Clip-clop… Clip-clop…
The sound echoed faintly through the mist. Horses. At first distant, then growing clearer...
Ren froze mid-step, instinctively lowering himself behind a collapsed cart. His pulse spiked.
'Horses? Not a creature, then… humans?'
He dared a glance through a gap in the wreckage. Shapes were emerging through the fog... dark silhouettes moving with purpose.
The faint jingle of harnesses, the grinding of wagon wheels, and muffled voices drifted closer.
Clatter… Creak…
A group of people arrived, cloaked in heavy leather coats that reached their knees, oiled and stained dark with use.
Strange masks covered their faces — elongated beaks of tarnished brass, tinted goggles fogged from within.
They looked like plague doctors from old stories.
Some carried lanterns that burned with a dim blue flame, casting cold light that seemed to push back the fog reluctantly. Others dragged large wooden carts on iron-rimmed wheels, their beds lined with stiff, white canvas sheets already blotched with rust-colored stains.
They weren't searching for survivors. They were collecting corpses.
Ren's throat went dry.
'No. If they find me standing, they'll ask questions. If they're burning the bodies or experimenting on them, I'm finished!'
He glanced at the nearby dead... still warm, some not yet stiff. A woman's hand lay palm-up, fingers curled like a frozen blossom.
A man's face was turned toward him, eyes milky and vacant, a trickle of black ichor drying at his temple. His mind raced.
'Think! Hide. Fast.'
He slipped between two fallen bodies and laid himself down among them, forcing his breathing to slow. The smell hit him like a wave — copper, rot, wet wool, and the sweet, cloying scent of smoke from distant fires.
'Damn it!'
He reached out, fingers brushing the gritty cobblestones, and smeared a streak of cold, half-dried blood across his neck and jaw. The grime dulled the unnatural pallor of his skin, blending him into the tableau of ruin.
'If they check… I can't flinch. I have to hide!'
He lay still. Absolutely still. A sharp pebble dug into his shoulder blade. The rough wool of a dead man's coat scratched his cheek.
Thump… thump…
His heartbeat felt deafening in his ears, a drumbeat of life in a field of silence.
Then — footsteps approached.
Heavy and deliberate, crushing fragments of broken pottery under thick-soled boots. A lantern's light washed over the scene, turning the swirling fog into a halo of pale blue, illuminating motes of ash dancing in the air.
"Another one here," a voice said — metallic and muffled behind the mask. "Still warm."
A pause. Ren sensed a shadow loom over him, blocking the faint light.
"Could be late-stage infection," another replied, tone cautious, clinical.
"The protocol says we bring them in for dissection. The Warden wants fresh samples for the vats."
Ren felt the faint pressure of gloved fingers, cold and stiff with dried fluid, press against the artery in his neck. He stopped breathing completely, willed his heart to slow, to be still.
Silence stretched, broken only by the distant caw of a carrion bird.
"Guess he's gone."
'Don't move,' Ren told himself. 'Become stone. Become earth...'
The second voice hesitated. "Wait. His skin's clean. No lesions and no sign of corruption."
"That doesn't matter," the first voice insisted, a hint of weary finality in its tone.
"Orders are to collect everyone within the perimeter. Living or dead. You know the penalty for deviation."
Ren's stomach twisted. 'So they do take the living too. For what? Vats? I thought they were kind of primitive but they're not?'
He heard a low murmur — disagreement, quickly stifled. The sound of shifting boots on gravel, the creak of leather straps as someone bent closer.
"Fine. But if he's alive, he'll wish he wasn't," someone muttered, the words barely audible.
'What?'
Clunk…
Cold metal touched his arm... a curved hook, its edge notched and dull, sliding under his shoulder to lift him. He let his limbs go utterly limp, a dead weight, rolling bonelessly as they hoisted his body onto the wagon. The impact jostled the other corpses; a lifeless arm flopped across his legs.
The rough, splintered wood scraped against his back through his thin shirt. He stared blankly upward, eyes cracked open just enough to glimpse the masks above him, the blank glass lenses, the beaks shadowed in the eerie blue light.
One mask turned toward him, and for a heart-stopping second, Ren was certain he'd been seen. But the gaze passed over him, indifferent.
'Alright,' he thought, forcing calm to seep into the cracks of his instinctive fear.
'This is a gamble. If they're human, I'll learn something. If they're not… then I'll die again.'
