"Take it out," Grylock coughed, staring blankly at the sheath of his poisonheart. "Find a way te kill the fucker. I'm tired of gods-be-damned hide and seek."
"Agreed," said Logan.
"Also agreed," said Celine.
"How?" Jeffrey looked out a window. "How the hells do you destroy something of that size with our resources? I think the Dauphine would have trouble with the Nothing, let alone five weary city rats."
I nodded. "I'm with Jeffrey. It hasn't found us yet. We keep ahead of it well enough. It doesn't even know we're here. Why not continue lookin' for Iko and stay out of its way?"
Reasons. Many reasons.
We've been arguing a lot lately. Morale is piss-poor. I'm feeling impatient, Jeffrey and Logan are understandably nervous, and Grylock looks worse with each new day. Only Celine doesn't seem to mind the situation, because, y'know, she's Celine. Celine is fucked up in the head, pardon my saying so.
The Nothing is one of our few topics of conversation. It continues to rumble through Below a five-or-six hour intervals before powering down, and whenever the damned thing lumbers to life I swear it somehow gets on our trail. Any cautious ground we make away from the fucker is completely undone when it begins to travel, as it's seemingly a lot faster than we are. That, or...
Er...
Or this city has no end. And we've been walking in circles this whole time. There's reason to believe that's true.
Sick of running constantly, we decided to set out for the closest wall. Below consists of an enormous cavern, one cavern, and though you can't see the walls in the distance they must exist. So we picked a direction - away from the Nothing, of course - and started walking. Considering how much we've been hiding of late, we should have reached the cavern's edge by now.
But we haven't. Below doesn't seem to end. No wonder Grylock lost track of his norths and souths and easts and wests, if that's the case. Navigating down here is apparently a hopeless cause. Which may mean... we're trapped.
Maybe Plato was the lucky one, getting spirited off by the ghost rats. He's probably dead by now. He won't have to wander around this infinite fucking maze until he starves.
We haven't reached consensus on the Nothing as yet. When we aren't running from the thing we're sitting in moody silences, tending to Grylock's increasing needs, fretting over our water supply, and staring blankly at one another. Any hope of getting out of here seems to be dying fast.
Logan and Celine want to go after the Nothing. It appears to be a machine, they argue, and machines can be broken. I'm pretty certain taking it on would be suicidal, so I've forbidden them from doing any such thing. We'll see if they bother to listen to me.
Grylock smells sick. When humans can smell sickness, there's something very wrong. We need to get him the hell out of here before he deteriorates any further. Without an exit, though...
Fuck.
Sincerely,
Dragomir the Wanderer
No comments:
Post a Comment