NOVEL WEB Chapter 3: The cave
I'm back! And yes, I am continuing this story. I've been a bit preoccupied with my other one. But I intend to put more effort into this story in the near future. I'll be posting the next chapter on my p@treon and I'll be uploading more there tomorrow as well.
It's good to finally be back in Lyzof's shoes again.
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(Lyzof POV)
My name is Lyzof Keele. I was the son of Barus Keele and Leontina Keele. I say was because those two idiots were utter street rats that pigged themselves on drugs and scrounged for money in the dirt.
Just so that they could save up to buy a bottle of that ridiculously overpriced and revolting Soma Wine. I could never understand what people say and tasted in that filth. Whenever a bottle was popped open near me, my nose would be assaulted by one the most vile odours I had ever come across in my life.
At one point, it took top place in my list of filthy smells. But not now. Because my current occupation had me coming across smells that were far worse than a hundred Soma Wine bottles put together.
I was a homeless street rat of Daedalus street, in it's deepest, darkest cesspits. In the slums of slums. A place where no self respecting person who took care of themselves would ever think to walk. Those who inhabited it were the ones that had the misfortune of being born there, for no one ever came in, and rarely did anyone ever manage to get out.
And I was forced to take up on of the filthiest and dangerous jobs by my useless bums of parents at the age of 3. Just one among many of the smelly, underpaid, rugged sewage cleaners.
Armed with nothing but a brush, a small hammer, and a chisel, every morning at dusk I would leave our rotten shack of a home, that was little more than a toilet cubicle sized hut with holes in the roof and sand on the floor, and venture out in the world to chip off dried muck that collected around the rims of the manholes leading to the sewers.
What a brilliant start to life, one full of ambition and promise of glory no doubt.
One year later, and I was considered to be the most reliable in my neighbourhood. I did what I did with the greatest reluctance, but with the most fulfilled fervor, on the off chance that maybe on of the idiots who swayed about in their doorways when I collected my payment would drop an extra few Valis or so in their drunken haze.
Not like I had much of a choice any way, since I was well and truly alone in the world now. My 'parents' had tried to mug a member of the Soma Familia themselves in their crazed lust for the 'heavenly' wine. And ended up decapitated in an alleyway.
No one cared. Nobody ever did. Not even me. That was just the sad reality of this life. Every choice made is a step closer to either death, or towards more money. It was all anybody cared about.
Nobody had time for a bare-foot boy in rags, walking around with a hammer and rusted chisel stuck in the helm of his pants, after having been kicked out of his shack by another crazed junkie.
...
But that was okay. Because I left willingly. Because I was also known by another name, amongst the masses who lived in that crowded close.
'The Cursed Child.'
The boy who attracted demons. The boy watched over by angels (pfft),whatever rationale that drunk junkies could conjure up in their intoxicated minds to explain why when an older boy tried to stab me, his body ended up brutally mangled and twisted, like a wet cloth being wrung of its water, except in this case the water was replaced by blood, stomach juices and other substances that nobody even wanted to know about.
It was the first time I had seen death, the first time I cried in horror at seeing life snuffed out before my eyes. The first time I'd seen blood, and feared the inexplicable unknown.
For the unknown followed me wherever I went. One time a rabid dog whom I had disturbed in a small crevice in the wall of a house came rushing out snapping wildly and madly in rage and blind hunger, Paralyzed by fear of the incoming maw filled with sharp teeth and dirty slobber, I could do little but wait for impending death.
Yet an unknown intervention saved me once again, and the dog's tongue was ripped clean out of its mouth, followed by its throat pipes and it's guts. It plopped down on the filthy pavement with a sicken slop as blood pooled around its body.
I suppose my reaction was not as violent as fearful as before because I had already seen something like this happen and it was not another human this time.
Slowly but surely, as small happenings like this persisted through out my life, me fear began to lessen and lessen until it had all but receded, and I gained a sense of security, knowing that in a life or death situation, some unknown force would not allow me to die.
I still remained ever wary though, for it did not protect me against cuts and burns. Perfect evidence of that was the time I'd been sleeping on a wall and fell off in my sleep, scraping and cutting my back on jagged pebbles and sandy surfaces. I could not see my back, but beyond a doubt I had a few scars and blemishes that would remain for the rest of my life.
Not that it mattered. Such a thing was minor in the life i was born into.
Speaking of sleep, it would be around the time my parents died that I found myself plagued with vivid dreams. I would dream of a completely different world. In it, instead of stone, the roads were made from some sort of substance that looked like it should be soft yet was actually hard.
In it, the normal people lived in great towers and constructs as tall as the sky. Not unlike the great Babel tower, which cast its ominous shadow over all of the dungeon city.
In it people would walk to travel to places, and when they did not, they would board these metal cocoons on wheels that came in a variety of colours shapes and sizes. Journey that would usually take months were reduced to hours instead.
In it, I would see giant birds made of metal fly through the sky and disappear into the clouds. It was only as I had more of these dreams that I realized that these birds actually carried people in their bellies to distant lands and said people could leave those stomachs whenever they wished.
I dreamt of a life with a strange woman, whom I decided was supposed to be my mother. She always carried a beautiful smile on her face, and every look she would send me was filled with so much love and warmth, I almost choked on tears. My own mother had never even bothered to acknowledge my existence, except when I brought 10 Valis home and she'd wail about why I did not bring more.
