A ballad of the hollow

"Listen....."

He said it to no one. 

A lone figure stood upon the huge cathedral, where no one like him was ever meant to be. A presence this place was never meant to allow.

A Victorian industrial city glowed beneath the lamplight below him, as he stood above and began to sing.

"Listening to my ballad."

His voice was low and quiet. The wind carried his words across the cathedral roof.

 Only his silhouette could be seen beneath the moonlight, watching over the Vale city, as his coat swayed in the sweet wind.

One hand rested behind his back. The other lifted slightly, like he held an invisible dancer's hand. 

He walked through the rooftop's stone ridge, slowly and calmly. He turned once, twice. Then he danced. There was no music. Just his own rhythm, slow and sad, like a ballad only he could hear.

Below him the Vale city went on forever, rooftops, bridges, towers, all of it fading into mist somewhere past what the eye could reach. 

Countless windows glowing, steam rising above the factories. Carriages moving between them, small and quick, like fireflies.

 Machines grumbling far off. Bells chiming somewhere beyond the fog. Crowds murmuring underneath all of it, the ordinary noise of a city that didn't know yet.

"Listen... The world is humming."

He turned and lifted his arms over the city as he danced. 

He then looked down at the street as one lamp flickered below. Then another. Then the whole city's lamps began to flicker unusually.

"Can you hear it beneath the bells? Beneath the wheels, beneath the blood, beneath the stories this kingdom tells?"

He kept dancing, voice dropping softer and almost tender.

 Then the ground began to tremble, just barely. Somewhere a cup rattled against its saucer.

"Everything that lives must tremble. Everything that trembles must change. And everything that change must one day lose itself..."

Voices rose among the crowds. People stopped walking, looked at each other. Some pointed at the ground. 

Others just stared up at the lamps, not understanding yet what they were looking at.

"So when the world begins to tremble. Do not pray."

The lights went out, lamp by lamp, street by street, until the whole city plunged into darkness for a moment.

"Now listen...."

He stopped his ballad and stood still. Towering over the dark city.

After a few moments of blackout, the lights came back slow, all at once, lamps and machinery and carriages and voices returning like nothing had happened. 

Then it broke. A scream, at first. Followed by another scream from somewhere else. Then another. A street that had been normal a moment ago was panicking now, most of them without knowing from what yet.

A man under a lamp dropped his bag and stared at his own hand, shaking, wouldn't stop. When his wife reached for him he shoved her into the wall hard enough to drop her, looked at her like a stranger , and walked into the crowd with eyes gone the color of nothing.

A factory worker stood in front of a shuttered shop, hands moving, pulling and turning at something that wasn't there. 

When a stranger touched his shoulder he screamed and put a pipe across the man's skull.

Behind them, a carriage went straight through a crowd like the people weren't there. The driver never turned his head, face gone pale.

A woman broke from the crowd and ran, silent, until a man grabbed her wrist. Whatever she did to him, he let go on instinct before the pain even registered. 

She didn't stop until the steps of some building caught her, and there she stood, face turned up at the sky, eyes gone the same colorless pale as the rest.

On the otherside, a soldier on patrol put three rounds into the sky, and then, for no visible reason , he poured it into the crowd in front of him.

Blood in the road now. Windows bursting. Fire catching somewhere behind a shopfront. Carriages crashing into each other.

The city understood, in that moment, that this wasn't a riot and wasn't an attack, even if it understood nothing else. Something was happening to people, at random, and there was no name for it yet.

Everyone who began acting strangely had only one thing in common. Their faces and eyes began to turn pale, as if something were slowly sucking the life out of them.

They either wandered around aimlessly, like children who had suddenly lost all their memories, or violently attacked anything that came within reach.

Army troops quickly moved into the streets, soldiers in black long coats, armed with swords and rifles, ordered to expect another strike from whatever mystical thing had supposedly entered the city from outside. 

But there was no sign of what was doing this. A curse, someone said. A plague, said others. Soldiers from the outer districts muttered about a spell slipping past every ward the city had. Nobody actually knew, which made it worse.

