Shadowlight
Prologue
"Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight!"
- William Shakespeare, Othello
The cable broke.
Because of the combined weight of two falling bodies, or the sudden stress on corroded, rusted filaments, or the intense heat from the inferno below—who knew? Or perhaps it was simply a serendipitous combination of all those things—with a chance slip of Fate's shears to help it along—that severed the fragile line. For whatever reason, it broke, sending the dead weight dangling on its end plummeting to the ground below, the concrete reaching up to finish the job that the fire had not quite managed to complete.
But in the end, neither prevailed. The unholy spark within the charred carcass was too strong—or too aberrant—to succumb to either impact or inferno, and the body fell to the ground, rolled into the shadow of the building, and lay still.
It was only moments past sunrise, and the denizens of the city were nowhere to be seen, no doubt sleeping off the decadence of the night before. The only possible witnesses had already fled the scene, stunned and shaken and believing themselves—erroneously—to be safe.
In the minutes after its fall, as the sun continued its slow ascent to full daylight, the body stirred, and a low, pain-wracked groan emanated from the blackened, smoking ruin. A hand—charred and near-skeletal from the devouring flames—reached out, groping a path to the rough stone of the structure. Sightless eyes streamed bloody tears that dried into brownish-black tracks as they rolled down scorched, overheated flesh. The hand found purchase on the rough, cracked frame of an ancient window set low in the wall.
Fumbling at first, but aided by an inhuman strength and an unwavering bent for survival—survival at any and all cost, for who knew what came after?—the ruined fingers found not glass, but bars. In this city, renowned for its greed and its passion, both leading to its rampant criminal activity, what else could be expected?
Groaning, the man—or beast, for he no longer looked even remotely human—fisted his hand around the metal and pulled the dead weight of his body nearer. Reaching out with his other hand—this one not quite so terribly burned—he grasped an adjacent bar and, grunting painfully from the exertion, tugged out and sideways. With a screech of corroded metal, the ancient bars gave way and ripped free of the crumbling mortar that held them. He removed two more and, flailing blindly at the circumference of the opening, judged it large enough.
Fisting his hand again, the man made short work of the thin glass pane that was the last barrier between himself and continued existence.
Grasping two of the remaining bars, he dragged his body over the warming concrete. He sensed the sun's continued rise, though its rays had not yet reached him. A moaning curse, in an ancient tongue, accompanied the rending pain as destroyed flesh scraped along rough ground, but he didn't cease his desperate struggle for the promised salvation that lay in the darkness below. A final pull and he dragged his frame to the opening—although he was not overly large, he was a tall man, and layered with enough lean muscle that it was a tight fit, made agonizing by the brutal claws of broken glass and twisted metal.
With a last frenzied burst of rapidly failing strength, he pulled himself through; a hoarse, grating roar of anguish issued up from somewhere within his broken, burned body as it fell through the opening into the blessed dark of the ancient cellar. Rolling feebly to a far corner, he huddled against a cool, moist rock wall, feeling the chill of the hard-packed earth seep soothingly into his devastated body. A low growl, almost animal in nature, vibrated deep in his throat. In some portion of his mind, the part untouched by the agony-induced madness, a realization formed of what his fight for survival had saved him for, and once again, for the hundredth—or thousandth—time in his endless existence, the impotent fury bubbled up from the doomed depths of his soul. Cracked, blistered lips opened and spewed forth a soundless litany of sacrilegious anguish.
Finally, as the sun reached its zenith, his strength failed him, and he lost consciousness, falling into a deep sleep, with dreams that wavered between hellish nightmares and heartrending memories.