I dreamt of attending strange activities. One appeared to be swordsmanship, except it was nothing like the swords I had seen adventurers walking around with. It was a small, pointy metal stick with some ort of bud on the end, which was used for merely parrying and jabbing. From my dreams, i was supposedly best and undefeated.
If only that were true, if only that were the case. For someone like me, the only life I could attempt at that would probably bring me fortune was the life of an adventurer. After all, there were all those stories about great heroes from humble origins that would rise to the peak of strength, and be a shining beacon of light and hope to all.
But in the end, stories were stories. For all its danger and disgusting quality of life, Daedalus was the safest place I could be.
Orario had entered something everybody referred to as the 'Dark Days'. A time where evil gods, and their deranged followers rampaged upon adventurers, citizens and gods alike and blood was spilled like rivers in the streets of the so called 'Center of the World'.
So many dreamed of coming to Orario, the city of wealth, fame, power and women. If only they knew that they would be walking into a death sentence the moment they stepped in. And those that did realize would usually end up dead not a day later.
It was not long before I concluded that there was something different about me. The constant phenomenons that happened around me, paired with the lucid and vivid dreams, as well as the fact I seemed to possess an uncanny willpower other kids around me did not have all pointed towards the fact that there was something about me that was wrong. Something not normal.
Something that made me a freak.
Which was why when I walked, other would step out of my way and all would have wary look in their gaze, even in a haze, and would not drop their guards until I had passed them and was a good thirty feet away.
This was my life, day in and day out. From dawn to dusk, I was scraping and chipping away at excrement around the edges and walls of manholes, and at night, I was in a box, on a wall, or somebody's roof, shivering from the cold and from the disturbing vividness of dreams that were naught but torture for me, as I was constantly bombarded by scenes of privilege and comfort I came to realize would never be a reality for me.
Perhaps I was possessed by demons. Demons that sought only to torture me with visions of everything I could ever want but could never have. Cursed Child indeed.
And so my despair tormented me for another year. Winter came and went, and the cold mornings of spring slowly settled on my frail, scrawny and malnourished frame.
Everyday, I woke up and washed in the puddle I'd found on a rooftop. The roof had caved in a little but not to the point of breaking into the inside. It created a miniature tub for me that would fill with rainwater.
When it froze, I would simply hammer away at it and break the ice into shards. I would then rub them between my frozen hands to melt them and then wipe my body all over. By that time, the rest of the ice would have melted a bit, enough for me to wash my clothes in of all the filth it would accumulate.
A meager attempt since I would always look like a filthy little gutter rat no matter what I did. But just this small wash meant the world to me.
One day, I had been working on an extra large manhole that nobody else would dare come near. Neither did I before today, because people were known for falling in and then disappearing to gods-knew-where and never returning alive.
I only chose that one because all the others already had a few kids brushing and scrambling away at them, eagerly ripping away bits of people's feces in hopes of being given enough valis to afford a mouthful of food as their only meal in a day.
So I was the one left with leaning over the edge of the large hole, hammering away at the rocky face to get the fossilized pieces of muck off and let them fall into what looked like an underground river. The purpose of this was meant to make sure that the hole would not get clogged and overflowing with stuff you didn't even want to think about.
But I soon realized exactly how people fell. Because as I was leaning into a literal maw of death, the poor maintenance of the road decided to turn on me today as the tile my body was on suddenly lifted up because my weight was concentrated on one end of it.
I was sent tumbling headfirst, scraping my elbows and feet along the sides of the rocky walls in futility as my tiny form fell into the stream. What happened next has always been a blur to me as I felt cold water engulf me from all sides and I could not tell up from down, and I was taken away by a force of nature.
Regardless of my thrashing and silent screaming, I could not find something to hold or something to break my path. All I could do was hope to high heaven that I did not run out breath during this wet turmoil.
What chance did my malnourished, five year old body have against a raging river?
My prayers were semi answered as suddenly I was spat out of a rock cliff face and thrown down into a pool where the water had collected. It was a good 50 foot drop, and while I was airborne, I managed to get a quick reading of my new surroundings.
I had arrived in some sort of underground cave, The only sort of light came from a crack in the high ceiling. I was tumbling down into a pool of water that only covered three quarters of the cavern I was in. There was a bank where I was intent on reaching once I could.
And so I did, as once I cannonballed in the freezing pool, I swam for dear life as much as my inexperienced self could to shore. My strokes and splashes slowed and weakened as I reached dry surface once again
Weakly laying with my top half on sand and my bottom half in the water, i glanced up to take in my environment again. There were bushes growing around the water's edge, and they seemed to hold these tiny red berries of sorts.
The cavern was dark and murky. And not far off was the wall of the cavern, not unlike the cliff I'd been vaulted out of.
But what caught my attention was what the only source of light landed upon, As I previously mentioned, the only source of light came from a crack in the ceiling hundreds of feet in the air. The sunlight that peaked through rested upon a stone chair, or more appropriately a worn-out throne. It and the entire area around it was illuminated by the rays of the sun.
But the last thing that caught my eye before I blacked out in tiredness was a magnificent sword embedded in the seat of the throne...
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