The wagon jolted violently as the horses were whipped into motion.
Clop… Clop… Creak…
The voices of the mask-wearers faded, replaced by the rhythmic, hypnotic sound of wheels over uneven stone. Ren's breathing stayed shallow, a thin whisper of air through parted lips. The cart swayed, a morbid cradle.
'Survive…'
His gaze flicked briefly to the side. Another body beside him, a young man with a mangled leg, twitched faintly.... a last synaptic firing, or perhaps a sign of lingering life.
The cart bounced, and the body settled, still. The fog swallowed everything beyond the wooden rails, leaving only grey oblivion.
And as the sound of the horses carried them away from the ruins, Ren lay among the dead, eyes half-lidded, heart cold and steady in his chest... pretending to be one of them.
...
The wagon rattled endlessly through the fog.
Clop… Clop… Creak…
Ren's body bounced and shuddered with each uneven turn of the wheels. The stench was a living thing in the cart... blood, decay, voided bowels, and something else, heavier and more putrid, like the inside of a slaughterhouse left to rot in the sun. It coated the back of his tongue.
He had stopped counting how many corpses were piled around him; their weight pressed down, flesh cold and yielding against his arm. A woman's hair, matted and stiff, tickled his ear.
Drip… Drip…
Somewhere behind his head, a corpse leaked dark, viscous fluid onto the planks, the sound slow and constant. The smell clawed at his throat, and he forced himself to breathe through his mouth.
'Don't gag,' he commanded himself, feeling bile rise. 'If I move, they'll notice. Just endure. Endure! Shit!'
The rhythmic sound of the horses became hypnotic, a lulling dirge. Time dissolved. Was it an hour? Three? The light never changed, only the density of the mist.
Slowly, the fog began to thin, giving way to something else: the distant, orange glow of torchlight refracted through moisture, the murmur of many voices behind walls, the heavy, definitive echo of large gates being unbarred.
Clang… Groooan…
He risked a half-open eye. Through a gap between the wagon's slats, a city loomed in the distance — or rather, what looked like one. Jagged walls of blackened stone, slick with moisture and lichen, rose like broken teeth into the mist.
Their tops were crowned with flickering lanterns housed in iron cages and rusted metal spikes tangled with barbed wire.
Towers stood crooked and uneven, silhouetted against the bruised sky, their architecture a chaotic mix of crumbling stone and bolted-on metal plates, like old bones forced upright and bound with iron.
'A fortress? No… too large...' he realized, watching the shapes shift past as the cart rolled closer.
As they approached a monstrous gate of banded iron and weathered oak, a sign came into view, mounted on chains — rusted, pitted, but faintly legible even through the grime and creeping moss:
CITADEL OF NAMARRA
Sanctuary Through Severity
He let the name and its grim motto sink in. The horses slowed, their clip-clop becoming a tired shuffle on the paved approach. Voices barked orders now, sharp and devoid of warmth. Chains rattled through pulleys, and with a final, shuddering lurch, the cart came to a halt.
Whip—snap! Clatter!
"Unload them! Quickly! The sun's almost gone!" a voice shouted, raw with authority.
Rough hands, sheathed in thick, soiled gloves, grabbed Ren's arm. He let his body hang like a sack of grain, head lolling, as they dragged him out. The sudden exposure to the cold, damp air of the courtyard almost made him gasp.
Around him, the sound of bodies hitting the ground filled the space... a sickening percussion of finality.
Thump. Thump. Thud.
He lay motionless as the masked workers began their grim sorting. One group, larger and stronger, dragged corpses by the ankles toward a yawning iron chute set into the courtyard wall.
Another, more deliberate group moved with lanterns and rods, checking pulses, prying open eyelids to shine light on the cornea.
The ground beneath him was slick, dark stains seeping like ink between the cracks of the cobblestones. The air here was different — not just fog, but smoke from nearby forges, the tang of chemicals, and underneath it all, a pervasive, sweet-sick odor of decay and antiseptic.
"Check this one," a man ordered, his boots stopping near Ren's head.
"He's still warm. Feels… weird."
Ren felt those cold, gloved fingers on his wrist again... the same mechanical search for life. He knew this was the fulcrum. If he stayed 'dead,' he'd be dragged to that chute and dropped into whatever lay below. His only chance was now. He had to be alive, but not too alive.
He let a single muscle in his forearm twitch faintly — a small, spasmodic movement, just enough to be felt through the glove.
