The Man

You are here. This is where they said he was.

This place is sullen. Sunken. The buildings hang heavy into the bog, weighed down by the damp atmosphere and the crawl of vines. Pathways of raised, carefully treated wood wind between homes. It’s hardly a town, more akin to a cluster of irregularly placed homes, though the infrastructure is all the more impressive for the small number of people who maintain it. There is at least a place for travelers to gather and to sleep, the core of the maze of wooden walkways; a small tavern, with an inn suitable for four separate guests up top. It is slightly less dreary than its surroundings, festooned with the sum total of the entire town’s joy. It’s almost cute, the way the town has decided to drape it in colors and banners and lights, and even outfit it with stained glass to bring some color to the pale morning hazes and dappled bog moonlight.

You step into the tavern, and few are there. It is late at night, after all. Very nearly midnight. The witch said he would be here.

Your mask glints in the warm attendance of the lanterns in the room, kept dutifully lit by the man who greets you at the bar. A Khesil, an odd sight in this part of Woodveil, but not an unwelcome one. He smiles at you as you take your seat awkwardly, folding your hands on the table in front of you.

“A lantern bearer…? What brings you here?” he asks, his tone polite and curious.

“Just passing through,” you say. “Looking for a place to sleep.” You spy a sign on the wall, and dig through your robes, sliding two gold coins across the table.

“Oh! Well, it’s always an honor to have a Bearer in town. Certainly makes us feel a little safer; we can never have too many lanterns out here.” He offers you a cute little wink and scoops up your gold, exchanging it for a little key. “Here you go. First door coming up the stairs.”

“Thank you,” you say. Your words are leadened by the awareness of what’s to come. You don’t even know what you’re expecting, but command mentioned a strange man passing through towns and the rains following him. You’ll just have to be careful.

Without another word, you slink off of your seat and upstairs, feeling a little bad at how curt you were. You head upstairs, glad to have gotten here before he did.

…

You awaken.

It is still night time. The stained glass shimmers only slightly. There is shouting outside.

You scramble out of your bed, scooping your mask and gun off of the table and scurrying down the stairs. Your mask is on as you hit the bottom step, and your gun is tightly in hand. You only share a quick glance with the fellow behind the bar, who seems to be looking for something, before you’re on your way out.

“Wait—” he calls out.

You are out the door, and the moment you are, you feel something heavy strike your back.

…

You can’t move. Things look odd.

There is no light. The lanterns glow, but from and into nothing. The moonlight ripples off of the marsh water, whose shimmer outlines the negative space of the rest of the world. The trees, the homes, are tall and black and vacant.

At the other end of the marsh is a silhouette perched atop a horse. Seven silhouettes atop seven horses. But the others are vacant, aligned around the one in the center, hooded and robed empty things. He is not so vacant. A man, curly hair outlined by the dim light. His eyes shine white like floodlights in the night, catching you in their burning light.

Your heart beats, slow and weak. Thhm. Thhm. Thhm. The only moving thing in the whole world, for this moment.

Then, you notice it. Pitch drops in the scenery, perfect little droplets of negative space against water. You feel something inside of you break in two, like a crack sprawling across the delicate porcelain of your mind.

All at once, you are able to move again, only as the urge to vomit consumes you. You double over, dropping your gun onto the path below and barely catching yourself. Your insides squirm like unfamiliar things in the empty space of your empty body. Your empty head suddenly swells with strange sound, and your empty hands clutch for solid ground. You look up again, and the man is gone. The Ichor rain slams heavily on the wood like war drums, on your back like stones. It’s so bright. There are homes on fire that steadily crawls along the wooden paths. Shadows lurch out of the flames, people stretched into horrid shapes. You witness one of them coming down the path at you, and you try to raise your gun to meet it, but as its storming feet become audible behind the thunder of the rain you are already in the bog below.

You hear a loud report above, like a blunderbuss cracking through the smothering noise for the briefest moment, and see something splatter and ripple on the surface of the water above before something else lands heavily and gracelessly into it with you. You pass out.

…

You thought you drowned.

Your mask breaches the stillness of the bog, your eyes opening wide and startled beneath it. You try to breathe, but the parts that usually do that just aren’t there. You flail in the water, and reach for the walkway you’d fallen off of the previous night, but there’s nothing to grab but the ashen stump of wood left in the water to which you now cling.

The sunlight is harsh in your face. Harsh, too, is the stench of ash and… a smell, electric and metallic, like ozone. You look around, and find that there are only remains of the town you had rode into last night, patches of ash and scattered remnants floating among the algae. It is hard to think. The sunlight is so harsh. Why does it burn so much? You try to pull yourself up out of the water a bit, and pull your glove off.

Your hand boils in the sunlight, black bubbles briefly forming on its equally black surface, and you quickly pull the glove back on, seething through your teeth. Oh. You can breathe again. What is happening?

There are things hiding among the trees, you notice them now as you look about. Heaving, tall forms with long limbs folded perfectly into the shade as tightly as they can be.

You need to leave. You do. You quietly swim through the remains of the town, seeking the sunlight if only for the guarantee that it does not harbor those things. You remember now. They are Interstitials. How didn’t you remember that? You spent years studying them. They don’t look at you like you remember, though.

Wait.

Are you one of them now?