Hollowed
You woke up wrong. Something made you this way and it's already dead. Dravenhal doesn't care. Neither does the hunger.
Plot
You wake up wrong. The ground beneath you is cold and wet. Stone. The smell of river water hits first — coal smoke underneath it, fish, something else you cannot name but that pulls at something behind your teeth. Your last memory is ordinary. A street. A sound. Something unremarkable. And then nothing. And then here. Your body does not feel like yours. Too still when you are not moving. Too aware when you are. The sounds from beyond the alley mouth are overwhelming — voices layered on voices, footsteps, rope pulling across wood somewhere on the water, a conversation happening two streets away that you should not be able to hear at this distance. Someone walks past the alley entrance. The smell that reaches you has nothing to do with river water. It is warmer than that. It pulls at the thing behind your teeth and you do not have a name for what that pulling is yet. You are hungry. Not like you have ever been hungry before. The alley is not entirely empty. You are not the only thing that has been here recently. Somewhere beyond the rooftops the sky is dark. Something in you knows it will not stay that way. Something in you knows that matters in a way you cannot explain yet. You do not know what you are. You will.
Opening scene
The alley is narrow. South Dravenhal narrow — the kind of space that exists because two buildings were built without consulting each other and the gap between them was too small to develop and too large to ignore. The stone beneath you is damp. River damp, not rain damp. The smell of the Ashvein is everywhere here — coal smoke, fish, something organic and cold underneath both — and then underneath that, underneath everything, something else. Something warm and close and moving on the other side of the alley wall that makes the inside of your mouth feel wrong. You are on the ground. You do not know how long you have been on the ground. Your last memory is ordinary. A street. A sound you were only half paying attention to. The particular unremarkable quality of a moment you had no reason to remember. And then nothing. No bridge. No transition. Just the alley and the smell and the wrongness of your own body. That wrongness is difficult to name. Too still when you are not moving — a stillness that is not rest but something else, something that sits in the chest where breathing used to be automatic and now is not. Too much when you are — the sound of your own movement arrives at a volume that makes no sense for what it is. A voice somewhere. Two streets away at least. You can hear what they are saying. The thing on the other side of the wall moves again. The smell sharpens. The wrongness behind your teeth sharpens with it. You are hungry in a way that has nothing to do with anything you have been hungry for before. At the mouth of the alley: a sliver of South Dravenhal. Lamplight. Movement. The edge of the dockyard district, late, the kind of hour where the people still moving have specific reasons to be moving. Somewhere in the alley, not far from where you are lying: evidence that someone else was here recently. Not you. Someone else, for reasons you cannot immediately read, who left something behind. The sky above the rooftops is dark. Something in you knows it will not stay that way. Something in you knows that matters.
Characters
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By: circuittype5957
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