The city was dimmer than it had ever been. Escar lifted his gaze to the cavernous expanse of Rift's Scar, where smoke hung low like dying breath. "Hey, Bart," he said, following the older soldier down the spiraling path that carved the city into its own ribs, "when do you think the mines reopen?"
Bart let out a dry laugh, scraping his boot against the mud. "Kid, let me tell you a secret—when things close down here, they usually stay that way." He kicked a piece of rusted pipe aside. "These prisoners shit everywhere. The whole city's turning to filth."
"But there've been fewer missing people this month," Escar said, quickening his steps to match theirs. "That's good news, right?"
Bart spat. "Fewer folk go missing because there're fewer folk left to go missing."
Kaleb smirked beneath his hood. "Don't listen to him. There ain't no diamond in them, but we will figure a way to make use of them—save us some dignity from paying for pleasure. Prisoners look like dog shit for sure, but you can find one or two gemstones in a large enough pile of shit."
"Oh, yes," Bart muttered. "Listen to the all-knowing Kaleb and his vicious groin. If he had half a brain, he'd leave like I plan to. You should too, kid—before this place eats you whole."
"Halt. This level is restricted." One of the soldiers standing at the checkpoint shouted. They were dressed differently than Kaleb, Bart, and himself. Not the gray they were wearing, but uniforms that fit the Dictate's code of conduct for officers: royal purple. The color was not a mere stain; it was embedded in each of the slick strings. They were all shaking. The doublet did a poor job at saving them some heat here. This uniform was only a formality that served ceremonial purposes. Close-fitting, it restricted movement, and on top of the irritating cold, they had to tolerate the painful chafing from their deep purple uniforms. Oh, their poor armpits, knees, inguinal regions, and all the other unfortunate places to neighbor a fold.
Escar gazed at the logo on Bart's scapula. On the mechanical jacket, the triangular logo was nearly wiped by the passage of time, yet the font remained in its color of gold: I.N.D.S. He glanced at that and wished he had purchased a mechajacket, mastercrafted by Industrum.
"Easy, lads. We ain't prisoners. Look." Bart shifted to his right to let them see the rifle strapped to his waist.
"Restricted means restricted," the officer quavered, his teeth rattling like a set of grinding stones turning wheat to white flour.
"Oh, well, you see restrictions work on traders, tourists, journalists and alike. We bunch are officers just like you are," Bart said as he attempted to slip in through one of the turnstiles, but the officer from before grabbed his shoulder and blocked him from passing through.
"Sorry, friend. Turns out restrictions work on you too," the officer said, his voice still quavering from the cold. Bart gritted his teeth, and not from the blister. His mechajacket was the best of the three; despite its vintage state, it was made by Industrum and it delivered on the logo on which it was formed. Industrum's byproducts were known to be sturdy. The common saying was: you eat bread made by Industrum and it grows back from the bite mark.
"I'm under the impression that you didn't hear me right," Bart pushed him back.
"I heard you alright," the officer barked, and a few of the purple-wearing soldiers closed in on them from all sides at his words, waving and brandishing their batons in the air, testing them—or rather, testing Bart's courage against their own.
"Fellas, fellas. I get it. You're fresh from Sindera and you think you have to prove something you deem worth proving, but we are just soldiers like you, serving the Executor's commands. Let's not let things get hot and out of hand," Kaleb said as he raised his hands high.
"This area is restricted by the order of Planetary Security Manager Alimet Cleaver for all inhabitants, inmates, and personnel," the officer quavered once more.
"Cleaver? Why didn't you say so? He is my brother," Kaleb replied.
"Really?" the officer mocked.
"Well, from a different mother," Kaleb said.
"And a different father," Bart mocked under his breath.
"Enough jests!" the officer shouted as he ordered the enforcers to approach by spinning his finger.
"No, no. I'm serious. Look," Kaleb replied as he showed him a cozy picture he had with Cleaver. The officer took a glimpse of the photo and gulped.
"At ease," he ordered, and the enforcers scattered by his command.
"Why are you going into that hell anyway?" the officer queried.
"We are going to gift this gallant gent a sleepover," Kaleb answered as he lightly patted Escar on the shoulder of his mechajacket.
