The child is not born but drifted. He stands at the margin of the city where the stones are slick with age, and no one marks him for anything more than the shadow of a passerby. His coat is thin, his boots scuffed, his face no more distinct than the soot-stained walls behind him. The lamps burn faint through the fog, their light pallid, drowned in rain.
The city before him spreads wide and ruinous, its chimneys coughing into a sky forever gray. Factories belch smoke, barges groan across the river, and the streets are clogged with carriages and beggars and drunks who mutter into the filth. It is a city that has endured wars, plagues, famines, and its endurance is not a triumph but a sickness, for each survival births only another layer of rot.
In alleys narrow as wounds, children crouch like animals. They are feral, eyes wide, ribs stark beneath their skin. They fight one another for crusts of bread. The victor gnaws quick, snarling, while the loser slinks into the dark with blood on his lips. From windows above drip slops of stew and piss, raining upon their heads. None raise complaint.
A tavern door opens. Light spills out, yellow and false, and with it the roar of voices thick with drink. Within, men crowd shoulder to shoulder, slamming their mugs, spitting froth, slurring curses at kings dead a century. A fiddler scrapes strings cracked and raw. A whore with paint upon her face leans across a table, her teeth dark, her eyes void of joy. The door swings closed. The light is gone. The street returns to its silence.
The bells of a church toll. Their sound is hollow, muffled by the smoke. Inside, beneath the cracked frescoes, a priest kneels. His fingers clutch a rosary, his lips move, but no prayer takes shape. He stares at the crucifix, wood worn thin by centuries of hands. The Christ upon it is faceless now, features rubbed away. The candles gutter, the wax pools, the air is chill. The priest whispers not to God but to the shadows in the rafters. They do not answer.
Down by the river float dead fish. Their bodies roll pale in the current, scales slick with oil. Barges loaded with coal grind past, their crews bellowing above the splash of oars. The water stinks of industry, of sewage, of all the things men cast away when they believe the current will erase their sins. But the river remembers. It carries the rot to the sea.
Beyond the wharves stand warehouses, their windows boarded, their doors chained. Yet inside, voices murmur. Crates are pried open by lantern-light. Opium is measured, flesh is weighed, guns are traded hand to hand. Deals are struck without paper, only with blood and nods. The city breathes through such chambers, not through its churches or its courts.
Atop the hill looms the asylum. Its facade is cracked, its gates iron. Through the bars one hears the wailing of the lost. Some cry out for mothers long dead, some laugh until they choke, some whisper tongues no one has spoken in a thousand years. Keepers patrol with rods. They beat until the sound ceases. The silence lasts an hour, then the voices rise anew. In the basements men are strapped to boards, eyes rolled white, their bodies convulsing with visions. They speak of stars that fall, of mouths in the sky, of time unraveling. The keepers shove rags between their teeth. Still the words escape in muffled moans.
At the university, men of science lecture in halls cold as cathedrals. They chalk equations upon blackboards, their hands trembling with the speed of their thought. They speak of gravity, of atoms, of lightning captured in jars. They dissect corpses with steel knives, peeling flesh back to expose nerves like threads. They weigh brains, chart organs, catalog bones. Their words are sure, their voices steady, yet behind their eyes lingers the unease of men who know that what they measure may be infinite, and that infinity does not end with man.
In the observatory, another man squints through glass polished fine as crystal. He charts the heavens. He names comets, he traces orbits. He whispers to his assistant that the stars are not fixed but fleeing, that the void between them is greater than all men imagined. His hand trembles as he writes. He looks again, and in that blackness he sees not order but hunger. He does not sleep.
The city's markets are swollen with rot. Meat gray with mold, bread alive with insects, vegetables shriveled and black. Yet men and women buy, for hunger drives harder than disgust. Coins clink. A thief snatches one and runs. He darts into an alley, pursued. The stones there are wet, the walls high. He does not return. His pursuers do not either. The alley swallows all.
The nights belong not to the city's watch but to those who do not fear knives. In shadowed streets men stalk with chains wrapped about their fists. They strike without word, stripping bodies bare. Women scream and no one opens shutters. Blood runs in rivulets to the drains. Rats gather. They lick the stones.
Beyond the city lie fields, their soil thin, their crops yellow. Farmers toil bent, their backs scarred by years of sun and lash. They curse the heavens that send drought, then curse the rains that drown their seeds. A scarecrow leans broken, its sackcloth face slashed, its arms sagging. Crows perch upon it unafraid, their caws harsh and endless.
Past the fields rises the forest. Its trees are black, its air still. No birds sing. Hunters whisper of shapes moving, of eyes glowing in the dusk. Those who vanish within return marked, their bodies clawed, their minds broken. They mutter of voices in roots, of figures woven of shadow, of laughter from trunks hollow and deep.
Mountains stand beyond, peaks white with snow, valleys choked with mist. In caves live hermits who carve symbols with their nails upon stone. Their bodies are bone and skin, their mouths whispering prayers older than language. Travelers who stumble upon them turn away. They swear the air itself froze their blood.
And past the mountains spreads the sea. Gray, restless, eternal. Ships depart and vanish. Sailors return with eyes sunken, speaking of storms like walls of black water, of lights beneath the waves, of whispers rising from the abyss. They drink to silence the memory, but it clings like salt.
All of this the city endures. All of this it has always endured. Its endurance is no triumph but a curse. For each plague survived, another festers. For each fire quenched, another smolders. The stones are black with centuries of soot and blood. The air carries screams of the living and the dead. And still men are born here, and still they labor, and still they die.
Among them walks a figure.
He moves without haste, without pause. His coat is dark, his boots worn. His face is plain, forgettable, yet none forget the silence that follows him. Dogs do not bark. Children do not laugh. Men in taverns fall quiet until he has passed. Women at doorways turn their eyes away though they do not know why.
He walks through the market. The vendors falter in their shouts. He walks past the church. The priest lowers his gaze. He walks by the asylum. The mad within howl, not words but shrieks raw and mindless. He walks to the river. He stands upon the pier. The water moves sluggish, bearing rot. He does not move. Hours pass. He is still.
The lamps gutter as he passes. The air grows heavy. The rain halts above his shoulders. He leaves no trace on the stones.
He walks beyond the city, through the fields, through the forest, beneath the mountains, to the edge of the sea. He does not rest. He does not falter.
He is no man's son. He is no one's brother. He belongs to no nation, no creed, no god.
He is as old as silence, as cold as stone, as patient as hunger.
He watches the world, and the world does not know him.
But his name is Heinrich Dämmerung.