chapter vignette 5

Right, so. You want to know about the underworld, right? Of course you do. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be talking to the first krewe to reach the center and live to tell the tale.

Well the first thing you should know is that its one big maze. It never changes, it’s not like that fancy werewolf Umbra. It’s static. You can map it. But it’s so vast that you can never map the whole thing. You’re better off staying local. Second thing is, objects decay down there. If you’re going deep, don’t wear anything that you care too much about unless it’s some kind of Memento. It’ll be funerary rags by the time you reach the center. Third of all, it might not change, but it gets weird. Think pipes made of flesh and snow made of asbestos. Rivers made of blood and pus and scorpions. That kind of weird.

Black Bull Krewe prides itself on how far down we’ve gone. We know what’s in the center, and we ain’t telling anyone else. It gives us power, and power means more gates to our name, more Mementos, more everything. And in order to take care of Harry I need everything I can get.

What? You want to know about me? Like, specifically?

I mean, alright, if you insist. I’ve never been what anyone can call well to do. Never knew my mom, and Dad did the best he could for us. My brother Harry was never mentally well, and because of him I always got left in the dust. I never acted out or tried anything, I couldn’t. Not where my brother was involved. I guess I always used to sit in graveyards when I’d get really upset. I found them calming, if you could believe it. Used to end up having conversations at nothing. Sometimes the nothing would talk back, and I didn’t even think much of it.

At least, I did till Dad died. We weren’t more than teenagers at the time and now it was on me to take care of Harry. I won’t lie, I slipped into a depression after that. It got harder and harder to get out of bed at all. I didn’t even know I died until the second something was telling me to get up, my brother was watching. Telling me please, it can help me get up. Well using my brother as a bargaining chip is gonna work every time, honestly. Got me right up. Sure enough, there he was. I watched him break right in front of me. I felt the air change around me. Kind of became dream-like, if you could believe it. I think he turned into something just like I did that night. Took a while to get him to trust me again.

Wasn’t long after that that Black Bull found me. They gave me a second family, just abouts. Thanks to them I got enough support to get help for my brother and start going back to school. I always wanted to do architecture, you see. It’s a passion of mine. I got my first real job last week! Some rich guy is opening up a new branch of a publishing company and asked me to design the building!

Right. You want me to talk more about Sunshine, right?

Sunshine was a girl we got told about by a krewe in Seattle. Really she called herself Midnight. It was Sarah that came up with Sunshine, I guess to be ironic or something. Anyway she had a problem on her hands, and Roch, that’s our krewe’s leader, thought he could solve it, both for glory for all of us and just to say he did. All of us who signed up to get this girl down there were aware of the danger, of course. But I had to admit, the draw of being the first ones to make it all the way down was exciting.

It wasn’t easy. A couple times, we almost died. Let alone her. None of us knew the fourth river would do what it did to her, and things became even more dire. At some point, it stopped being about the glory. We grew fond of her and her little parakeet buddy from Seattle. We wanted to see her succeed no matter the stakes. And let me tell you, getting her down to the center to talk to that snake god thing was probably the most gratifying thing I could have ever done with my life.

After we sent her home, a bunch of us started finding out new, weird powers. Things we’d never even seen before. All of a sudden I knew how to poison people with a touch if I really focused in, and I could make people really sick if I wanted. A couple of us even found new ways to manifest the keys we had. The one I saw the most was weird powers of binding. Wasn’t just Black Bull that started talking about it; a whole bunch of others started talking about it too. According to the oldest of us Sin-Eaters, these powers have always existed, but the power to manifest them used to be very rare. They started becoming more common. I don’t know if it was us reaching the center of the Underworld, or some kind of cosmic shift, and maybe I never will.

And things have been shifting cosmically. I recently left Texas to pursue my career. Took Harry with me. Moved up north along the Mississippi. Once I got up where I was going, I decided that I could do the underworld dive again, at least to the first river. Well I never thought I’d see the day things other than Bound started messing around in there, but I saw a pack of werewolves that told me this was their rite of passage. I’d never seen a werewolf other than the fuzzy little shit Sunshine brought with her when she came to Black Bull with her problem.

And speaking of Sunshine, turns out the guy I’m working for is her brother in law via her neurotic little girlfriend. The fuzzy little shit married the guy! It’s like this city is one big crossroads, when you think about it. Like the inverse of what Sunshine told me about Seattle. She called Seattle a hellmouth. Constantly in turmoil from vampire attacks and… evil werewolves or something. Well according to the guy I’m working for, she and her whole family just moved right on down here after Fuzzy almost died because of a baby. I don’t have context to that, but. Hate to see her down in the underworld as a ghost.

So, I guess that’s my story. There’s not really much to it. The underworld is something you just really have to see for yourself, to be completely honest. Just describing it isn’t enough.