"Let me see some credentials," he ordered.
"Here," Bart barked as he tossed his papers toward the officer's face.
Escar looked up at the strip mine above—if it was a funnel, they were standing at its spout. He had never ventured this low in all five months of his deployment to Melas Oon. It was no coincidence they had put a restriction of access to the lowest level. By the tales he had heard Kaleb talk, if a Priest Templar were to sneak a camera to the entrance and gather some sweet evidence of misconduct, the Supreme Executor should have anticipated Seluk's grand fleet at Sindera's door. That was, if the folklore held any truth of the children being sent to the Shadow to die in a process Kaleb named "sending to the night," and the furnace in the lowest layer actually burned the elderly as fuel. Oh, the faint sound of the screams from down there. Maybe it was the spiral's resonance, or that the inmates down below were more talented in the art of howling. Regardless, the outcry seemed more enthusiastic than the weepings from above.
Escar looked up to the base of the exposed inverted cone and thought about rain—how lucky they were that it didn't occur on this planet. If it were any other case, they would have the prisoners make a lid, and that wouldn't do much since the city was carved in the exact shape of a sinkhole. He noticed the sun shone only to the highest point of the eastern arch line, nearly as high as the city's mouth, and reckoned it was only a few minutes before it fully set out. He observed the yellow lights returning to life in unsteady blinks.
"Papers!!"
"Sorry, what?" Escar muttered in a confused state.
"Papers, you deaf!!" The officer in the purple uniform shouted as he nearly tore Escar's documents from his grip with one hand while pushing him back with the other. He read through his assignment forms thoroughly.
He imagined himself reading the documents, his lips only slightly miming words in absolute stillness; first he rehearsed his name, then he read the officer's lips to repeat what he had rehearsed, and then he recalled his father and his place of birth; he automatically recalled the numerous bird flocks that traveled north in fall and migrated back south before spring; he likened his own journey to their repetitive voyage—there was little to match; those birds fled to the most comforting seasonal bed they could find, and he had tossed himself into a world which was more severe than his world at any season; at least there was no rain, Escar thought, while he soundlessly whispered the last digits of his social security number, the officer glanced at Escar and his eyes drifted back to the papers.
"Checks out. Two hours—got it? Only two hours," the officer shouted while he returned their respective documents to the trio.
"Got it," Bart barked back as he crossed to the other side of the checkpoint and Escar hurried behind him and Kaleb while he looked up to see no sunshine in the sky, only an eddy of flickering yellow and red lights that enclosed the inverted, exposed cone from all sides.
"Kenta. We serve Kenta, not Cleaver," Bart said under his lips.
"We serve the Executor. We are all his tools; some tools are more glorified," Kaleb replied.
"Kenta is no son of his father. If here was Askoval, Sinderian scum would taste a thick tight rope on their neck for sure," Bart noted. And the name of the water world got Escar thinking again of rain, and he praised that it was impossible to occur on a planet of such low humidity.
"Volikant is an Arsalan—a vessel only in name, not in practice, and certainly not an obedient one. Kenta is just a fief: easily installed and even easier to be replaced," Kaleb whispered. How can one abide the bidding of another equal in rank and power? Askoval had as many ships as Sindera and twice as many officers in the Dictate's military—and far more valued than those. An Arsalan status in Gordsi's courts, as one of the only ten planets and their respective rulers seemed fit to carry this title in the greater Domain—the only other planet than Sindera in the Dictate to be regarded in such a high state. The rivalry between Denns and Selementies was common knowledge even to children on any planet in the Dictate. Their relentless tugging at every junction where their interests collided formed the very shape of the Dictate's inner politics. This strife stemmed from their comparable power base—well, less than comparable, Escar thought, since High Hegemons in Gordsi and Astian always held a bias against Sindera and favored their vessels in Askoval in the greater schemes of the Domain.
"I can't wait for this deployment to end. I prefer Askoval's relentless downpour to this hell hole," Bart said. "How did you get that image anyway?" he asked Kaleb.
"You know that wiz from the third level, lad with the pads—Marki? Well, he has this thing on his system that makes enhanced pictures!" Kaleb answered with a devilish smile.
