In the not so far off distance a bell tolled.
Time
Time is a concept lost on Fox. He could tell when the sun was shining and when the stars shimmered in the night sky, but now neither of those could be seen past the dark clouds that covered the skies now. As he continued to walk forward down the muddy road he could only guess the time. To him, every step was like the tick of the clock. A symbolence of the passage of time. Each step a tick closer to the end.
Thirteen tolls the bell rung.
Fox brushed back his hair. It was getting long. Getting in his eyes and blocking his vision. Something he didn’t like. Perhaps he should trim it he thought.
The road continued on.
Not that there was any way for him to trim it. The only sharp item he had on him was his sword and it wasn’t particularly sharp by any means. Perhaps the town in the distance had a barber. That’s what they were known as. He wasn’t yet use to his new body.
How long had he been on the road from that first day? The day he changed. The day the Darkwood Witch cursed him. How much farther did he have to walk in search of awnsers without questions?
He passed by a ruined cart in the ditch along the side of the road. It looked months old. The rot had already taken grasp of the wood and possibly even the driver.
Rot.
The land smelled of it. The fields he passed were brown with death. Nothing grew and anything that once had was long gone. Rot had ravages these lands barren, any old fool could see that.
After a time he could not say. He finally reached the town of the bell. He stood at the foot of the giant wooden doors that prevented entrance into the parimeters. Then he arched his neck to look up at the top of the walls. No guards. Vines grew up them like the figures of nature’s past creeping up to swallow man’s last mistake. Taking hold of those fears the inhabitant had of the woods beyond. To think these vast walls once gave protection and security to those behind them, and now they crumble like a rotting cage to hold in the stench of death.
No longer had he waited before scaling up the vines and climbing over those decrepid walls before the rot crept into his skin. Yet inside these walls was no better that the darkness on the outside.
From the distant alleys he heard the coughing and weezing of the sick and dying. Bodies, cold and rigid sit amoungst the walls of buildings or lay is the wet dark streets. He wandered on, covering his mouth with a cloth, hoping that the stench wouldn’t seep into him. Fox’s spine tingled and he stood up straight. Through the city dust he saw two men and a cart pushed along. Poking and prodding at the bodies, some groaning, some did nothing.
They were scavaging. Boots and gold teeth, rings and other fanciful jewelry. Even eyes that were good enough were removed, from both the living and the dead. As the men got closer he could see that they themselves were not much better off than the sick around them. Their skin in bloodied bandages, boils popped and oozed sickly pus. They wore bells all over their persons, as if the dinging would scare away the crows that feasted on their flesh.
Fox decided he did not want to chat with the desperate or the dead so he quickly stepped down another alley only to be met with a similar sight.
The little bells jingled.
Fox quickly climbed. He was a good climber and the walls, with all their scaffolding, balconies, and ropes were easy to climb, so it wasn’t long before he was standing above the streets of the dead on cracking shingle rooftops.
Then it made sense.
In the distance he could see the slight and welcoming smoke of the inner city, behind yet another wall of course. Luckily for him it showed much promise of life.
He chuckled ironicly.
The desperate townfolk huddled closer and closer together behind walls of their own making. Hding from the death that surrounds them. By doing this they have only ensured the rot more of their trapped flesh. No hope of escaping it now.
He was tired and cold and smoke ment a fire, and fire ment warmth.
It wasn’t all too long before Fox made his way to the inner walls. Jumping and leaping from rooftop to rooftop. At one point a shingle had slid out from under him making him lose his footing and their was a precarious moment where the weight of his body threatened to plummet to the dark hard stone streets below. Luckily for him he was able to regain his composure and continue on.
It wasn’t until he was almost to the walls that he saw the guards. He quickly ducked behind a cold smoke stack and watched them. One every one hundred feet or so stood posted to the wall. Some paced, others looked out onto the quiet streets beyond. One of them yawned and began carving a block of wood in his hands.
So he waited.
Darkness began to set in and Fox sat still till he could barely breathe through the stench of the rotting city, yet he willed himself to stay put. The guard nearest to him had dark bags under his eyes and looked almost as bad as those he saw down below. It wasn’t long before he was leaning on his bow in such a manner, his head rocking precariously back in forth in and out of sleep, that allowed fox to make the jump from the rooftop to the wall and slip past him unnoticed.
Traveling by rooftop is dangerous. Traveling by rooftop by night is even more so. A single misplaced step and he could fall to his untimely death.
ns 15.158.61.8da2
