The Foundry was an odd building.
A foreign design for one thing, constructed by some poor sap who thought they could cut costs by setting up shop in a backwater place like the City. Needless to say, the Foundry remained, but the original owner had long since cut ties with whatever prospect they had been expecting.
Honestly, Garrett found the fact that the Foundry had yet to collapse after years of trading hands and purpose quite impressive, especially considering the foundry was horrifically impractical by City standards.
With a wide, open floor plan for the actual would-be workspace, few support beams, and machinery poorly guarded against the temperamental and frequent weather of the city, many would assume that the foundry would not stand long, yet stand it did.
Thrive it did.
Like a buzzing hive, machinery purred and clanked along, men milled about like bees, and up high, above it all, crouched upon a jutting beam, Garrett watched it all.
"Up you go, you sorry bastard." One man grunted from a elevated platform, hoisting a lifeless body up onto his shoulders while a co-worker held a meat-hook at the ready.
The corpse was heaved up, and then down. The ensuing noise was no doubt sickening, but the hurried bustling of the foundry choked the sound out before it reached Garrett's ears.
"Better you than me." The first man huffed once the dead man was secured upon the hook. Thereafter, an alarm sounded, and whatever apparatus the hook was fashioned to began to move, taking the corpse with it.
Garrett grimaced at the display, he had seen more than his fair share of death through his life. Children starved dead in winter or snatched away by the cold. Senseless stabbings over scraps, guards letting what little power they had go to their heads.
But what Garrett saw before him, the dead being carted off so carelessly? Abattoirs had more respect for their pigs.
Still, if anything, the Foundry workers remained consistent in both the disrespect they showed to the deceased in their care, and the utter lack of regard for their jobs. And, to Garrett's delight, their personal effects.
Coin pouches tossed down haphazardly across the shop, penknives and mechanical bits and pieces strewn about willy-nilly, all ripe for the picking, and who was Garrett to turn down such opportunities.
Just as the thief was pocketing a very nice calligraphy pen from some desk, a bell began to chime from somewhere high above, followed by a foreman bellowing that; "Break's over! Get that line moving!" A great mechanical beast groaned soon after, and the conveyor belt sparsely decorated with too many dead men began to sleepily shuffle forward.
Garrett took a moment to watch the grim parade, keeping himself well to the side of the marching path, if the slick smear of foul dark brown mud directly below the conveyor belt was any indication, the suffering of the perished was far from over.
Still… The sight of the many swaying meat hooks gave Garrett a convenient, if unpleasant, method of traversing the Foundry.
Scaling a stack of pallets was a breeze for the thief, making a short jump to grab hold of a vacant meat hook, easy. Playing dead above the heads of the foundry workers? Not quite as simple… For one, Garrett was fully clothed, for a second, Garrett was very much alive. The city watch was known to be notoriously blind, but surely not to such an extent.
…
Who was Garrett kidding.
Of course the damn city watch in fact that blind.
Garrett made his way across the main floor of the foundry completely unaccosted, save for one instance where he was forced to drop down, two watchmen had decided to shirk work and hide away atop a maintenance walkway, bantering at corpse level. While Garrett was confident that the two would be too engrossed in their conversation to notice something amiss on the line, he had not survived as long as he had by taking risks.
Perhaps it was Lady Luck finally turning her gaze towards him, or more likely, a dead child's lingering black gaze, but when Garrett dropped off the line, something behind his eye began to… Flutter?
It was a strange sensation, almost like a tremor, but not painful, not even inconvenient, just, there, present, growing more intense when Garrett looked in a particular direction.
It wasn't curiosity per-say that drew Garrett to find the source of the disturbance, more of… A need to know…
Finding the source was easy enough, Garrett didn't even have to look, his eye guided him… Well, his eye, and to guards plotting some thievery of their own.
"The two of us could force it." The taller of the two suggested with a hushed whisper; "Split what we find between us?" The door in question was shoddily sealed, two crooked planks of wood nailed across the door, with a large enough window for someone to crawl through.
"What do you say?" The first guard asked his shorter companion, excitement bled into his words at the prospect of pinching himself some extra coin. His partner was far less amused.
"I say the General will ring our necks if we're caught Blackhanded like this!" The taller guard scowled, making a move to retort, but his partner cut him off with a choking cough; "I need some air. I feel like shit."
Garrett clambered his way up into the rafters, out of sight, out of mind while the guards below continued bickering, one calling the other a spineless coward, the other calling the one a deluded mut. They both departed bitterly shortly after, leaving Garrett alone in the hall.
Now, Garrett could have easily forced his way through, but even easier than breaking a window was crawling through a vent shaft.
The room beyond the door was ill-kempt, but not messy, dusty, but not filthy. It had clearly once been a workshop of some sort, papers of mechanical jargon littered the desk, tools sat out, frozen in time, as though waiting for their master to return and resume work.
And at the very back of the room, hidden behind soft velvet drapery, deep blue and royal purple, tucked into the wall, a safe.
The source of the strange disturbance…
Garrett wasted no time with cracking the code, the previous occupant had been kind enough to leave their would-be friend clues to open the safe, clues that Garrett had no issue deciphering.
What resided within the safe however… Garrett would ponder for years to come.
Encased within a glass container, adorned with fine gold trim, sat a gentle pale light, spiraling into itself in an endless mesmerizing loop… But that shiny thing was not the source of Garrett's curiosity [he pocketed it regardless]
No, what truly caught Garrett's attention was stark white bone, dulled through the years, an inscription cut deep into the marrow, a familiar mark. Reaching out, Garrett's own mark seemed to sing with the mark on the bone, burning cold life against the back of his palm as he plucked the trinket from its prison.
The world shifted, rippling outward from the point of contact before cold dead hands settled at his shoulders, a weight pressing against his hood so lips could brush against his cheek, teeth lined every word as the Leviathan spoke.
"A gift for my thief." The dead child crooned as a hand trailed down Garrett's shoulder, fingers dancing along his arm before moving to cradle the hand holding the long dead bone.
"A Rune. Bearing my mark. Meant to aid you on your endeavors." That cold hand guided Garrett's arm to his chest, until the slab of bone pressed against his beating heart.
The young god laughed, the sickening cacophony of a dying man's last breath and far-away whalesong echoing through Garrett's mind as the Leviathan turned the thief's head towards him. A hand slipped beneath Garrett's hood, drawing the article back just enough for dead, dead, dead fingers to run through his hair as water-logged lips pressed against his brow, directly over the mangled scar running across his eye.
"Be safe, my thief." The dead god murmured.
"I will be watching."