"Give me that." Bart snatched the image from Kaleb's open front pocket. "We be damned. They let us slip in with a counterfeit? And this counterfeit of that. He looks nothing like this. And what's with that beard? Did you tell Marki Cleaver was a leprechaun or something?" Bart added as he deposited the picture back into the pocket of Kaleb's mechajacket.
"Or something," Kaleb smirked while he took the lead from Bart.
He turned sharply into a narrow alley carved from ancient stone. Escar shivered; his thick coat barely held back the blistering wind. "How much longer till we're there?"
"Two more turns," Kaleb answered, patting him on the shoulder.
Bart grinned, the yellow light catching on his cracked teeth. "It ain't too late to head up to the Black Rose. Bethsy's warm, soft, and sings like a lovebird does in hot springs. Her voice is sweeter than a cushion and twice as inviting."
Kaleb scoffed. "You're the only one who wants that fat wench, and we have gone through the trouble of passing the gate."
"Wench?" Bart barked a laugh. "Bethsy's the warmest girl on this dead planet. She sleeps with men because she wants to, not because she's chained. And she costs less than a bottle of that swill you call wine."
"This girl sleeps willingly too," Kaleb said, smirking ear to ear. "If you want warmth, Bart, buy yourself a blanket—not a whore."
"The girl's dead," Bart muttered, his face hardening. "She doesn't talk, move, scream, cry—nothing. She's so dead, she doesn't even die."
"She's pretty though, right?" Escar asked, his voice uncertain. "The prettiest girl in the Scar?"
"Pretty? You don't fuck a girl's face, kid. You fuck her body. If she's as still as a rock, you'll be doing all the work. Buying her's worse than buying a statue—it's like renting one." Bart scoffed.
"Let him have what he wants, Bart." Kaleb chuckled.
Bart grumbled but said no more. They reached a red door at the alley's end, its paint faded and chipped, a faint glow spilling from the cracks. Kaleb pushed it open, and warm air thick with sweat and oil drifted out.
The chamber was dimly lit, flickering lights casting long, twisted shadows across the cracked walls. The air was heavy with the scent of oil, sweat, and despair.
"Russell, long time no see," Kaleb said to the man seated behind a colored wooden desk at the center of the room. "How's business?"
"Business? Booming!" Russell's smile cut thin. "It's your visits that've grown rare, my friend." His voice was smooth, but an edge of urgency threaded through it as his eyes flicked toward Kaleb.
Escar, disinterested in their talk, found his gaze drawn to the girl standing silently in the corner of the desk atop a red carpet. Her feet were bare. Her hands were bound with rough rope. Her form—slender arms, narrow waist, long neck, and soft curves—was like an effigy sculpted by a god. The gown she wore was too thin for the cold, nearly transparent, clinging to her body like mist. Through it, he could see the faint pink hue of her nipples. Her long braid fell across her left breast, half-covering what the fabric did not. She didn't move. Her head was bowed, gaze locked to the floor, her pale face and glacial eyes were the color of purling springs in spring. For the depth they held and also the other distracting features the girl embodied, Escar couldn't read much in those unattainable springs.
"Bart. Never thought I'd see you here," Russell drawled, finally setting aside his ledger. "Forgot how to be cheap, have you?"
"I haven't lost my mind yet, old pimp," Bart shot back, scraping his boots against the mat.
"Then why are you here? To insult my establishment with your soot-stained clothes?"
"Actually," Bart said, smirking, "I followed the smell of shit—and it led me straight to you."
Russell's smile didn't falter. "We're here for the boy," Kaleb interjected, nodding toward Escar. "He wants to taste Ginger."
Bart snorted. "The girl's all bones. How do you keep her alive?"
"The girl's alive," Russell said smoothly, "and full in all the right places." His finger traced lazily toward the girl's chest. "Her lips taste like strawberries, her hair's the color of fire red and godly gold and her breasts are full and soft as milk itself."
"Never known the dead to give milk," Bart muttered, moving toward the fireplace.
"Care to test that theory?" Russell replied, scrawling something into his ledger.
