These Old Streets

The air smelt of dust and ashes before death and sulfur saturated it.

I remember that, vividly. My home for decades—my empire that tossed me aside and begged me to save it in the same breath. Still worth saving, hope still burning faintly in the eyes of a people who looked at me with some strange mixture of relief and wariness, but slowly dying all the same.

I walked through without challenge, the grit crunching beneath my boots as familiar as the bared scars on my face. No one ever bothered me, unless they weren’t human.

“‘Nother one on the east?” The gryphon large as a wolf craned her arched, black-feathered neck as if she’d be able to squint through the gloomy haze, lit only by flickering blue-white lamps.

“Someone discovered it budding under his antiques’ shop. Must’ve been drawn to the decor.”

“Eesh. You sure he didn’t just invite it in?”

“The place isn’t related to the Blackroots, as far as I know.”

“Yeah otherwise we’d be gettin’ an outbreak instead of a warning. Again.”

I hummed. “Unless they’re getting creative, and attempting a trap this time. That would be interesting. Perhaps more interesting than cutting at eternal roots on a coral moon.”

The street gave way on one side, showing fields filled with the bobbing lights of toiling farmers and their gryphons, stubbornly imbuing each plant until the midday sun would finally turn the sky grey. Sels waved a wing, and I inclined my head, weary faces smiling back.

One eternal-tree cutter recognises another.

We wound back up into dreary streets of stone houses, to the old east side on the hill closest to the castle, where the high trail used to come down through paddies....

Trees and grass—a dirt trail down to a small city past stone walls hemming off marshy pools glimmering with hints of fish between budding rice—I remember that, don’t I...?

Here, iron gates twisted with the faded designs carved into frame posts and doorways, as if they’d hoped facsimiles of demonic faces and claws would distract the real ones. Meil had scoffed at it, along with all the other religious nonsense and rituals that sprang up from the imagination of a desperate people, wrinkled, gnarled hands picking dismissively through her dried herbs—a quiet conversation in a warm room, when sunlight still glimmered through dust motes and warmed aging bones.

She would have hated the waste of leaving imbued beads to fade on her shrine-stone, but I was always a sentimental old fool.

“Hey, Dy? Dys? Dysentery?”

I found myself in an old rusted gateway, gazing up at the ugly effigy, somewhat vaguely reminiscent of Ilempo, flaring down from the arched point of the eaves in front of the door. “Yes, Silage?”

“You comin’ in or you gonna stand there staring at ugly bird-face all day long?”

I took my time wandering down the short cobblestone path, wrought-iron sticks twisted into representations of decorative bamboo lining it, rusted and dull. No gryphons in the place, or enough money flowing through, otherwise they would have been real.

Items of every kind filled the inside, lanterns leaving dark shadows between old Imperial statues, knick-knacks on shelves, and newer things, like incense boxes from the last fifty years.

“You’re here!” The shop’s owner came out wringing his hands anxiously inside old-style wide sleeves. Reminded me of Yoive for a moment. “Thank the guardians. I found it just down in the old basements when I was shifting things— instead of a new empty room for storage, I wound up with this... this fissure bud. Never seen one this close before. Ugly thing.”

“You found it earlier this morning?”

“Just a few hours ago. I barricaded the door, in somewhat of a panic.” He laughed nervously, ushering us through to the back. “Nothing’s come out. I don’t know how mature it is.”

“Hey look,” Seelis murmured as we passed more antique figures. “It’s your dad.”

I glanced at the worn statue, half its stoic, fixed face chipped away. “I think he’s seen better days.”

After winding down old, worn steps into a place half-tunnel, half-basement carved from the ruins of the even older section destroyed during Isesst’s brutal rampage, we came to a rather thoroughly barricaded door, indeed.

“You got rocks in these crates or somethin’?” Sels grunted as we cleared them away, making a face at another ungracefully-aged statue. “This one looks kinda like you.”

“I believe I’ve aged better.”

“Least he’s still got a smile.”

“If... well, if you’ve got all that in hand... do I have to stay?” The shopkeeper grew more fidgety as the barricade thinned.

I pushed the last to the side, brushing the dust off my hands. “Feel free to leave. Wouldn’t want you getting in the way.”

“Oh good!”

“I’d recommend staying far....” By the time I turned, he’d already disappeared.

“Hah, don’t think he’s gonna stick around.”

“No. Wisely.” I pushed the doors open, unsheathing Atsukute with a rasp of metal on lacquered wood. The sound of my footsteps both echoed and didn’t, a familiar wet shifting coming from somewhere in the dark.

Lighting it showed a large black heart throbbing with fiery veins growing on the back wall behind scattered crates, several smaller buds beating out of time. Immature. Easy to deal with.

Should... have been. Should be. Young and new.

Young and new.... Something about that....

“Hey, you all good?” An older and grown Seelis poked at them gingerly, peering back. “Ya look kinda pale.”

I don’t dream. I remember. This memory seems wrong. The room was too empty. The side of my face burns when I touch it.

Seelis frowns at me when I hiss. “Dyste?”

Meil is a wrinkled old woman with clear grey eyes—she looks at me like she doesn’t know who I am; her cynical smile fades like aged ink, buried beneath a simple marked stone in a shrine’s garden. Like the stone floor that kissed my knees.

It’s a trap— they wanted me— not just to kill me—

The chains crack. I feel the sharp edges digging into my skin, dark waters rising up to my chin. I remember. Where am I?

I can’t breathe. Ichor slides between my fingers like bloodied intestines. I can hear her yelling. I can feel it going up in flames—not white, not blue, not pure.

“Lonn!”

I tear free, and the quiet, soft darkness of a natural night presses in around me with the faint sound of pattering rain. Heavy, cold; sparking at the side of my face hidden beneath its mask.

It’s here.