I never should have been. ~ Fritz

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GreyMoth
Posts: 38
Joined: Sat Jun 27, 2020 2:39 pm

Posted by GreyMoth »


The jarring impact of a filthy cobblestone street met Fritz's palms. The flash of a intrusive, vividly colorful portal suffocating as abruptly as it had come. The weight of his robes to the cult of the Path of Inspiration draping around his arms feeling, just for a moment, as if they weighed a hundred pounds in threads across skinny arms and a mess of rust colored hair matted in sweat and traces of blood from a headwound.

He had done it. He had escaped, at last. Gone were the cries of the Inspired Herald calling for Fritz to halt. Gone were the sconces in the twisting halls of the Chosen. The air where he was now lacked the sweet, saturated, dense and choking smell of incense to ease meditation. Fritz was in a cold puddle. The air turned cold, dank, reeking of far away furnaces. Arms trembling as his long limbs twisted about to find purchase on the ground and lift his immense and fear riddled gaze onto the Hive. Widening further as for the first time, Fritz saw creatures inhuman.

Their gazes were far from friendly. Just as disgusted with the clueless Primer as the Inspired had been with Fritz's indignation of his captivity and refusal to adhere to doctrine. But this was disgust he could deal with in his state, climbing on shaking legs and with vertigo filling every fold in his brain. The strike of a sling stone had left its mark, nothing he wouldn't survive but enough to make every single source of light too intense to take in his state. Gathering the entirety of nothing in his possession and taking to the streets in a black robe embroidered in symbology that evoked nothing around him. Nothing at all. Not the reverent, 'non' glances of a mass that understood its place beneath the il-atlas. There were no Quori monoliths here, penetrating the dreams of commoners. None of the 'comrade' smiles, saccharine at the sight of Fritz the Meek wandering past from yet another failure of adapting to life forced on him. Nothing at all. It took all of ten houses to not even be noticed again, his sandals drenched to the toes and the startling gold patterns woven into his black robe nearly muted by the ash falling from the sky.

He didn't have it in him to worry. He didn't have it in him to beg for help. No one at all seemed to take notice of anyone else. Humans walked by great creatures shaped as spiders, or snake tailed things where should have been legs. A hulking creature with a jaw thrust forward like early man, drool dribbling from his bottom lip. No one panicked, no one did anything. Fritz read the room and kept his mouth shut, before he ousted himself anymore an outsider than his introduction had already.

Freedom was much like Fritz had always known it would be. There was no hands on his back to congratulate him and there was certainly no recognition of what he had done, or what he had fled, or even a hand to pick him up as vertigo turned his empty stomach to wretch against the ground again and again.

A disdainful remark of, "Hold your bub, ya sod." from a passer by and some spit that flew errantly off course nearby.

And Fritz was 'alright' with this. Setting his jaw and panting through his teeth, Fritz was alright with picking himself up instead and wandering into the sprawling streets and alleyways to be left alone and recuperate. The portal never opened behind him again. Whatever fluke of the multiverse that had released him, saw fit to keep it that way.
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GreyMoth
Posts: 38
Joined: Sat Jun 27, 2020 2:39 pm

Posted by GreyMoth »


It hadn't taken Fritz long to find a burned out home to lay low within. Crawling through its entrance beneath the swept debris of some family's ruined life, through dust and filth and ash, to find a worn and molded mattress had, to a extent, survived the fire. He didn't bother standing afterwards as the tight confines of the ghetto made such a thing irrelevant. A pot for the bowels, a mattress, and all was fine enough. The lack of need for food created a far more simplistic set of needs for the elan, sprawling back with a still throbbing head to the light of the outside world cast from a hole in the roof.

The realization that struck Fritz took minutes to dawn upon him. Meditation, to staunch the bleeding wound to his head, consumed what faculties weren't a blurred and distressed mess. But there was no light beyond that hole in the ceiling. There wasn't anything at all. No starts, no moon, no sun. Fritz's morbid curiosity encouraging him to angle and pivot amidst the old straw bedding, to glimpse into a expanse that seemed to be... almost a infinite nothing. Save for that arch, distant and far away. The pieces clicked.

And Fritz began to dry heave again. How was it possible? How did it work?

"... how is anything, anything, really?"

It worked. It would be enough. It would be enough until he came out of meditation. There was far far too much to unpack, now, pulling his sandals now caked in the miserable drek that polluted the lanes where no one walked. At least, no one walked with a intent of being looked on. The ruined home's splinters like twigs to a bird's nest. With just enough 'soft things' shoved below him, Fritz's breath stabilized to a steady rhythm. The heart beat that had previously filled his ears to the point of migraine slowing, slowing, slowing.

Fritz stared off into the sky. Every bit as vulnerable and naked as the black infinite expanse. It held no secrets. It swallowed everything. Unblinking and unflinching, Fritz through his mind into that same void. He became empty and vulnerable. And he cried.
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