"The boy's the fool who wants to buy, not me," Bart said, rubbing his hands near the heat.
"She has a nice face," Kaleb uttered with a smug tone.
"Your mother has a face; this here is a visage," Russell said calmly, placing his fingers around the girl's jawline and lifting her gaze up. "Two thousand credits. One hour."
"That's almost two weeks' pay for a corpse," Bart scoffed.
"She's worth your whole worthless life," Russell said sharply.
Escar glanced at the girl, Russell still holding her chin, and glanced into her pristine blue eyes and the golden eyebrows that crowned those holy grails, the girl not offering a glance in return not to him, not to anyone or anything in the room and Escar gulped and heard the ticking clock on the wall click click click and more like an unsealed valve of heavy oil dripping on a marble floor, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a burning shape take flight on the edge of a book standing on its rusted yellowish paper and it took to the sky drip drip drip as Escar heard the ticking clock and thump thump thump and felt his own heart pump, the shape flying to him and past his ear, it golden and not golden, crimson and not crimson, a color in between, both at the same time and none of them at all, until he slid one inch back and almost slipped.
"What the hell was that?" Bart barked while Escar breathed a faint flow of air from the after-path of the fleeting butterfly, as he tried to hold his composure in the presence of a girl who gave him no mind.
"These moths down here—every room is infected with them. Anyhow, two thousand credits," Russell repeated, his voice hard. "I don't bargain."
"I'll pay," Escar growled.
Bart turned, stunned. "You will?"
Escar nodded, grumbling under his breath. Russell's eyes gleamed.
"The terms are set," he said, cutting Bart off before he could protest. "The service has to be consummated and the room is gratis." He added, offering Escar the rope that bound the girl's wrist, and nodded to a red open door while the girl's gaze fell back to the ground.
Russell smiled, satisfied, as Escar turned down his radio and set it on the counter. He stepped toward the girl; her stillness unnerved him as he did.
"So, Bart," he heard Russell say behind him, "any news from the mines?"
"No dead bodies coming up," Bart answered. "Which means one of two things—either they're too mangled to bring them up without panic, or the shifts that go down to collect them join them in the long sleep."
Escar seized the girl's arm, wrenching it from the rope that bound her wrist. Her hand hung limp, as though detached from the rest of her—and the rest of her seemed detached from the world at large. She offered no resistance, no movement. It wasn't as if he dragged a willing girl to bed; she simply wasn't there at all. There was no tugging at the other end; it was almost like dragging a floating feather, fluffy and weightless as a moth.
He crossed to the red door, closed the door behind them with a heavy thump as clarion as his beating heart, leaving Bart, Kaleb, and Russell alone with their whispers and the faint, rhythmic sound of fingers scratching against the ledger.
Escar grabbed the girl and tossed her onto the bed from the ground, and as he kicked off his leather boots and loosened his tunic he turned back to look at her face, just her face, her glacial eyes shining as bright as a thousand mountain springs, her hair not red or yellow but something in between—something far more pristine than anything he had ever seen—yet those glacial eyes weren't looking at him but were tilted to the side, avoiding his presence.
"Look at me," he said commandingly, yet the girl seemed not to hear his words she didn't even flinch.
Escar raised his hand as high as he could and brought it down with all the force he could muster, a sharp slap tilted the girl's head to the right as her cheek turned crimson.
"I said look at me," Escar uttered aloud, yet the girl still didn't flinch, so he grabbed her by the shoulder and slapped her again to the left with the back of his palm so hard that even his own knuckles started to burn—but the girl didn't move, even though the strike burst her lips, she didn't open her mouth, not even to sigh or suck in the dribbling blood that spilled from the open cut on her lower lip.
Escar lowered his pants and tossed his coat aside, then with only his shirt on he approached the girl lazily and extended his hand, grabbing her left breast the one half-covered by her golden hair—giving it a squeeze before brushing the hair aside with one finger, then seizing her transparent dress and tearing it apart without ceremony in one savage motion.
