It was the wrong night for corpses.
Sythius didn’t sound like he was breathing, so much as the air around him was using his body as a conduit for raw fury. His wide, overly-bright eyes flitted in every direction, seemingly at once, but he didn’t have the countenance of someone you would normally find in a dark alley halfway through Deep Watch.
Everything about him conjured the image of a wild animal, and somehow the least of it came from the bear pelt he wore about his broad shoulders like a cloak. A heavy, hand-wrought spear sat innocently, strapped to his rough-hewn traveling pack. He’d killed the man with nothing more than his hands.
Sythius looked nervous; but he seemed far more frightened of the stone walls surrounding him on all sides than by the fact that he’d just committed murder.
“... Does the city frighten you?”
A lesser man would have flinched. A smarter man would have at least paid attention.
Sythius didn’t seem to hear a single word.
A second figure approached from the darkness, stepping into the moonlight to regard Sythius with something vaguely resembling pity. It was a young man, thin and wiry and too young for his eyes. Dressed as he was in patchwork pants and a coarse-woven shirt—he had shoes, but they were dusty and battered, like an old dog—the youth would have seemed unsightly, offensive even, to most of the people who lived in the city.
Standing next to Sythius, he seemed like the height of civilization.
When the youth stepped up next to Sythius and laid a hand on him, the giant finally regarded his new companion. He turned and tilted his head to the side, like a hunting hound who’s lost the scent. “City,” Sythius murmured, his voice just as thick and heavy as the rest of him.
The youth nodded. “Do you know where you are?”
The youth nodded. “Do you know where you are?”
Sythius squinted, then shook his shaggy head.
A grand, welcoming gesture. “Welcome to Moonguard. The White Wall of Phila.” Then a bow, low at the waist.
Sythius looked confused all over again.
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