"…Wait!" the examiner exclaimed, pulling his hand back. "This one—he's breathing! Faint, but he's breathing!"
The others paused in their tasks. A short, heavy silence descended, broken only by the distant clang of a hammer from a tower. Then, hurried footsteps surrounded him, boots scraping on stone.
"Still alive? Out here? Then he's contaminated for sure..."
Ren chose that moment to groan, a low, ragged sound from deep in his chest. He let his eyelids flutter open, then immediately winced and squeezed them shut as if blinded by the torchlight, turning his head away weakly.
"H—hold on…" he rasped, forcing his voice to sound cracked and dry, a leaf scraping on stone. "Don't kill me… please… I don't know what happened… the light…"
The masked figures exchanged quick, silent glances, their beak-masks tilting toward one another.
One of them, taller, with a red stripe daubed across the brow of his mask, knelt beside him. The blue flame of his lantern hissed softly, its light catching the countless scratches on his goggles.
"Name," the voice demanded, flat and toneless.
"Can you speak your name?"
Ren blinked slowly, acting dazed, his eyes struggling to focus. Behind the act, his thoughts were whetstones, sharpening.
'I can't tell them too much. Observe first. See what they do to survivors...'
"...I don't remember," he murmured, letting his voice trail off. "There was screaming… then pain in my head… and the fog… it was eating the light…" He coughed, a dry, hacking sound.
The man with the red stripe stood, muttering to another.
"Memory loss and disorientation. Common symptoms after direct exposure."
"Then he's infected," someone else replied flatly, a hand resting on the handle of a cudgel at their belt.
"Protocol's clear—send him to the quarantine pits. Let the alchemists decide if he's worth the powder."
Ren's pulse jumped. 'Pits? Alchemists? Damn it! Wrong answer!'
'Not good. If they isolate me, I won't learn anything. I'll die for real this time in some hole.'
He coughed again, more forcefully this time, curling in on himself slightly, clutching his chest where the old, knotted scar still throbbed with a phantom heat.
"Wait!" he gasped, the plea raw. "I can help! I'm not sick! Look! I have no wounds, no marks!"
With a show of weak desperation, he tore at the collar of his shirt, revealing only clean, unblemished skin and the faint, silvery line of the closed scar — a mark that looked old and healed, not fresh corruption.
The group hesitated. The leader tilted his head, the brass beak pointing down at Ren like a bird of prey considering a strange insect.
"No lesions… no black-crust around the eyes. That's unusual for someone who was in the Red Mist."
Another muttered, voice lower, "Could be a mutation stage...Hmm... Best to let the Warden decide."
Ren's eyes, wide with feigned fear, narrowed just a fraction beneath the cover of his trembling.
'Warden. So there's hierarchy here… and someone with enough authority to overrule protocol.'
He lowered his gaze, his trembling becoming more pronounced, a full-body shiver that was only half an act in the penetrating cold.
"Please…" he whispered, voice barely audible, threading it with a broken hope. "I just want to live. Whatever this place is… I'll do anything..."
The leader with the red stripe studied him for a long, silent moment. Ren could feel the weight of that unseen gaze. Finally, the man gestured sharply with a gloved hand.
"Fine. Take him inside. To the Receiving Hall. The Warden will see what's to be done with him. Bind his hands and do standard precaution."
Ren didn't resist as they hauled him to his feet. His legs buckled convincingly, and they had to support him. Rough cord was tied around his wrists, not cruelly tight, but firm enough. He kept his head down, feigning weakness and disorientation.
'Citadel of Namarra. Corpses collected like raw material. Masked handlers afraid of 'infection' "Alchemists and vats.' He stored each piece away as they half-dragged him toward a smaller, heavily fortified iron door set within the larger gate.
He glanced up once more at the looming, asymmetrical towers, at the caged lights that seemed to watch like malevolent eyes.
Somewhere high above, a bell tolled once, a deep, sonorous note that vibrated in his bones.
'If I want to survive,' he thought, the coldness in his chest spreading, a familiar and steadying frost, 'I'll need to understand the rules of this world.'
A faint, internal sigh, devoid of self-pity.
'Haahh… Too much work. But it's the only work left.'
Clank… Creak… SLAM!
The iron door shut behind them with finality, sealing him within the Citadel's damp, echoing, and shadow-cloaked stone belly.