Still, the girl sat motionless on the bed as Escar prepared to ravage her, as though her soul had long drifted—Escar's rough hands gripped her breast, pawing greedily, but she neither resisted nor acknowledged him, she didn't scream, didn't weep, didn't even tremble, her eyes remaining fixed on a distant point beyond the room, dull and lifeless, the pond Escar had seen in her eye now he suspected was just a pond, a motionless body of water in the desert devoid of all shapes of living life, maybe even a mirage.
He squeezed her breasts and pinched a nipple so hard that its pink turned red, then laid her on the bed and lowered himself on top of her.
He took a kiss from her burst lip and looked at her she wasn't looking at him, her gaze drifting toward the ceiling so slowly he turned her head so their eyes could meet, and she didn't pull away as he did, but when their eyes finally met a chill ran through him because she still wasn't really seeing him, her eyes there but fixed on something far beyond him, a distant point he could almost see reflected in their glassy depths.
Escar grunted in frustration. "What's wrong with you?" he snarled, shaking her. "Don't you feel anything?" But the girl remained silent, her breathing slow and steady—as if she were a corpse animated by the barest thread of life. Her eyes haunted him. He wanted them to see him, to acknowledge that he existed. Yet that look fixed toward him but not on him made him feel like a helpless child before her. Maybe it was him she imagined dead.
Slowly, he pulled himself upright and turned her onto her back so her gaze could no longer pierce him; then he began again from where he had left her. He touched her bare back—her smooth skin sent a chill through him and he jerked his hand away and stared at his palm, shivering, fearing that smooth back might have given him a cut, while the clock on the wall ticked, ten minutes gone, whereas fifty more remained to be endured, and already he felt diminished, as though some quiet curse was working its way through his veins.
The girl didn't make any sound either, so Escar drowned in far-off sounds—the clock's clicks and distant talks—as he shifted his weight impatiently.
He stared into those eyes again and wondered to where they belonged; they weren't green and had no hint of it, so he crossed off all the worlds from Hassar, Gordsi and Astian, Epiphany and Giliad—he crossed those four and a few more. Blue eyes weren't common in the Dictate either, but still they were more commonly found here than in the beating heart of the Domain at Hassar. He wondered about the possibility of her being born to the Dictate; her skin was white but not pale, so she wasn't from the sunless subterranean surface of Sindera and not from the sullen skies of Askoval. Her regal profile showcased that she was not starving before being shipped to this dead world, so he found it near impossible for her to be born on a desert planet, and the lack of augmented body parts helped him conclude she is not from any worlds run by Industrum or its conglomerates. The fact that she was bound in jail in the Dictate made him think of Junglla as the sole world this beauty could seed from. Escar had been to Junglla once—not as a soldier, but as a passerby—he had sighted girls similar in appearance, and yet none of those chicks could reach this high. Junglla had recently surged as a hotbed for disobedience and insubordination; its rebellious folk seemed ungrateful that the Supreme Executor had blessed them to be proud dwellers under the shadow of his new palace complex that spanned much of the planet's habitable zone—that wasn't dominated by wild giant fauna. So Escar positively concluded that the girl's haunting beauty originated from Junglla.
He looked once more at her regal beauty and deemed it divine—her profile, her frame, and all the other minutiae aspects that he noticed or just shrugged—this girl was far beyond all the worlds he had just enumerated, and he sensed in her an essence of excess in all measures of being; to him, the girl was more formidable than the Herclion's stock in Astian, more evocative than ballads written by poets of Gordsi, and far less likely to talk than the tree gods in Epiphany and Giliad, and yet he could have her here, of all places—such beauty shouldn't be found—just like the moth, that butterfly of impossible color, drip drip drip—he heard the ticking clock from beyond the wall.
A sudden fear tightened his chest more air floated out than it was sucked inward and as he breathed more he felt less air and a greater need for it as though his lungs were punctured by an unseen needle of some kind.
He was perspiring profusely, and the airflow on his lips felt far warmer against his skin—he wondered: was his outside really colder than his innards, or was this just a play of his mind? He shivered and flinched, and outside something rang—the ticking clock—as he hoisted out of the bed, fastened his clothes, wiped the sweat from his forehead with a pink towel, and tossed it on the girl's thigh.
"What is your name?" he asked the girl without hearing a response, and he asked again to test the girl's silence he only heard the agitating ring of the clock.
