The Guild of the Forsaken

CHAPTER 44 - Between The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea

I Want You - Mitski

November 14th 2024

GOTHAM CITY       

The abandoned Sangue Hotel stands on a promontory before Gotham River. Outside a gentle frost encases the surrounding life in a shimmering cocoon. A faint breeze touches the sinking debris of previous festivities. The Hotel's gardens are imposing with vines and wildflowers claiming back their home with a vengeance. It's undeniably beautiful but the shadow cast by the severe lines of the City's skyscrapers lend the place a forbidding air.

Facing the river, the building is fronted by tall windows that have long since lost their youthful translucency, the mismatched graffiti mercilessly culling any chance of revival. A slow rot consumes the old timbers as the place is left to ruin. The choice to teleport to this decaying hole was one not made by a unanimous sentence but rather dictated by a consuming desperation.

There was simply a cry for safety or perhaps a simple 'away,' but in a city rotting from the inside out would there ever be a perfect equilibrium. Blurrily observing the groaning wood tinged by a green mould Chloé surmises such a thing to be improbable.

The five-storey edifice is an epicentre for the pairs shared grief as Ewan's body lies in the middle of what Chloé assumes to be an old ballroom, the gentle grandeur now lost to the stain of decay. Rather sardonically Chloé doesn't feel out of place amongst the ruin, with her bloodstained clothes and dirtied skin where dark lines now mark her in places where Axel launched his attack.

A few isolated rays of morning light push through the muddied windows, illuminating small patches of Ewan's waistcoat, Chloé likes to imagine that his soul is travelling through the rays, going to rest and relief as his mortal casing is left behind.

Chloé's return to consciousness had been anything but pleasant or comforting, instead of a warm embrace she had awoken to splintered floorboards and a splitting pain her head. Her ears ache with a phantom invasion, rapturing her from the inside out. Bile threatens to rise in her throat with each swallow and any movement sends a bolt of pain through her bruised neck. 

The dilapidated shell of a building provides minor shielding from the winter air but Chloé is already shivering in her spot. Her bright yellow top contaminated by her own blood strikes a dramatic note against her muted surroundings.

The cooling body of Ewan makes for a gnarly sight and Chloé desperately tries to keep her eyes averted as she pushes herself into a sitting position. Her back protests the action but she pushes through with a gruelling determination. Being no stranger to loosing those she loves Chloé pushes down her grief with a practiced certainty, dark thoughts being replaced with a dull hum as she categorises her memories. Perhaps in a desperate attempt to figure where it all went wrong.

An unsolicited wave of melancholy sweeps through Chloé when she sees Marinette hunched over, head pushing into the dirty floor, lungs heaving as she wheezes. A delicate hand curled into her stomach where a glass shard glints. It's not the source of Marinette's crushing pain however as the ragged woman reaches for Ewan's body.

Averting her eyes from the agonizing scene Chloé raises a shaking hand and tries to wipe the tears glistening on her cheeks but only succeeds in smearing the blood and dirt further into her skin. Marinette begins to loudly sob, they tear themselves from her throat with a voracious hunger to fill the trembling room. Chloé can hear the tremors as Marinette tries to smother them with a bloodied hand.

The noise reeks of desperation as it wretches itself from Marinette's rising delirium, unable to stand watching her friend fall apart before her eyes Chloé begins to push herself towards her. Muscles protest the anguished movement, but the sound of Marinette's desperate cries propels her forwards.