Post by Farain on Mar 19, 2010 20:47:30 GMT -5
Arkon! Lignite of cities! For what else could you compare it to but a brownish lump of carbon that smells bad when you burn it? It was not a metropolis, but it had enough slums to be one. And currently the slums were discovering that most unpleasant of population controls: the plague.
Arkon was under the heavy hand of the gods, it seemed. In the past three months the population had been decimated, leaving behind only remnants of the once thri -- well, persisting city. And now the rats had eaten half the produce in the city. The duke's succession was rather muddled, what with everyone related to him dead or dying of the pulsing black boils, and the merchant district had but a few staunch survivors left.
John was not a merchant. He'd been born in the slums, raised by the slums, and now was cleaning up the slums, one cartload of mutilated bodies at a time. He didn't know why he did so. These days he didn't even know how he did so.
He was taking a break from hauling bodies to eat something. He was always hungry these days, but there was always something edible in the houses of the dead. He bit into a rat-bitten biscuit, stale from sitting out for a month, and crunched. His mind didn't work. He had given up on thinking.
Then there was a knock at the door.
Arkon was under the heavy hand of the gods, it seemed. In the past three months the population had been decimated, leaving behind only remnants of the once thri -- well, persisting city. And now the rats had eaten half the produce in the city. The duke's succession was rather muddled, what with everyone related to him dead or dying of the pulsing black boils, and the merchant district had but a few staunch survivors left.
John was not a merchant. He'd been born in the slums, raised by the slums, and now was cleaning up the slums, one cartload of mutilated bodies at a time. He didn't know why he did so. These days he didn't even know how he did so.
He was taking a break from hauling bodies to eat something. He was always hungry these days, but there was always something edible in the houses of the dead. He bit into a rat-bitten biscuit, stale from sitting out for a month, and crunched. His mind didn't work. He had given up on thinking.
Then there was a knock at the door.