Escar opened the red door and stepped outside, fastening the buttons of his coat; before closing it, he glanced back inside—his chest heaving with exertion and unease.
The girl's dress hung in tatters, yet she made no move to cover herself—she simply stood there, stripped of dignity but not of that eerie, hollow strength that clung to her like a shadow—and he glanced away from her and didn't find his friends in the brothel's hall.
"Where are they?" Escar asked, his voice rough with spent exertion.
Russell didn't look up from his ledger. "Went up to the Black Rose. Said they'd be waiting for you there with their fat Bethsy."
Escar grunted, adjusting his belt as he strode toward the door, paid his due, and retrieved the radio—just as his hand touched the handle to the gate that opened to the alley, Russell's voice slid after him like a blade.
"If you ever wish to return... we're relocating to Braken's Deck. Fifteenth floor. You know the place—the old restaurant."
Escar paused, weighted like a coin on a dead man's eyes.
"We'll be waiting."
Escar hesitated—just a breath, just a flicker—then stepped into the night. "It's fucking cold outside," he complained as he exited, and the door clicked shut behind him, sealing the brothel's thick silence once more.
Escar breathed heavily and wiped the cold sweat from his brow with his sleeve, unable to shake the image of the girl—the hollow, lifeless stare, the way she had stood there like a broken doll, untouched by his violence—something about her gnawed at the edges of his mind.
He switched on his radio—it came to life with a harsh screech.
"Center to Falcon Nineteen—report your position," the voice barked through the static.
"Shit," he muttered, then pressed the button. "Escar—ah, I mean, Falcon Nineteen to Center. Ninetieth floor, left wing, Brimstone Alley."
"I've been trying to reach you for a solid fifteen minutes, Escar! Where the heck were you?"
Escar released the button and took his time to think of some carefully crafted alibi, and he uttered the easiest that came to his mind. "My apologies, Center. I've been preoccupied—too much fruit and too much beans."
The voice crackled again. "Hope now you're done excreting, Falcon Nineteen. There's a cold mass near the mine entrance. Check it out, then report."
Any other time, he would've ignored the order—who would venture into the mines alone? But they had him forked, with his pants down, as he thought bitterly. He sighed, pressed the transmitter again, and muttered, "Roger, Center. On it."
He started his descent, winding down the spiral paths that coiled through the mine city's depths. The lower he went, the colder it grew.
Clutching his rifle tighter, he felt a faint pull—a whisper of longing he couldn't explain. Maybe he'd pay for another hour once this mess was over, two weeks more of his pay. Maybe he'd make her react. The thought festered, lingering in his mind as he moved.
His boots echoed sharply in the narrow, cold corridors of Rift's Scar. The dim yellow lights above flickered, casting long, ragged shades. The deeper he went, the heavier the air became—thick with oil, rust, and old scent accumulated over many long years of the most demanding human experiments.
He hadn't been here before, deep in the bowels of Melas Oon. Every night is the same down in the Scar, he recalled Kaleb saying, but tonight felt different. The usual background hum—gruff voices, distant maddening laughter, the clatter of chains and bones—was gone. In its place was an unnatural stillness, a silence that pressed against his skin. Maybe that's why they restricted this part, he thought.
He looked at his watch. He recalled that the fresh officers from Sindera—with purple uniforms and pale skins—had given him a two-hour deadline, and he was well past it. But since they had radios of their own, they might have heard the Center's command, or even suggested to Center to send in Escar themselves.
He passed a few cells with prisoners tightly packed. He looked down the spiral at the dispersing lights, few and far between. As he looked deeper, darkness gathered. He looked up then at the eddy of flickering lights and listened to the strange sounds of merrymaking in the background—prisoners' groans, moans, and bellowing.
He wanted to turn back, to climb up toward the Black Rose and drown his nerves in ale and warmth.
"Damn it," he muttered, tightening his grip on the rifle. He wasn't meant to be this deep and this late, but orders were orders. With a grunt, he adjusted his gear and started down the crumbling walkways toward the mine shafts.
