Chapter 2 (Friends I)

~1k Words

The Pitts were a ruin. A black stain on the Aerodin Empire that the King and its people preferred to ignore. It sat tucked away in a sunken recess at the base of Nero’s Thumb in what would have been a natural reservoir for water, were it not for the intervention of those who lived on the mountain above. A chaotic network of lofty platforms and swaying walkways, the slum balanced above a swamp of filth and fog on top of weaved swathes of flexible willowood; as though Aeras herself had started a game of pick-a-stick before losing interest and breathing life into the rest of the world. With so little sunlight able to breach its dark confines, few plants grew that its residents could safely consume, and clean water was horribly scarce. It was a hostile world that raised hostile people. And that was before accounting for the fiends who roamed its floor. Hideous, misshapen monsters who trolled The Pitts beneath a curtain of swirling haze. The loops that littered the walkways had these fiends at their end, and it was too them that many in this forgotten place went.

Bal looked up from his wrapped leather shoes and stared through the gap between railing and walkway, his brown hair sticking to his sweat-damp face. He liked to tie it into a razortail like Lynceus, but evidently it had come undone.

Before being forbidden all but the briefest trips into the Pitts, Bal and his late friends had been playing aimlessly on a walkway when he’d caught his one and only real glimpse of the fiends. The immutably thick haze that covered the Pitt floor like a permanent atmosphere, had cleared, framing a fallen walkway submerged in a muddy brown sludge. Largely decomposed, it had been fortified by piles of discarded garbage that had pushed up around the small island like sea foam at high tide. A muck stood there. Larger than a forest bear and covered in mold and open sores, the ponderous things acted as bells on fishing line, only coming alive when they felt a tug on their noosed ropes. Little more than a statue, the Muck’s vacant expression had suggested only the vaguest notion of its place in the world and the things that went on in it. Then a second fiend had appeared. One moment the filth covered floor of The Pitts had been an unbroken surface of floating moss, and in the next, an injured Rake had crawled out from the putrid filth, dragging bits of moss, and the dead weight of it’s lower half behind it. Lithe and agile next to its hulking cousin, the Rake had mounted the small island, probing it’s depths with one abnormally long arm before tearing through the piled refuse with a spastic zeal. The resulting cascade of detritus had flown into the unflinching face of the muck in its wake. Then the haze had thickened, and Bal and his friends had seen no more.

Any other time, and Bal would have looked over the railing hoping for another glimpse of the world below.

But not today.

Bal squeezed his eyes shut and spots bloomed behind his eyelids.

He waited for his vision to clear when someone shoved him roughly to the side.

“Forty feet at least!” said a stout young man with red hair. He wore a tan tunic and a green cape, the latter of which draped off of his shoulder as the redhead grabbed the railing and looked over. “And Rantha claims another! Gods Bal, but those fiends work fast, can’t see a damn thing through the soup though.”

The walkway lurched beneath him, and Bal had to spread his feet to stop from losing his balance.

“Maize?”

“You think they killed her yet?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Where else would I be?” The redhead paced the railing like a hungry Dinac, his messy hair bobbing as he walked. “Did you know these things can think? I mean they throw their loops all over the walkway and what not, but they can talk too. I watched them toy with this old drunk guy Tibol last Frostfalls. The Mucks were pullin at his arms, while a couple Rakes took turns dunkin his head beneath the filth. They were talking to each other I swear! It was like this weird, gurgling laugh or something… Although in hindsight, that might have been the sound of Tibol drowning.”

“Maize,” said Bal.

The red haired youth stepped away from the railing and walked towards Bal. His hands were raised, and he wore a look of wounded innocence on his pale face. Shorter than Bal by less than a hands-width, Maize was broader and stronger by far. Next to his old friend, Bal felt like one of the willowood poles they used to prop up the walkways.

“What? I didn’t kill the old drunk.”

Bal left the railing, ushered away by Maize’s guiding hand.

“Doesn’t mean you need to make a joke out of it,” said Bal.

“Bal,” said Maize, his voice sweet and heavy with sarcasm. “You spend so much time in the Bloat these days, you forget what it’s like out here on the sticks. When we were kids you flew through this place like a swallow with the wind at it’s back. Now…” Stepping back, Maize gestured up and down the length of Bal’s body, scowling. “I mean, Aeras breath man, what have you been doing? A runner for Dalbo? The man trails lesser nobles like a mangy sheep dog hunting for scraps, and has the audacity to call himself clever.” Maize paused and looked sidelong at Bal, as if considering something. “I see you sometimes, you know? When I pass through Beggars Square. You’re always at the Market, bowing and scraping, making nice, playing it safe. You give empty smiles to ignoble people in pursuit of a dream that couldn’t possibly be your own, and for what? The possibility of eventually taking over for The Great Dalbo?” Maize voiced the man’s name with gusto, hand stretched up to the cloudy sky.