Blood.
It keeps us warm, keeps going. It's what makes you hard, what makes you other than dead. Of course it's her blood.
A young girl's blood swept through the streams that grew with each tiny dagger of rain that stabbed into the barren ground beneath us. She could not have been more than ten, but her as her flesh, wet and cold, frozen in a perpetual glare toward the night sky, her life source warmed this narrow street buried within the city beyond the Palace of the Kahn.
With just a gentle touch, that warmth coated my fingers, small, delicate, but curious and traversed the jagged edge of her jaw, removed by a strong, blunt weapon. Her tongue slack and smooth, funneled water into the cavity of her mind and there in the eternal reaches of humanity did my journey end, and my fingers curled and recoiled.
This was not a moment of horror, but exploration. If curiosity killed the cat, then strike me where I stand, wet and cold beneath this oppressive rain. The blood did not affect me as much as brutal force that mashed the mortal coil of life and death into a tangent of endless nothingness that has become her sudden existence. Once a girl, now I can only know her as 'the body'.
Someone murdered the body. Someone strong, or someone with a powerful weapon. This is not uncommon in Outworld to see bodies in the streets, for I have seen several piled up and taken from the Coliseum, but it is a rare sight indeed to see this.
Who would do such a thing?
Perhaps the promise of death in a careless moment as I had dared the Elder Gods to curse me for my curiosity had come to fruition? The wet slap of feet on mud and stone barely broke through the barrier of rain that caged me like a helpless slave. It was only a second or less that I had to scurry like a rat back into the shadow of the alley I had crawled out of.
A large gnarled shadow crept forth into the street. It cared not for any eye set upon it, but I dared not show mine. It was as bony as it was big, it's limbs twisted and writhed around itself. As it neared the body, what little light allowed me to see this creature revealed that it was what the merchants called 'The Kollector'. One of those Naknada creatures that littered Outworld like the rodents that feasted on the scraps of its cities.
This one, its kind were known to travel from city to city, town to town, shrine to hovel and collect tributes, taxes, and sometimes heads for the Kahn. This one, however, was shrouded in tattered black cloth. It would be too little cloth to call a robe, and too much to call a hood. It draped over it's head so those red goblin eyes shined like the blood under a gleam of moonlight.
This Naknada unfurled it's two largest arms like a shokan, but not as muscular as Goro, nor as smooth as Sheeva, and reached for the little body like it were a tribute to collect.
It's eyes scanned the darkness, the light, and the cracks between time and space in this small street that lead down a winding road barely connected to the main pathways to the Coliseum. It was a street only urchins knew best, where the crumbs would be dropped by the carrion crows, and the bodies that were taken from the Coliseum would be carried down, to keep off of the main streets. No one lived here that wanted to.
This is where I lived, and where I saw everything.
What I did not see was the rain halted and bent over space like it had found an object it could not pass through in the very air around it that settled like a foul mist before the creature known as Kollector.
"Leave nothing behind." The strange shape of water spoke.
"No one will think twice about the blood spilled. It is stained in it every night because of the Kahn." Kollector shared words with the rain until a scaly figure formed before him.
It was like magic this strange reptilian beast melted into being. Rain dripped down its ragged leather and cloth. Clothing dark enough to hide in the night, without knowing it was there, I may not have even seen this reptile.
The two shared threats, words that promised death from a higher power they both seemed to follow, but the name was too foreign to me to understand. It seemed familiar, but so much goes on in the life of a street urchin that political and cultural affairs in Outworld do not linger in my mind, only the thoughts of where the next crumb of bread, or dead rat will be.
Why was a little girl collected by two strange creatures in the dead of night in the epicenter of the Kahn's own city beyond the palace? Why did I witness this, and do I follow them?
The answer to the last question seemed obvious to me, and it was a glaring 'yes.' This want not something an urchin sees often and may be far more fruitful than any ordinary crumb.
As soon as the reptilian beast faded back into the ambience of the city, Kollector hoisted the little girl up to its chest and then began to fold her as best it could without breaking the body already tarnished by another's brutality. As he hunched and marched into the night step by step, eyes red and shrouded, but ever vigilante, I kept to the alleys, the shadows, and followed the stream of blood.