As he descended, his thoughts betrayed him, dragging him back to the girl—her red hair glinting under the dying lights, her lips full and motionless, as if frozen in another time. She should have fought. She should have screamed. Instead, she had simply... endured.
He recited the memories and projected the girl's braid to be yellow-golden as an optimus star. How could he not precisely recall the girl's color of hair? It worried him in ways he didn't understand.
And yet, the idea of returning to her—of forcing something, anything, from that frozen mask—gnawed at him like hunger.
The yellow lights faded the deeper he went, giving way to a faint reddish hue that seemed to seep from the very walls. The air turned colder, heavier, metallic, and rubbed against his skin. Ahead, the sprawling mines loomed. The hum of distant machinery vibrated through the ground, mingling with the low groan of unseen passageways shifting in the deep.
He turned on his flashlight and saw a crimson engravings on a wall—a thing he was sure he hadn't seen, or maybe noticed, anywhere before. Crimson as ruby. And though far, it was clear it wasn't written with ink, but with scattered gemstones perhaps. But his flashlight didn't erect any chromatic flares from them. They were diamonds for sure, but somehow they behaved like dirt. The font was big, and in its entirety, the passage was larger than Escar.
It was no prisoner's work, as it did not mention the Supreme Executor at all. And no soldier's doing either, since it didn't scold or mock the prisoners with their intended closed fate. It was a thing entirely devoid of meaning.
"Praise Mekan in His unending design, he who shaped the world for men to end upon, he who waits at shadow and strikes at light."
Escar read the lines. He shrugged it off and plodded downward.
He walked further, and more lights stuttered and died, throwing jagged shadows across cracked stone. His boots grew quieter on the uneven ground, swallowed by the oppressive silence that nested in the dark.
Escar looked back and didn't recognize the path he had just walked; he gazed forward and saw no signs, markings, or shapes he was acquainted with—only the dark. The familiar paths blurred into one another, the landmarks he thought he knew from the maps twisted into strange, distorted shapes. Without realizing it, he was lost. He twisted, twitched, swallowed a lump. He thought of the girl again—he attempted to block those thoughts now—yet he sensed the ticking of the clock, drip drip drip, he heard the echoes, or rather their absence, and heard them more on the shivering of his skin and the sudden bristling of every thin string of hair from his ankle up to his hackle, rather than with his ears, which heard naught. In his heart, he felt like he was a child and the rifle in his hands a mere stick; he felt the darkness and the monster he feared donned behind its veil—those monsters he imagined many, and he was weak, he couldn't even oppose one. His eyes twitched from the stress. Without turning, he stepped back; he glanced then not forward but rather to his back, and he started to run back. Drip drip drip he felt the ticking of the clock from behind.
The entrance of every walkway he passed gaped before him as a vast, black maw rimmed with a sickly, pulsating red light. The yellow glow from above was gone now, leaving only that angry crimson that seemed to breathe with the planet's own heartbeat.
His radio crackled again, but this time the voice was distant, warped, as if calling from another world. He didn't answer. He barely heard it at all.
Something was wrong. The silence deepened—thick, tangible, pressing down on him.
He was pacing with such haste he almost passed from his own speed and gasped like he had done not long before when he was atop the poor girl. In front of him, the darkness turned into a wall; he whirled at the final second, collided with the wall but did not fall, didn't slow down either; he ignored the heat on his left leg and the itching on his left shoulder, and he just continued his flight.
Another wall—he slowed down this time. A dead end. There was a writing on it. He gulped and reached for his flashlight without looking; cold air seeped from his fingers as he clutched—he gazed with horror at his own empty fist. The flashlight was gone. His eyes, though now intimate with the dark, could read the carvings with little light: in diamond grooves on the wall, in crimson lines, were written these words—praise Mekan. He reached his hand for the wall; in the vibrations, he felt the pulsing of the ticking clock—tick tick tick. He pushed against the wall and whirled and ran faster than before, turned and turned again. He passed another wall and he saw the other line; he read as his heart shook to its weary core, in His unending design. There was no light ahead or even above; the eddy of flickering lights was gone. In its place was absolute dark. On the wall that he walked, there were sparsely placed letters, too crooked and too wide; he read them as he passed every one:
he
who
shaped
the
world
for
men
to
end
upon
Ahead he sensed an iron scent; he looked down to see red dirt and then fresh wet blood—drip drip drip—his boots splashed the blood. He again heard the ticking clock. He slipped and fell, rolled on his back a couple of times like a playing ball. He closed his eyes, opened them, and looked up: there it was, the eddy of lights and the spiraling path just to his left. He laughed as a child laughs for the first time, and choked on his gulp. He looked to his right: a gate closer to him than the wide walkway that corkscrewed inside the interior of the Rift's Scar. Atop the white gate, in crimson fonts, he read: he who waits at shadow and strikes at light.
