden in the darkness ahead. Too terrified to turn and confront the barely-perceived shadow behind him, he tried peering into the darkness beyond where he knelt.

It took a moment to notice, but then he saw that two big eyes reflected the fungus light back at him, like some enormous cat staring into his soul.

Heskel, the voice intoned. Make sure the boy is not like the others. Its strange magnanimous cadence made Jakob stiffen, though the meaning of the words were lost to him. The thrum of the words also left a strange ache in his chest.

A grunt of acknowledgement came from the shadow behind Jakob. Suddenly, two hands, powerful yet careful, lifted him from the ground, inspecting first his head, before moving on to his limbs and torso. When the hands turned him around to inspect him from the front, Jakob came face-to-face with his shadow.

A face like that of a man stared back at him, frozen in an archaic smile with closed eyes and a small nose. It took Jakob a moment to realise that what he saw was a mask, and he only noticed it in the dim light because of the small holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth.

Fresh horror flooded through his body as he took in the appearance of the hands that gripped him. There were five fingers, but each were covered in long spiralling patterns of stitched scar-tissue, and, though it was hard to tell in the dark, they had the colour of a bruise. The arms were worse, as they ranged from black to frost-pale, with greys and rotten-purple in-between. Each coloured segment of the arms seemed as though it had been sewed on to the previous bit, and, though they were proportionally similar, Jakob thought they looked like they might belong to many different people.

Heskels torso and shoulders were covered in a sleeveless poncho of sorts, though it was made of a leathery material. This fabric too was stitched and multi-hued, as though created from a similar method as his arms.

Strangely, he seemed to Jakob to smell like a flower field. It was such a calming scent that it slowed Jakobs pounding heart and dispelled his gooseflesh.

Healthy, the masked creature gurgled.

With almost affectionate consideration, Jakob was placed back onto his feet gently and spun around to face the darkness and the reflective cat eyes within it.

Likely noticing Jakobs dismay that he would have to work with such terrible samples, Heskel grunted and said, Slum: tainted. Upriver seek.

Caught off-guard by one of Heskels rare moments of advice, Jakob hesitated for a moment, before going over to one of the dismal stone bridges that spanned the filth river of the Slum. Tracing the path the river took upstream, he saw that far in the distance an entirely-different part of the metropolis existed. It was as vibrant as the Slum was filthy, and though he could not see any of its people, it seemed a sure thing that they would be possessed of more vigorous souls.

Jakob breathed a sigh of relief that there yet was hope for his nascent undertaking.

Thank you, Heskel. Let us seek people more worthy of my knife.

After some hours, the sun had set as Jakob reached a wide section of the river where a large bridge, manned with people in leather-and-chainmail and armed with swords, blocked the passage into the metropolis beyond the Slum.

His eyes long adjusted to the darkness of the sewer, he did not need a torch to see his surroundings, but it seemed the guards were not like him, as his appearance into their torchlight elicited surprised gasps from the lot of them.

He was not self-aware enough to realise that it was not his sudden appearance that caused them alarm, but rather his attire of bruise-hued flesh-wrought hooded apron, trousers, boots, and gloves. Certainly, the red scent-mask, crafted and gifted to him by Grandfather, which covered the bottom-half of his face, two tube-pumps diagonally situated in the underside and venting his condensed breath in rhythm to his breathing, did not help.

Halt..! one of the men commanded uncertainly.

It took a second for Jakobs mind to register the different language to what Grandfather and Heskel spoke, but he had been taught well enough to have a grasp of its limited complexity.

Do not bar my passage, he replied.

The guardsmen, of which there were five, exchanged glances, before the leader drew his blade from its scabbard. The rest followed his example.

Having already warded off several abominations and vagrants within the sewers, Jakob was not unused to such a situation, though his foes were better equipped. It mattered little however.

Heskel.

The Wight emerged from the darkness, eliciting terrified gasps from the guardsmen, who seemed to not have noticed his presence until then. To their credit, they steeled themselves and charged towards the towering figure, blades held high.

Heskel was a musclebound giant compared to the guardsmen, as he stood almost two heads above them. With a single punch, he pulped the head of the lead guard, before blocking a slash with his left forearm, the blade not digging very deep. He grabbed his attackers neck and snapped it with a simple twist, then took the blade from his forearm and carved through the third and fourth with such terrible strength that they fell into pieces.

Disable the last, but leave him breathing! Jakob quickly commanded, and Heskel stopped himself from decapitating the remaining guard, instead dropping the sword and grabbing the man by his arms and crushing the bones with his hands. The guardsman let out a sobbing scream of pain, but Heskel wasnt done, as he grabbed the man by his legs, flipping him upside down, before twisting both of his ankles so he could not run away. At this point, the guardsman had passed out from the pain, and the Wight laid him on the ground, knowing he could not escape.

Jakob pointed at the two men who had been carved into pieces, and said, Throw those two in the river, were bringing the rest.

From the cloth the guards had possessed, Jakob made a gag to shove into the mouth of his captive, lest his screams draw too much attention.

It had taken a while, but Heskel had brought the two corpses and their captive to an abandoned shed further into the residential area beyond the Slum gate-bridge.

When the captive guard came to, he whimpered in terror at the sight of Jakob carving into his dead friends to harvest their skin and organs.

Do not fear, Jakob said in the mans tongue, I will make you better.