AUTHOR'S NOTE AND A WARNING TO READERS: A stand-alone story set within the shared universe of the City of Scum. It features some rather unpleasant characters and situations, so be warned. Read the tags ahead of time if you are squeamish.
Special thanks to
StillStunned
for being the original creator and creative force behind the shared setting, for beta-reading this story for me, and for being my friend.
It is a work of fiction, and all of the characters in the story are above the age of eighteen.
All of my work - including this one - is copyrighted. © Devinter.
--- SYLLVASSTER'S SEWER SECT ---
Bellanore's first month in the City had not been without its perils. The young lass had expected no less, but found herself ill prepared for the unwritten rules of the streets. She had arrived wide-eyed and half-smiling, her skirts still bearing the scent of her mother's hearth. That scent was long since replaced by ash and rot.
Soot and sin - each building much like a tomb, housing multiple bodies - technically alive, but spiritually dead. Grey stonework wept with grime; shattered windows stared like hollow eyes at those that scurried below. Smoke curled endlessly from chimneys that never ceased burning, as if the City was trying to purge itself - and failing. The streets stank of boiled cabbage, dung, and the iron tang of blood. Each unremarkable landmark was seemingly claimed by some gang or other. The cacophony of screams and steam engines never ceasing, playing the dreadful notes of a city long since given over to decay. At night, when the ghouls came out, the City groaned like a wounded beast - and those caught by the wretched fiends would pray for a swift death.
Yet the City was home to those with no other place to go. Those who could not stand the thought of returning home empty-handed. People like herself. And so she stayed.
Some insisted it was the 'greatest city ever built' - a machine running on blood and foolishness; the beating heart of an empire long since corrupted, bitten by greed and plagued with immorality. Governed by crime lords and crooked politicians, ruled with brute force and coin, and all manners of alchemical concoctions promising a tiny glimmer of sunshine in exchange for your soul. Hope came in glass vials and greasy palms, and it was never free. But there was ample opportunity for those with the right connections and the wrong morals.
For just a few copper coins, you could purchase just enough Dreamer's Drought to ensure a good night's sleep, if you were not too concerned with waking up again the next morning. Add a silver noble or two, and you might score just enough crushed Paprunika to speak to imaginary friends conjured from your fevered mind, though a heavy nosebleed would inevitably follow. It was said those who took too much began to see things that were not quite imaginary at all.
Bellanore's parents had always insisted she was a clever girl. Bright as a silver needle, her mother used to say, and twice as sharp. So how hard could it be to swindle a couple of drunkards and druggies? Lift a pocket here and there? And with her charms, she was confident she could avoid having to sleep outside when night fell and the ghouls came out to feed.
She believed herself a fox among chickens. In truth, she was meat in the slaughterhouse.
That was all before her arrival, though. Her confidence had waned. Her throat now scratched from breathing in smoke and dust, and she had been the one swindled more oft than not. Her first lesson came swift: a smile could earn you an opportunity, but it could also cost you a tooth. The meagre bit of coin she'd managed to scrounge had proven insufficient, and if they were not quickly spent, some thief would soon find them in their purse instead of hers. She had been bruised and battered more than once, and most of her plans and schemes seemed to be side-tracked by how empty her stomach felt. Her belly had become a second heartbeat - loud, insistent, and impossible to ignore. Barely a day had gone by where she wasn't on the verge of begging for something to eat.
Still, she held fast to the belief that tomorrow might bring her the luck she was owed. That someone - anyone of importance - might be fool enough to fall for her lies, and present her thieving fingers with riches beyond compare. Always looking for a shortcut, Bellanore's naive outlooks was both a strength and a weakness, for at least she refused to surrender. Refused to accept her place at the bottom of the food chain.
As she walked down the cobbled streets, a scarf around her mouth and nose to protect herself from the acrid air, and a hood pulled up so she could better conceal her unwashed hair, Bellanore encountered something she had not come to expect from the city. A tune, haunting yet beautiful, echoing through the quieter backstreets. It slithered through the air like perfume, delicate yet persistent, and impossible to ignore in a place that otherwise stunk like Badger's Breath.
She stopped in her tracks, listening, trying to discern the source of the music that caused such emotion within her. This was no tavern song nor even the lively ballad played by musicians for meagre tips at street corners. No, this was.. Artistic. Inspiring, even. Gentle strings, strummed carefully by plucking fingertips, meandering amongst the dissonant sounds of violence. It struck her in a place she didn't often feel anymore - just beneath her ribs, where that fussy feeling used to live. And despite herself, her lips parted in a faint smile.
Curiosity got the better of her. Forcing herself to be more inconspicuous as she trawled through each narrow alleyway, she hunted for the source of the sound. Following the echoes through each laneway, snaking around stinking gutters, Bellanore drew ever closer, her heartbeat matching the rhythm of the ghostly chords. Cockroaches scattered at her approach. Somewhere behind her, a child sobbed. Neither distracted her.
Finally reaching an alleyway - shadowy and uninviting - between two tall, stone buildings. A trap? It was likely - everything in the City was a trap.
But the music beckoned her inside nonetheless; that gorgeous, ghostly melody pulling her forward like a rope around her wrist. The lass stepped tentatively into the dimly lit alley and squinted her eyes.
There, on a crate of Blaggard's Brandy, sat a man in muddied boots so high up they passed his knees, their leather cracked and blotched with dried mud. In his hands he held a lute made out of the shell of a sand tortoise, hollowed out and polished to the colour of sun-baked bone. Its strings shimmered like spider's silk under the alley's sickly light. He wore four belts, each with a shiny clasp, of which no two were identical - and a dagger hung in plain view from each thigh. They swayed with each subtle motion like the warning coil of a serpent. His tattered coat matched his eyes; pale blue like frostbite on a corpse; though it was clear there was life beneath those cerulean depths. Indeed, he radiated a certain warmth in an otherwise cold and hollow city.