Out of the corner of his eye, beyond the gate in its shade, a shadow moved—too fast, too fluid to be anything human.
His instincts screamed. He pivoted, rifle raised, and fired at the shadow—the shining bullets illuminating a hideous form: long limbs that twisted lithesome and soundless as if bound by no bone at all, while it dodged the bullets one by one, not a single bullet hitting any part—click, click—Escar's loader was thoroughly dried up. His index finger froze in place, slightly juddered in that frozen state, and its numbness grew only like a communicable plague, contaminating his hand and even his shoulder. He observed the creature slowly stop whirling; he only noticed the gun falling from his grip when it had already hit the ground, and he himself shortly followed, dropping down.
A hand emerged from the shade—long as a tree and as thick as its stump—it had five fingers with dagger-sharp claws, and its discolored peel paler than the girl's hide and that of the soldiers from Sindera, as pale as light. The hand clung to the wall. Then a head came to light: a skull of human shape, enormously large—it wasn't designed to be human, it was designed to eat one—and its teeth were nothing like humans', jagged and pointy and differing in size, mostly tiny, and yet some as large as Escar's palm. Some loose, half-peeled ghostly skin remained on the skull, loathsome, somewhat decayed, peculiarly with little to no scent—the creature didn't have any scent, or maybe Escar's nose was failing him like his rifle, his finger, his hand, his shoulder—does a nose ever go numb? The creature's eye sockets were utterly devoid of light, black holes as empty as night, and a neck as long as its arms as it appeared slowly out of the dark. Escar gulped, looked up at the eddy of lights, heard his own heartbeat, and imagined the girl—and that he had her—he noticed a warm liquid drip down his thigh. The creature squeaked and leapt, pushed its arms forcefully against the wall, and hurled out a hundred paces away, and then fifty, it didn't stride, it jumped. Escar extended his hand for the rifle as stiff as it was and squeezed the trigger for good measure, but no bullet came out at the other end, and his focus shifted to the wetness of his thigh—and suddenly he felt a burning shame as the creature's hand reached for him like he had reached for the girl, and its lousy fingers nearly squeezed Escar, but it stopped when a shining moth landed on the tip of Escar's nose. The creature halted, pulled its hand back, squeaked again—its agonizing screech this time seemed to vary from the first—it whirled and returned back to the dark, jumping like a fat frog.
The butterfly shined of its own shade; the monster seemed afraid of the firefly. The fly inverted on Escar's nose one tiny step at a time and looked directly in his eye with a thousand eyes. Escar wondered—was this the moth from before, from the brothel? It certainly looked like it. It had its elusive coloring, which was still unfathomable to Escar's eye, and it felt like it was judging him in that stare of a thousand eyes. The butterfly blinked again and again with all its eyes. Escar looked at its eyes so piteously, but the butterfly's eyes had no expression at all. Escar's guts contorted, and he tasted a sudden sourness under his tongue. The firefly's wings flipped, all four of them, once, twice, thrice in their inaudible flutter—he heard the final drips of the ticking clock—it flew to the eddy of flickering lights and faded into the endless dim hue that made up Rift's Scar. A wet giggle reached him—the sound of a drowned man laughing, a mouth waterlogged, unable to swallow or spit. Escar's eye drifted toward the gate. His head didn't finish turning; it didn't need to. Right before his face were needle-point teeth, waiting in the pitch dark. A wet, elastic black goo dripped from the gaping gob as the jaw unhinged with the clink of a battery spinning on a worn-out spring.