Garrett awoke with an old, withered hand running along his forehead and through his matted hair.
Everything ached within the thief, his bones felt brittle, his skin frail, his head pointed, his heart throbbed, his lungs burned.
But he was alive.
By some misguided miracle, he was alive.
"Twas fate." The Queen of Beggars told him once he could finally open his eye, eye, singular.
His right eye was damaged, and with what little the Queen and her Beggars had, they wrapped cloth around the wound… Garrett's head felt heavy, and panic welled in his chest every time his thoughts dared to stray into the darkness of what he once could see...
Garrett was told that he had been found by one of the Queen's rats some few days after the manor wing collapsed. The urchin had grown bold enough to dare skulk into the noble district to pluck a few prizes from the debris that could fetch a price.
And the rat did find more than a few trinkets that would have surely have kept him fed for the coming year.
But a full stomach paled in comparison to discovering Garrett amidst the rubble, sheltered beneath a collapsed pillar, hidden away, unconscious and wounded. At first glance the rat feared the worst, that the thief was indeed dead, but even dead, the rat was determined to return Garrett to his Queen.
According to the rat, Ansel, he called himself, Garrett had been dead to the world when he pulled him out of the rubble, limp, lifeless, pale, had he not coughed when dust fell upon his cheek, Ansel would have been sure he'd be lugging home a corpse.
The Queen of Beggars insisted that Garrett's recovery was fate.
Garrett would argue that it was merely a coincidence.
Regardless, fate, coincidence, destiny, accident, Garrett was returned to the Queen of Beggars, his injuries were many, but the Queen and her beggars were patient and perfectly capable of nursing the thief back to health.
There was however, little they could do to heal the horrors which stalked his mind…
And so, the Queen of Beggars invited the thief to remain with them for a time;
"Until we can be rest assured you will return to us should you ever decide to leave."
The Queen and her beggars weren't expecting the thief to agree… But he did, Garrett agreed with little more than a nod…
There was a crushing weight in his chest, guilt and shame, and for a long while as he resided within the ancient cathedral he pondered… If that was how Erin felt all the years she had spent away from them, too ashamed to come home, too weighted by the guilt, the blood on her hands…
Unlike Erin's reluctance to see her family, knowing that they judged her severely for her turn to blood coin…
Garrett's guilt stemmed solely from his inadequacy.
His failure to protect his sister.
His failure to save his sister…
And so Garrett remained, tucked away within that hidden cathedral, content with wasting away with his sorrows…
But things hidden away within the city had a habit of not staying hidden.