The Sewers Under Northgate
Late 214
She still could not, to this day, recall exactly what led her to take that particular route in the sewers, or why she decided on impulse to burrow into the unpromising crevice.
She knew she had been sick at the time—some wintertime fever, her body alight with the horror of the chills and deep aches gripping her, the thoughts of death with every rattle in her lungs. With how she felt, she had no doubt she’d have been chased away from any stoop that a righteous-minded person might find her on. Perhaps it had just been that the sewers were the only refuge left to her.
All she remembered were fragmented images. Stumbling half-blind through long passages of sewers, barred circles of light from the grates above lighting her way at regular intervals. Squeezed in tight in a small crevice, sagging in almost relief against the walls so close they gripped her body and held her up. The ground beneath her face and hands, stony, covered in dirt and debris, smooth and oddly tepid beneath the grit—neither cool nor warm. A tiny trickle of water that she lapped at eagerly, too thirsty to think of the chance of it being befouled by sewage, and the achingly cold purity of the water.
The most coherent memory she did have of her first moment in the skyfolk ruins came after some time had passed—an hour, a day, who knew. She’d sat up, feeling her limbs respond to her control—weakly, but not trembling and overheated. She leaned into her grip on the wall to push herself up, and suddenly light bloomed from a strange, angular glyph beneath her fingers.
She stared at it, too exhausted to be surprised. Leaning close, she realized it gave off a faint heat, and even—sound? It sounded almost like… singing.
Exhaustion crashed over her again as she laid her forehead against the wall, and she fell asleep—a true, dreamless, peaceful sleep—against the warm, singing glyph.
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