Prologue ~ Legends of Arboria

Prologue

A pattering rain began to wet the tepid cobblestones of a long forgotten back street. Night had fallen and the denizens of the day had retreated finally to the safety of their dwellings for the evening. The air swirled with the remnants of the day's aromas and a whisp of descending fog began to force the humid breeze off the streets. Those telling dark and murky stains trailing down the stone walls of those not so prominent houses tucked into the darker, less savory corners of the city began to glisten with seeping run-off and the creatures of the night came out of hiding for their nightly scavenging ritual. Shadows danced in corners and whispers carried on the wind as the moon faught for station in the brooding sky. Even the horses locked away safely in their pens could find no ease in rest.

It was an altogether different world there in the sopping, debris choked gutters and back alleys where all the cast-offs and lost souls made their homes. Forced by necessity to scavange for whatever they could find to ease the blazing hunger that tore at their bellies, these children of the night quite often ended up as thieves and nare-do-wells skulking about and keeping company with shadows. Not all, however, were even so lucky as they to be able to fend for themselves. Some of them were societial waste no one wanted to deal with, the deaf and blind, crippled and mentally deficiant, the helpless beggars that could only shiver in the dark waiting for either a scrap of cloth to huddle in or the cold clutch of death to finally take them from that veritable prison.

It was one such vagrant, a solitary pittiful wretch of a man with no family or friends and barely the ragged clothes on his back to call his own, that sat curled up in a rotting forgotten crate strewn with thatch. He listened to the rain drip from the edge with hollow eyes sricken with clouds of blindness and muttering incoherant ramblings to noone inparticular. Noone knew quite how long he had been there. He just always had. He was nobody, an unseen wastrell and whisp hovering at the fring of insanity that civilized men just forgot and pretended was not there. He didn't even have a name and some of the children that frequented the dingy corners during the day took to calling him wretch.

So wretch sat there day after day, night after night muttering. Very seldomly would he actually be seen wandering about outside of his hovel and when he did it was only in the hope of finding a scap to eat and it was only ever at night when he could avoid the jeers and insults of even his fellow vagrants. This night was now different. Wretch sat up in his bug infested hay bed, summarily breaking off his lengthy conversation with whatever specter or vision he was prone to engaging, and shuffled out into the damp streets with frail hands outstretched and groping along any available surface. His already scraggly gray hair began to mat and plaster to his sun splotched face. His nose led him to the nearest dumpster behind a local market and he climbed in among the rotting food matter to find supper.

It was well into the night when he made his way back to the relative confines of his box and settled back in to resume his lost mutterings. Just then, though, his brow curled and he sat up. His lifeless, hollow eyes widened as his large ears told him of the shrowded footfalls of some unknown wanderer coming up the alley. Fear took hold of his faculties-- what faculties he still had-- and he scrunched himself further into the crate against the back wall. He was rather used to being regularly mugged by passers by for any chance of finding anything useful. They always left him shivering in his box with not but a bruised rib for his trouble since he never had anything of value. It had just become second nature to shrink away from anyone passing by and hoping he was not seen or heard.

The steps came closer and seemed not that of the heavy trodding of the city guard or the shuffling of another of his own ilk but softer like and sneak plodding through the shadows only faster and more evenly spaced as though casual. Be it friend or foe, he preferred not taking the chance of being beaten even if it did mean loosing out on a morsel of food or some other vestige of benevolence. They did not pass on by, though, as he had hoped and his breath caught in his throat as they seem to stop right in front of his crate. It was all he could do to keep from crying out in fear and trying to dash away. He shivered and cringed as whoever it was slowly knelt down, the barely audible sigh of their garments creasing over oneanother.