After the two acolytes entered the facility, Ezkiel's entire body trembled. If they discovered that he had opened the gate and stolen the prisoner's dream, it wouldn't be the gate that would be destroyed with a coin.
If these motherfuckers do this with a coin, imagine what they do with a real weapon... No, no! I don't want to know.
Staring at the gate one more time, he observed the carriage with the two horses alone. The idea came to his mind but vanished quickly. The fear of finding something undesirable inside that place.
They can sense a gate being scratched from more than a city's distance away, imagine the carriage that's right here.
Giving up on the idea, he wrapped the chains around his arms and ran into the smaller alleys. His mind only thought of hiding from the Others who had disappeared and getting rid of these damned chains. However, something else came to his mind.
" Return available in 5 minutes "
Yes! Finally! I just need to hide for 5 minutes and this will all be over! Damn this cursed dream, I will survive you!
Joy filled his entire body. An abrupt urge to laugh out loud and make the biggest noise around him hovered over his emotions, but he needed to contain them for now. When he woke up, he could do all that and more.
Ezkiel's main focus was to find a place to hide until the dream ended. Luckily, the city was completely empty and full of hiding places; he just needed to find a safe shelter, and that was simple with his little knowledge of the Others. Using the moonlight, he analyzed the slimy trails that pulsed from the creatures and veered away from spots with a stronger smell of spice.
He found a house on a small dead-end street. The smell was more like dirt and fungus than spice. For the first time, he was happy with this bitter odor.
The house seemed small by Ezkiel's standards. It had two floors with the upper being a small attic, judged by the window's level with the ceiling. The walls were shared with the houses on either side. The ground floor was an open studio, where some destroyed furniture could be identified.
Broken wooden tables with small circular adornments on the ends. An old wood-burning stove that had become a nest for some creature, in which the upper pipe leading to the ceiling seemed to be broken, toppled over in the middle of the room. There was a small bed further to the left, where old curtains, faded by time, closed like a small dressing room.
On the other hand, there were other intact objects in the house: an old dressing table, with the glass completely dirty and drawers open and rummaged through, and a metal bucket next to a hole at the other end of the room, where one was supposed to do their business.
Tired, Ezkiel just looked at the destroyed room and felt strangely familiar. His body was led to small spasms of pleasure and tranquility. The sleepiness, coming from the bleeding in his shoulder and the various wounds on his body, began to rest in his mind, almost making him faint right there, among dirty wood and pieces of broken slabs. He slowly knelt on the spot, barely able to keep his body upright, and fiddled with the dirty wood and slabs. He slowly looked up at the ceiling, realizing that there should have been a central staircase there, but it had been taken. In his current sleepy state, he could barely assimilate information very well. Only that someone had searched this place before.
Ezkiel stood up again and called up the timer for his return.
" Return available in 2 minutes "
Almost there! Soon I'll be able to rest...
He walked a little more around the house. He heard small noises on the ceiling above his head. It must be the damned animals that had made a den in that place. He looked up at the ceiling again, seeing only small tremors, too small to be a large creature. He glanced at the hole where the stolen staircase should have been, but saw nothing there; the animals must have noticed his presence and hidden.
He got a little closer to the stove and noticed several pieces of old, dry wood around the area, near the nest. The animal's nest looked like a bird's, but made of old trash and other dry materials.
"This is great fire starter, as my father likes to call it!"
He remembered his old father and the times he forced him to go camping near the small cabin of his late grandfather. He hadn't done that since he was little. He didn't much like going into the woods, preferring to practice some sport with his school friends. Now, this would be useful.
He gave a light tap on the metal part of the stovepipe. A hollow sound echoed through the room; it seemed the pipe was empty.
"I thought rats would like to make nests in pipes like these."
He thought, but soon dismissed the matter. It wasn't his problem. Soon he would be out of this dream. He just needed to kill a little more time.
" Return available in 1 minute "
Ezkiel walked slowly to the last point of the house. The small dressing room with dirty curtains. Upon entering, he saw the dirty, completely broken bed, with only a dirty straw mattress on the floor. Next to it was the dressing table, one of the best pieces of furniture in the house. The drawers were wide open and scratched by smaller animals. In front of it was a dirty mirror that didn't reflect. With his hands black with dirt, he wiped his hands on the mattress to clean them, then rubbed them on the glass, making the reflection reappear.
In a spasm, he almost let out a cry of horror at his reflection in the mirror. What he saw looked more like a monster than a person. A cadaverous being, pale, thin enough to show only bones and skin. He was short, about 1.68 meters tall, with almost no hair on his body, only slightly dark eyebrows.
His eyes were dark, like freshly mined coal. The chain that bound his neck left a large, reddish-purple bruise, the only thing that gave color to his skin.
But what impressed Ezkiel the most was the lack of hair. He wasn't completely bald, but the strands were so small and thin that they fell like sand at the slightest touch. His body was enduring being alive by spending the lowest level of energy possible. He didn't even have the strength for his nails to grow or his hair to strengthen.
After everything he had been through with this body—the fall down the stairs, the wound on his right shoulder, the mental and physical pain—he couldn't understand how it could still move, but there it was, standing. Persisting, with the greatest dedication it could muster.
"I don't want to die!"
It seemed it wasn't even Ezkiel thinking this, but the body itself begging him to keep trying.
A sense of pride passed through the boy's mind, with an immense desire to cry without knowing why. Compassion. Pity. Dedication. The feelings came together and seemed to merge with his mentality. Ezkiel didn't want to die either and was happy to have made it this far.
" Return is available "
At that moment, a strange feeling came to his mind. A small desire not to abandon that sufferer. That other body that had been trying so hard to survive until now.
Before he could think more about the feeling, a crashing sound echoed through the house. The floor shook and a figure approached, running in Ezkiel's direction.
— Who do you think you are to touch my things! You will...
"Fuck it! Return!"