Cold boots had clicked softly against the wornhewn stones, echoing softly against catacomb walls. The first moment I could hear him. At the time, I’d thought him another feckless wanderer, soon to be gone. Like many others before. Thus, I did not even approach. In fact, I hid. Shuffled to some far off corner and waited for him to pass.
Red traipsed his way through, attempting a modicum of respect of what he clearly did not understand. Staring up at decrepit archways and crumbling stone walls, short corridors that were pockmark lined with beds and mortuary rests, coated in once-were-bodies dust. Marveling into the afterlife surrounding yet denied to him. Unsure if this was what was waiting or not.
For an hour, this wretch marched slow through the halls before coming to a room, massive and round, marked by a cistern in the center. A dying tree grew from the center. I’d long since given up on nursing it from the unhealth that’d befallen it. Lichen and moss coated the trunk and sparse soil surrounded by the jagged edge of a hole in the flagstone path hanging around it. Roots hung across the gallow stones beneath it into the stagnant filth below. What once was fertilizer now barren poison. Hardened shells of bubbling sap bled from the dried bark. Even from my hiding, I could feel the sorrow behind the red face of the intruder.
For a long moment, he lingered in that room. Taking in the sheer breadth and weight. But even he knew he must move on. For now. Finding his way across the room, noting himself around the edge, flat gaze musing across the simple, crumbling brickwork. Eventually shuffling down another hall. Long mildewed wooden supports dressed the catacombs in a now-feeble attempt at maintenance.
And through it all, silence persisted.
The only sound interrupting the story being the slow, waning footfalls of the red masked intruder.
He told me at a later point how he’d felt the first time he’d come to these dusted edifices. How oppressive it felt just to exist within, among spirits he could not see, but felt the malice and sorrow and passions of each and every single one. How he needed nothing more in that moment than to run, but oh how his body betrayed him. Knowing better than his mind. And as much as I wanted him out of the closest thing we know as a home, I cannot help but feel a tad grateful for the slow, methodical footsteps his body forced into his frame, with the hindsight of how desperate his mind tried to override his basest instincts.
Another point of interest that I was given in the aftermath of our introductions, which I had not been privy to at the moment… By now, Red had noticed as he approached that door that he’d not heard or felt his patron in the slightest since he’d entered. Finding the feeling hollow rather than peaceful.
I knew every hall by the stone, even then. I knew where he was going, even in this ever-twisting labyrinth of serpent’s burrows. These halls that seem, against all better odds and effects, to know where waywards who wander in need to be. Even if they do not themselves.
Finally, after hours that felt akin to days, the Red found himself before a door in that derelict catacomb. Another slab of carefully manicured planks, too much in their nicety to be anything but leading in, or out, of this quiet horror.