By the time it reached Eastern Market, the whole city was running.

Somewhere a soldier was shouting for people to clear a street that was already clear of everything except bodies and glass.

The butcher at the corner stall had been dressing a pig when the lights first died. When they came back he was still working, except there was no pig anymore, just a bare cutting board, and his knife kept going anyway, fast and precise, carving nothing at all.

 Then his head came up. Whatever had been behind his eyes wasn't there now. He set the knife down. Picked up a longer one. He decided to go for the nearest child, walking unhurried. 

The boy was too frightened to move, not having a single clue about what was happening around him.

A local soldier saw him first and didn't think twice, he just ran towards the boy, got a shoulder into the kid's chest and took them both down hard behind an overturned cart a half-second before the blade reached them.

"Go." The soldier ordered. He was already turning back toward the butcher. "Find your mother. Don't stop for anything. Go."

The kid ran and didn't look back, which turned out to be the smartest thing anyone did on that street all night.

The butcher's knife caught the soldier's collar instead of his throat, close enough that he felt the wind of it. He staggered on the wet stone.

 The old man was already coiling for a second swing, and the soldier didn't see the one closing in from behind.

"Veyr!"

His fellow soldier shouted his name from across the street, he turned on the name alone, rifle coming up before thought caught up to his hands, bayonet driving forward into the butcher's chest.

 The old man instantly folded around the blade and went still.

Veyr stood over him a moment. Breathing hard. Blood spreading dark across the stone between them. He hadn't had a choice but knowing that didn't make it weigh any less.

No time to stand with it, though. Screams were coming from every direction now, the grain house, the fish stalls, the alley behind the chapel, people scattering in every direction at once, which was worse than one direction, because nobody had figured out yet which way was actually safe.

Down the row, Veyr noticed an old woman circling a spilled basket of apples, over and over. Nearby a dockhand had a man pinned to a wall by the throat, there wasn't any kind of emotion in his face.

"They're not fighting us." 

Veyr said it to nobody in particular. 

"They don't even know we're here."

The order came down the line a moment later, passed officer to officer until it reached him.

"Kill anyone who's showing the pale eyes, all of them. No exceptions!"

Veyr's hand tightened on the rifle.

"They're breathing. They're still people, far as we know."

"We don't know anything." 

The officer was already past him, moving toward the dockhand. 

"Could be a curse. Could be an infection. It might spread to everyone around here. We're not finding out the hard way. Kill them. Now."

Veyr didn't lower the rifle. Didn't argue again either, there wasn't room left for it. Somewhere down the street the first shot cracked, and then it was just that sound, echoed throughout the streets.

What came after wasn't something any of the soldiers wanted to witness. The dockhand man, the woman with the apples and others whose faces Veyr made himself not really look at. 

Every one of them went the same way. No fight in it, no fear in it either. Just something stopping, the way a machine switches off.

When it was finally over the quiet that came after was worse than the screaming had been. Eastern Market sat wrecked under the gaslight, blood cooling in the gutter seams.

 People stood frozen in doorways looking at a street they'd walked their whole lives and didn't recognize anymore. 

Somewhere close a woman was crying without any sound at all, both hands clamped over her own mouth like she could hold it in.

Nobody talked. An hour ago this had been an ordinary street full of ordinary noise. Now there was just the drip of blood off a cart wheel and the terrified murmurs of people trying very hard not to be sick from what they just witnessed.

Veyr lowered the rifle. That was when he noticed the boy still crouched behind him, not looking at the bodies, not looking at Veyr, looking straight up past the rooftops at the cathedral spire, searching through the dark stone the way you look for someone you're almost sure you saw a second ago.

Veyr followed his eyes up but nothing was there. Just moonlight on the cathedral stone. The boy kept looking anyway. 

Then the wind moved through the street and carried something with it, a faint echoes of a ballad, from somewhere past the cathedral.

"Listen..... The silence will come soon.

 And when there is only silence, you will hear something you have never heard before....

 something you have always wanted to hear...."

To be continued.