The Lost Voices (OLD VERSION - New Version to Come)

CHAPTER 7... DRIFTER (PART 1)

FILE 15,308,640 (-1,036,800): Underbelly

8-18-1620 A.R.

Location: Ostium, Terrarin 

Endless rain berated the empty bar's windows as Ithrayel's cigarette crowded the air with its wispy presence. Glancing down, a marked-up map and scratched compass sat beside his propped elbow, depicting his next place of contact with The Regime. It stared back at him like a coiled snake, but he chose to ignore its fangs for the brief moment he had. 

Instead, he passed the Uroboros coin over and under his fingers. Almost without realizing it, his peripheral vision glared at the coin as though it might make a mistake. After it came back to his thumb for the eighth time, Ithrayel flicked it toward the ceiling and watched intently as it slammed back down onto the counter: the Uroboros side. 

Lifting his gaze with an unamused crook to his mouth, Ithrayel's eyes fell upon the splintering wood of the unkept bar.

No bartender stood across from, only the faint cobwebs of what this small business might be one day. With Ithrayel's trench coat strung over the counter, he turned in his wooden stool and imagined the space filled with life. Friends laughing in the corner at a stupid joke, two men getting in a scrap over a pretty woman, an old man quietly eating a nice dinner with his kids, a gear-head drinking her friends under the table as bystanders cheered, and on and on. Just people with the time to be people. 

That was their normal; someone else's normal. A normal that he'd never really grasped. Not as a kid, and especially not now. It seemed so scarce in his world of bullets, magic, and corruption.

In a sense, Ithrayel wanted to see those seemingly normal lives in every state of Terrarin, but the prospects of a normalized life were strange to him. So many thousands of people walked through life with that same old song and dance, waiting forever for a change. The thought struck him with an almost jarring kind of fear. 

Shouldn't he want that life? 

It wasn't that he adored what he did. Not exactly. Of course, it was no small joy to break a scumbag's nose when the situation called for it, but he couldn't put his finger on why he did it. 

Who was it all for? Even those who did the same old song and dance did it for someone, right?

In the graying haze, he thought of his mother. Ithrayel's mind sank into those alleyways she coddled her children in. Places rife with abandonment that she made warm with her devotion to them. It still hurt, but in his heart, he knew she took up more jobs than he would ever know to make sure they lived. 

He even thought of his brother, and the way he provided for Ithrayel and his sister. Whether it was sweet-talking merchants in food markets or selling smudged newspapers, their brother did it for them without a thought. To this day, Ithrayel still hated the smell of newspapers. Hated the way they left his hands black, as if the events and gossip of the world wanted to stain his fingers with their stupid ramblings. 

Seeing them was almost as bad as the looks people gave Ithrayel and his siblings on the streets. That disgust that said they were "less" than the commoner, as if any kid enjoyed standing on busy corners being shoved around or coming home soaked from the rain, all while shielding those infuriating stacks of paper.

Ithrayel barely inhaled another spark of his crinkling cigarette when his sister touched his mind too. All three of them would smoke together on the dimly lit stairsteps behind a restaurant, while she regaled them with her pranks and bold comments. She could make anyone laugh, even if it was from shock alone. 

Ithrayel caught himself smirking at nothing in this silent bar as the stick of ashes finally bent and fell from his cigarette. All that nicotine wasted on daydreams. Shrugging it off, he brought the remains back up to his lips, donned his black coat, and blinked away the imaginary life he'd brought into the empty space as he reentered the storm.