Chapter 3-Escaping the dark, in search for a soul

The sewers were damp and ancient. Rats and insects scattered blindly through the dark as the shadow made its way through the labyrinth of stone, pipes and rust. Tunnels intertwined for miles, twisting and turning, this way and that; a maze of filth and disease that seemed to have no end.

Breathing in the musty air, the shadows lungs were filled with the rancid moisture that was suspended throughout the place.

The sewers. A haven away from the sun, which would destroy his new found fleshy body. He would have to wait here until the darkness came back again.

The sun continued to scorch the overworld, while he explored the underworld, and as he stepped forward, the solemn crunch of a thousand dead bodies sounded under the steps of his feet. The bones and sinew littered the floor of the stone floors; a path of the dead and decaying ones.

As he walked along, his eyesight at it’s peak, he asked himself, “I know this place; it’s all too familiar…”

Puzzled, he turned corners, only to be greeted with new tunnels and more pathways. He blindly chose a path, blind not in the sense that he could not see, but blind as in he did not care the path that he chose to walk. A look of nostalgia slowly appeared on his face as he passed the decrepit walls and crumbling ceiling. What was it that lurked in the depths of the city, the bowels of this pit of humanity?

Cold air rushed past his raven black hair, and a new smell, cutting through the reek of ancient defecation, entered his nostrils and spread through his mind. It was an old smell, a scent from before humanity existed. Fresh, crisp, but dusty, it smell like an old book in the attic of a very old house in the wintertime.

“I believe I have traveled too far,” he told himself. Tendrils of dark shadow slowly leaked out from between the cold stones off walls and cracks from the crumbling floor. Compelled and in a trance, he kept walking forward, not able to stop.

As his pace continued, the sewers finally came to an abrupt halt, as if the tunnel were broken off: floors, ceilings, walls, and even time.

As his path finally came to a sudden stop, the mysterious hold that had compelled him towards the en of his decent suddenly left him, and floated ahead of him, in the form of a blanket made of shadow mist. At the edge of his toes, the sewers crumbled and then,…..nothing.

There was nothing there.

Just pitch black, a void that seemed out of place, but had always been there.

It was his birthplace; the place all shadows are spawned from. A cold, soulless, place. The tendrils of shadow slithered passed his feet, and returned to where they came from and left him alone with his thoughts.

He thought for a moment, before addressing the collective shadowy world, and then asked himself, “Why am I here?”

“Why am I here!!!?” he yelled.

He waited in the dark for an answer.