Chapter Text
Suddenly, Lorenzo was awake and running.
His blanket and nightcap were long forgotten. His meagre belongings had warranted no attention. The loose floorboard containing Lorenzo’s secret stash of weapons and other contraband had been yanked aside, perhaps by a nervous cellmate in their rush to escape.
None of it mattered now. Not when his slippers, wholly unfit for running, pounded on the steel floor, pushing and struggling to reach the pace of his heart. Not when his glasses lay askew on the bridge of his nose, slashing at his vision until it was no more than a mosaic of chaotic colours. Alarms blared even as his eardrums themselves seem to scream in pain, the red warning lights washing over each grimy corner of the hallway. Each step shook the world and cut another searing notch in his windpipe. He breathed fire now, not air.
He had known. Everyone had. The prophecy of Fontaine’s demise, that it would be swallowed under a flood of primordial seawater, had been looming over its citizens for centuries. And now, it had finally come.
Lorenzo wasn’t ready. He never was.
As Lorenzo’s feet skidded around a corner, a black shadow materialised before him, and he halted. A prison guard. The guard’s head whipped around, regarding Lorenzo with wide, agitated eyes.
“What are you still doing here?” The guard yelled, struggling to be heard over the alarms. “Follow me!”
For a moment the steel and alarms fell away, and a blast of torrid wind clawed at Lorenzo’s face. Sand and dryness seeped through his leather boots, laying desert tendrils across his feet. The man in front of him wore a blue uniform, not black, clutching a musket and yelling at Lorenzo to get a move on.
The prison returned, along with the guard’s confused expression. Lorenzo steadied himself, swallowed the apprehension that accompanied that black uniform, and stayed hot on the guard’s trail, twisting and turning through the giant underwater prison that was the Fortress of Meropede. Never before had he wanted to return to the peace of his quarters more than right now, as much as he despised them.
Others joined along the way, though he had never seen them. He’d never truly ‘seen’ the prisoners down here, after all. To him they’d all been roughspun jumpsuits, star-studded beanies and coarse brown pants. Nothing more than background noise.
But now they might ensure his survival. One breathed deep, trying to suppress his overwhelming fear. One ran with a limp. One punctuated the metallic cacophony with deep sobs, tears streaming from her eyes. Others went as fast as they could, leaving their sanity and dignity in their cold, dingy cells.
“I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die…” the woman muttered, on the verge of breaking down.
Another man slapped her on the back. “Get it together! You keep going like this, you’ll be dead before you’re out the door.”
Soon, the welcome outline of a vault door came into view, warped and smashed open after it had refused to do so automatically. Lorenzo and the others wasted no time following the guard up the short staircase in front of the door and jumping down on the other side.
The central shaft of the prison expanded before their eyes, bordered with a wide, circular platform. Once, it bustled with activity. Old Grantham would be leaning back in a rocking chair, reading the morning paper with a pipe in his mouth. Frankson, with his insatiable appetite, would either be begging people for their food tickets or stuffing his face at the cafeteria. Ebony would be hawking her wares, constantly chasing Ham and his little schoolboy gang off.
Now, only wailing alarms filled the silence that would have been otherwise. From the corner of his eye, Lorenzo found smoke still billowing from an abandoned pipe. The cafeteria lights had been shut off, and the many market stalls had been overturned in the rush to escape. The fortress was dead, the alarms only a death knell mourning its passing.
As they approached an elevator, the guard slammed his hand on the elevator button as the rest came, only to receive no response.
“Power must be out.” the guard growled, pounding a gloved fist on the controls.
“What do we do then?” someone asked, her voice fraying at the edges with panic and fear.
“Curses! The stairs!” The guard thrust a quivering finger at a door studded with bolts. No sooner had he said that than they rushed to it, flinging it open and diving into the bowels of the switchback staircase.
Lorenzo’s nose seized immediately. Even in an enclosed space, the cloying stink of the sea seemed to slither up his neck and cling to his face, made worse by Lorenzo’s efforts to keep up with the rest. He lunged forward, bounding two steps at a time while keeping a tenuous grip on the moist railing, but he could feel himself slipping already. Though he’d put himself right in the middle of the group, he wasn’t sure anyone would help him if he did.
Fear clenched at his heart, and the figures in front of him blurred, melding into a great black mass. He was losing his grip. An outstretched hand appeared before him, dark and featureless in the lack of light. Amidst the hollow stampede of footsteps and panicked voices, his body almost seemed to stretch forward for fear of being left behind.
The world turned upside down in the next moment. The fortress shook violently, and suddenly Lorenzo wasn’t in the fortress anymore. There was an explosion, followed by sand and the shadow of a man barrelling towards him. With reflexes he didn’t know he still had, Lorenzo ripped his body out of the way, slamming into the railing. The movement caused his foot to finally slip, and an explosion of pain rocked his leg as his knee crashed into the corner of a step.
