Drip

I found myself within the ruins of the moldy slums, wandering toward the crack of light between the dark rampart. The pale white of scaled human bodies passed me by, their presence only a blur in my head as I tried not to stare for too long. I stumbled over dozens of scattered corpses, their ash covered rot leaving tiny clouds as my foot grazed them with every step. The buildings of this area were very close to each other, the tiny walkways between them making it nearly impossible to weave around corpse piles or step over them. The stone and wood walls of this settlement were far gone, their surfaces revealing their layers underneath. Stains of a very dark crimson lined the cracks and splinters of every building and small monument I happened across. The smell of old mildew mixed with the rotted scent of death coated the area, assaulting my nostrils at every corner. Everything was brutal, from the sights to the scents, it was hard for me to bear. I laid my dried palm against the wrinkle of my cloak and closed my fingers, pulling the piece of cloth over my nose and mouth. Even through the coverage, the piercing scent still shot straight through my nose.

I continued through the labyrinth of winding stone walls and dilapidated wooden roofs, their shadows only adding to the eeriness of the setting. I nearly got lost as piles of gray corpses blocked my path through several thin roads. There was no way I could bring myself to dig through corpses again if there are other ways around. With the landmark of the crumbled walls in the distance, I could still find my way forward.

After hours of wandering, the sights before me began to get old, and my senses were slowly numbing to the grotesque nature of the environment. Every building was beginning to look indistinguishable from one another. I was beginning to doubt if I was even getting closer to the cracked high wall, and I began to believe that I was circling around the same place. As doubts clouded my mind, something just up ahead had broken the monotonous pattern. The silhouette of thin networks of branches were jutting out from one of the rundown wooden roofs. The dark tree was slumped against an adjacent roof higher to it, its branches sticking out and following the slanted path its main branch had given it. I picked up my pace until I found myself in an alley, right in front of the door of the house I had seen the tree in. There was a small door canopy blocking my view of the branches above, and the wall behind me was far too close for me to back up and get a good look. I pressed my hands against the cold door handle and pushed forward.

The room I stepped into was far bigger than I had anticipated. From the outside, the buildings had been touching wall to wall, making it difficult to tell them apart, let alone their sizes. Entering this place felt more akin to a church rather than a home. The inside was spacious and with a somewhat high ceiling. Toppled benches and torn books were littered across the dusty floor. I looked to the center of the church to where I had assumed the base of the tree would be, but instead I was greeted with something much different. In the midst of the small rundown cathedral, a pale man, with clothes so ripped that he was practically naked, was kneeling on the hard floor, hunched over and his hands held in a bowl shape up above his head. Something dark was stringing down into his hands as he caught it. I looked up to the source of the mysterious substance to witness what I could only describe as a monster.

The roof had been completely decimated at the center and back half of the church, leaving the framework exposed against the dark clouds. Laying against the frames overhead was something difficult to describe. It was large, maybe two to four times larger than a human. Its body was humanoid, somewhat fetal in shape, yet also nearly birdlike. Its body was distorted and somewhat thin, but was recognizable as a human body. Its head was slightly larger than what would be expected for its body size, and its face had been rotted to a state of unidentifiable, but the round shape that remained of its head looked like that of a newborn baby. Its thin limbs dangled between the woodwork, bone exposed as the dark brown flesh came off it in thick threads. Its hands were huge and its fingers were thin, resembling a birds talon's. Its hind legs had inverted knees, and its feet were also somewhat shaped like a bird's. Yellowish gray forms with pointed tips were bursting out of the creature's back, slightly curving inward. Between the bone-like structures, a pair of large tree-like appendages broke free from the creature's back, to which I could only assume were wings. The branches of these nonfunctional looking wings jutted out in many directions from the main appendage, laying across the framework and the adjacent roofs in sight.

I was struck with fear, the sight being eerily similar to that of the pale girl I chatted with. However, I made it too far now to back down. I walked forward slowly, the scent of the dangling corpse beginning to fill the air. A strange clacking noise echoed about the room with my steps. I looked at my feet to see small, stone-like scales scattered across the ground around the area below the large corpse. I kept walking, the scales tumbling forward as my boots met them. Soon, I stood barely under the giant thing, staring up at its decrepit nature. Strings of flesh hung down like vines from its face and belly, leaving cavities to peer through. Gazing up through the hole in its belly, its rib cage was broken up, only held together by thin fibers. A few of its organs hung down from the cavity like gory ornaments. From what hung out of the creature's belly, drops of a dark viscous fluid dripped, ever so slowly. I followed the path of the drops with my eyes and watched as they pooled within the frail man's cupped hands.

"Just a little more now... then, the feast can begin." He spoke in a weak, yet somehow powerful tone.