The stench hit first. The Fortress sewers' greeting card. Not just crap and piss, though God knows there was enough of that stewing down here to drown a continent. It was the decay, thick and cloying. You could say it was rather like rotten meat. A sour tang coated the back of my throat. Always blood. You breathed it. You tasted it. You wore it like a damp jacket you couldn't take off.
I shoved the rickety cart forward. The rusted wheels shrieked on the uneven, slime-slicked bricks. Chilling water trickled endlessly down the sweating walls, carving paths through the piss-yellow slime in its wake. Phosphorescent, as if that made it prettier. The feeble light from my helmet lamp barely punched through the thick, shifting gloom.
Rats mocked me. Not the skittering, nervous city rats. These were sewer royalty. Bloated as drunk ticks, their fur patchy and greasy. Their eyes gleamed and they didn't run. They just watched with wet, twitching noses from the crumbling brick alcoves or the edges of the sluggish, black flow beside the walkway. Some were as big as newborn kittens. I kicked a loose chunk of mortar towards one. They didn't flinch. Just bared yellowed, sharp teeth in a silent hiss like mine. Yeah, even the rats down here knew they owned the place.
Me? I was just passing through. Thanks, Cyrus. Thanks a lot for the fatherly legacy, you bastard. Cleaning Fortress crap until the debt you racked up. Or until the rot took me. Whichever came first.
The cart hit a sunken brick. The load—a vile slurry of kitchen slop and chemical runoff—sloshed out of the cart. A wave of humid filth slopped over the side, soaking my sodden trouser leg. The smell intensified. The stench made my eyes water and my stomach churn. I gagged but nothing came up. There wasn't enough inside to puke. Breakfast had been a crust of mold-ridden bread, shared with the roaches in my shack.
Just get it to the grate. Push the cart to the grate. Dump the load. Push the empty cart back. Breathe the poisoned air. Collapse. Repeat. Repeat until you die.
Cyrus's debt. My life. Huh, this dream couldn't get any better, I guess. Yet, for some unknown reason, I was curious what happened to Cyrus. Did he join the Damned's lunch menu, or did he become a part of them? Who knows? They called us the Blessed, but if cleaning filth is a blessing, then I'd rather be one of the Damned.
I leaned into the cart handle, the rough wood firm in my palms. And then the wretch came. Not a smell this time, but a presence. The freaking Fog. It seeped in through cracks in the ancient brickwork high above. The tendrils of sickly grey vapor coiled round my neck.
Not to mention that it hit my lungs like splinters of glass. I doubled over the cart handle and a coughed violently.
The Fog was Dekaros' dying breath, they said. The thing out there, beyond the Fortress walls and the intoxicated sky. Even its exhalations hunted you down here, in the freaking bowels of civilization.
The Fog would look tame once I compared it to the images of that very night the sky bled. It triggered the memories that lasted beyond its shelf life. I was just a kid, maybe five or six, can't exactly tell. Standing on the roof of our flimsy pre-Fortress apartment block with Cyrus. He pointed upwards, shouting something about fireworks. Damn, I still remember how his breath was steeped in pungent garlic.
That night, the world turned inside out.
A blinding, searing crimson flash bleached the skies. For a second, maybe two, the entire sky was a vast, open wound. It bled a sinister red light. I remember clamping my hands over my eyes, but the light burned right through my fingers.
As the light died, it left an eternal gray behind. The meteors that followed were worse than their predecessor. Not the little streaking lights children wished on. These were titans ripped from the guts of space and were silent at first. The roar made my ears bleed.
Cyrus grabbed me and yanked me downstairs. We huddled in the basement with a dozen neighbors, terrified. The impacts were localized, I thought at first, but the news said they were global. And it didn't stop there.
In the days to come, I learnt about the lands that rose from the depths and pushed through the carcass of the old world's oceans. Scientists, the few who survived the initial strikes and the chaos that followed, called it the Great Drying.
The night Dekaros woke up in the void between the stars. The freaking beast noticed the insignificant blue marble teeming with annoying little lives. This whimsical freak decided to rearrange the puzzle. Permanently.
Damn, the Fog always gets me. I wish I could stop hallucinating about the past under its trance. I sighed and returned to my daily routine. With four hours left or so, the workload that piled up ravaged my sanity.