“Gah!” He choked out, the rest of his words drowned by an ill-timed glob of spit. The tremours tore through his body as he fought to maintain his balance, swaying left and right.
Something was ripping at his leg, threatening to pull it out. His head swung back to look at what happened.
A heap of people lay on the bottom landing, piled in a mess of pale limbs. Like filthy clothes that needed to be washed. A man clung to Lorenzo’s leg with a death grip as the staircase seemed to teeter from side to side.
He wouldn’t be able to get up, Lorenzo realised. “Let go!” he yelled.
The man held on, tears streaming down his face. “Wait, no! Don’t let go of me! Don’t–”
Another great crash came, and Lorenzo’s chin bruised from sliding down multiple steps. Blood pooled at the bottom of his mouth. “You–!”
In a fit of delirium, Lorenzo smashed his heel into the man’s nose, sending him tumbling down.
There might have been groans of pain, and calls for help, but Lorenzo heard nothing over the alarms. No, he chose not to hear anything. What mattered was that he was not down there, and still had a chance of surviving.
Turning back to the blurry figure of the guard, Lorenzo forced his injured knee up and forward. The first step sent an unwelcome shock up his leg, and he collapsed again, clutching the handrails as if they could save him from this crisis.
“Take my hand!” a white glove materialised in front of him, accompanied by a faraway voice. “I need to get the rest of you out of here!”
In the distance, phantom cracks of gunpowder accompanied the alarms. “I…yes, yes,” came Lorenzo’s half-lame response, shakily grabbing the hand and using the handrails as support. He began limping up, the smell of brine becoming ever more overpowering. Lights flickered delicately, temporarily throwing everything into darkness for the few merciful seconds they stayed off. It made no difference whether there was light or not. All of it was the same to Lorenzo.
The fortress shook some more as Lorenzo and the guard approached the doorway to the next floor. Those who hadn’t slipped and fallen leaned against the wall, catching what respite they could as the world fell apart around them.
“Alright,” the guard huffed, still struggling to support Lorenzo. “There should be a working elevator on this floor. We just need to–”
“Ah! Help!” There was a reverberating snap, and someone went tumbling down the stairwell hole.
Lorenzo’s breath hitched in his throat again. Yet another one.
“We need to get a move on! Go, go, go!” the guard yelled, just as the edges of the landing they stood on began to crumble.
“Wait!” Somebody shouted, but it was too late. Cracks shot through the floor, and the pieces fell away. Lorenzo felt the freefall sensation beginning to overtake him, sending his heart and mind into a panicked overdrive.
Suddenly, he felt a push from behind, and he fell not into the seething primordial waters, but the cold, hard floor of the fortress. Bewildered, he looked behind. The landing had collapsed. He’d been pushed through the door, perhaps by the guard, just before all of them fell.
Terror gripped Lorenzo as his mind raced to reconstruct the scene of their deaths. Would it happen to him too? How long before it happened? Would he truly be able to escape—
He smacked himself over the head, jostling the world into focus. He could dwell on that later. Filled with uncertainty as the world was, there was one thing Lorenzo could be sure of: If he dawdled, he would die.
Lifting himself up again, he pushed the pain in his legs down and went as fast as they would take him towards the elevator. It shone brightly even as the power flickered out around him, bathing swathes of land in darkness. Still Lorenzo ran through the pain, each jolting step bringing him closer to salvation.
The elevator’s fluorescent lights washed over him like a warm embrace as he rushed through its open doors. Spinning around, he smashed the button that would take him to the highest floor possible. Lorenzo grunted in pain. His hand stung from the impact. The elevator creaked close, and gave a lurch as it lifted off the ground before shooting up the elevator shaft.
Lorenzo collapsed on the ground, leaning his back against the wall. As if sensing that there was no longer enough panic and pain to distract him, his thoughts came rushing back to him, swarming around his mind and chipping away at his sanity.
You’re going to die here.
This is the will of the gods. You were foolish to think that they would be satisfied with simply locking away a felon like you.
You were never meant to get out of this alive. It’s hopeless.
Lorenzo growled to nobody in particular, shaking his head as if he could jar the thoughts out of it. His headache only intensified. Lorenzo groaned. At least that would keep the thoughts at bay.
The elevator shuddered before coming to a sudden stop, the doors sliding open with a slam. The entrance zone. Picking himself up, Lorenzo limped down the steps in front of the elevator towards the huge artificial harbour meant to facilitate transport in and out of the Fortress.
Other inmates had gathered by the edge of the water, nervously waiting to board the aquabuses bound for the surface. There was no guarantee they would get anywhere before the water rose to consume them all, Lorenzo realised, and even if they did there was no guarantee that the Court wouldn’t be submerged either.
But what was he to do? This was the only exit, and the alternative was to be jettisoned into the sea, where the pressure would crush him to a pulp. Despair hung over Lorenzo once more, keeping his mind in a firm grip. He wasn’t leaving this wretched place. He was going to die.
