More contingencies

Before war had come to Opis, as the subjugated servants of Chaos seeded the planet at the behest of the Officio Assassinorum, one of those weapons had already been put into action in the foulness and filth of Khezal’s underbelly. Below the commoners, below the debt-prisoners and the madmen, seethed society’s lowest stratum that no right-thinking citizen of Opis would have the poor taste to mention. They writhed through the remnants of the city’s siege-filled past, in the burned shells of buildings now buried beneath the grand works of the Aristeia. They were human, but they were not, for when one emerged into the light its worm-like pallid skin and milky eyes were things of horror.
These were the crouched rats, who crawled on their bellies through the buried sections of Khezal, which had been slums and charnel grounds before they had been bombed or burned and crushed beneath the Aristeia’s new city. Perhaps the crouched rats had always been there – perhaps they found themselves there after fleeing into the underworld or sinking so low they could not even scrape a sleeping place in a doorway or alley. No one acknowledged they existed, so no one cared.
Legienstrasse descended into their world, where the crouched rats gnawed on their dead for food. She read their marks, cut into the skin of corpses or burned into the walls of collapsed buildings, and learned their territories and pathways. When she saw them, she did not flee in terror or try to kill them. Eventually, they stopped fleeing from her and let her observe them, even as they clawed one another to death over breeding rights and left body parts to make boundaries.
Then she spoke to them. She had learned their language, a handful of growls and yelps that covered all the subjects needed for their short existence.
She said that they were human. That they were just as human as anyone who walked the distant streets of Khezal, who resided in the spires and palaces which they did not, at first, believe could exist. This city was as much theirs as anyone’s. This city deserved to have done to it, what it had done to the crouched rats.
Many did not believe her. Many thought she was a god. It did not matter what they thought. Already they had served their purpose, and been primed to fall just how Legienstrasse needed when the time came.

K-Day +18 Days