The darkness came for the fourth time. The black mists sputtered about, wildly, consuming segments of the city with the cyclical humming of the wind. It seemed almost that when the mist receded, as it so often seemed to, that much of the city had changed. The people and their faces shifted; where once a mother and her three children may have lain, the beasts of Nagash would come to her home within the field of black and split them apart. No one seemed to die, though . . . they would just change; a child one day would become a child marred by war, with a sword and shield in his hands. And then the next, a sailor, a singer, a boy with an innocent crush - and the crush would change. The child would sometimes almost die, but then the black would come, and his suffering would end for the night. He would be there again, on the morrow, alive.
What seemed strange to Alistair was that in this city - the one that he only seemed to meet at night, somewhat lucid and somewhat aware - he was one of the few who seemed to look upon the others and know. That it was false. That something was wrong with these images, with the black mist descending, with the beasts of Nagash and the craven mothers and fathers who always seemed to let their responsibilities fall and their burdens pass on. Though Alistair didn't quite truly know, he had grasped; this was a city of nightmares. And the people changed, always changed, disappearing and shuffling through... except for the onlookers. And who were they? The Magi.
He had always lived in this city in the night. Mostly... in a hospice, across the room from the strange man with the hedge cutter, and the carving knife. Sometimes face-to-face with the demon that had done such harm to Damien, his dearest friend. Somewhere along the line, those images had gone awry, and that shadow twisted into nothingness. And there he was; free, roaming the black corridors of Nagareen, weaving through alleyways and watching men murder their wives through the exaggerated golden lights that gleamed through their curtains... or equally watching wives throw their husbands from those same sills.
Everything about this place was terror. And every apparition that was not human, that was born and bled from the blackness of this place, appeared to linger at his back and lurch whensoever he did not dare to look.
Alistair was dressed in a black trench coat, with cold mists of air spewing from his lips each time he attempted a breath. The city was cold - it always had been. Alistair often searched for the good traits.
"Kin' Mallard bit the dust, she tol' ya?" a man whispered, in the city's grimy accent. That was another thing - everyone was of poor breeding, and insecure speech.
"Nay, nun' tol' me that," the woman he was speaking to replied.
"Tha' cook at Brinditch say his son kill'im. Long live the Kin', right?" he laughed. Long live the King.
The mist began to fall, lower and lower. The next round of people were about to disappear, and a new batch was to come in. He could see the beasts from within the clouds, and could hear their yawning, and gnawing for the flesh they all relentlessly sought to consume. Alistair knew that it was time to go inside - his flesh was, above all, most desirable. So, he stepped to the entrance of a shanty place that laid in the center of this alley-corridor, and parted the sliding wooden door, shutting it behind him. It was something of a bar, but with only a few seats, and a cramped room only a few meters wide in each direction. The bartender was seemingly a golem, or some other metallic animate beast. No one appeared to be lucid, like they were all stuck dumb, watching their fantasies unfold. The bad ones, at that.
That was almost everywhere, though. Above all, Nagareen was lonely, and these mold-covered bars even moreso. He was surrounded by the warmth of human proximity, but all of his peers were too blind to others. He took a drink - one that looked and tasted like blood and iron - and sipped somberly, lonesome. And then he waited, for his own mist to come. For this night to end.