The aquabuses had yet to come, and the large blast door controlling passage to and from the harbour hadn’t even been opened yet. Lorenzo prayed that someone got to the control room quickly, and that the controls hadn’t been taken out by the effect of the flood on the Fortress’ power grid.
There came a hollow roar from behind, and the lights of the elevator were no more. The elevator itself screeched as it plummeted towards the bottom floor, slowly becoming less and less audible. The flood was coming.
“C’mon! What are they doing?” One inmate yelled, near hysterical. “We need to go there ourselves! All of you, find the control room!”
With nothing else to do, the prisoners obeyed and fanned out, going in all the directions they had seen the guards go. Lorenzo stayed back and leaned against a hulking crane positioned opposite to the door. He couldn’t keep up with them even if we wanted to, and even then he would have no idea how to operate the controls.
Lorenzo realised that he was completely helpless, his fate in the hands of other people. Loathing rose within him. He’d hated many things in his life, but losing control of his fate came first. He could trust no one with it but himself, and for that his loathing for his situation and the Fortress grew. If only he hadn’t turned himself in…
A great groan came suddenly, and the doors began to crack open. They lurched multiple times, loosing deafening metallic screeches every time. Soon enough their movement became smoother, and the screeches were replaced by a low mechanical whir.
“They’re open! Someone take the boats and drive them!” Lorenzo doubted any of them knew how to drive, but they had no choice. Someone would have to figure it out as they went along.
The rumbling intensified, sending waves of pain battering his leg anew. Lorenzo caught himself on the crane before he collapsed again. This time the vibrations seemed to transmit all the way to his head, impressing a jarring headache on his brain. He wouldn’t be able to stand much more of this. Lorenzo looked back again to see the elevator shaft twitching, then quivering before something snapped. The flood was close. Too close.
The aquabuses teetered from side to side, kicking up small waves as the inmates clambered to be the first onboard. Lorenzo heard shouting from elsewhere, and found that an altercation had already broken out over pushing each other to get on board. He stayed pinned to the crane, flattened against it as the crowds pushed past. Every attempt to free himself was met with substantial resistance, forcing him to listen to the sounds of unrest that threatened to explode into mayhem at any moment. No, it couldn’t keep going like this, Lorenzo realised, the urgency in his gut growing stronger by the second. He had to get out. Get out of the way!
A swift shadow enveloped them, and Lorenzo looked in horror to see a jet of water surging up and out of the shaft with a bestial bellow, descending on them with an almost divine ferocity. Lorenzo heard them scream. Then he heard himself do the same. Even as the raging currents rushed towards him, Lorenzo spun and tried to run.
Or at least he tried to. Instead his joints became filled with the coldest frost from Snezhnaya, and he was left to meet his fate head on when suddenly, a voice reverberated through his head:
I, Iudex Neuvillette, hereby declare: People of Fontaine, your sins are forgiven!
It was a piercing ray of light that jostled Lorenzo awake.
Almost immediately his headache returned in full force, and through the viscous air he felt a damp hand come to his head. It was worse than what he was used to. Far worse. Not even the pounding hangovers after nights of drowning his sorrows out could compare to this. Whatever it was, it seemed to clamp over his head like a stubborn crab, painfully scraping his temples but not quite piercing them.
Something grainy passed straight through his wetted jumpsuit and poked at his skin directly. It clung to his hair too. As his hand came away from his head, he felt the same thing on his face.
Damned sand… He felt his arm fall onto a soft pile of it. It grazed the tip of his ears, muffling the sounds of the nearby waves washing up and around his body. Too shallow to provide any relief from the sand, but deep enough that each wave brought handfuls of it onto every part of his body. Like Lady Furina carefully decorating his prone form with sandy accessories.
The thought instantly filled him with loathing. That useless goddess who had done nothing but pose for the cameras as an imminent crisis rose around Fontaine, only exacerbating every injustice that had planted its roots deep into society?
Lorenzo reigned his thoughts in. It wasn’t Furina herself that he hated. No, it was her inaction. Her inaction as the people of Fontaine found the waters they called home turning on them. Her inaction, many years ago, when Lorenzo had been sent to fight into a freezing hell.
Despite that, he’d had faith in her to resolve a crisis that concerned all of Fontaine. She’d clearly failed to suppress the flood, however, if his last memories of the Fortress of Meropede were anything to go off of. Was this what the world under the primordial sea looked like? A vast nothingness, with only the intermittent currents to keep him company?
The waves came again, depositing more sand into his ears and hair. Lorenzo shifted uncomfortably. The sand brought back memories, memories that he would rather forget. He could almost hear the crack of muskets in the air, and pained cries falling on his ears all around him.
It would not do. He would not deign to wallow in his memories - and Furina’s substance - any longer. Though his full-body ache kept him pinned to the sand, Lorenzo got up as fast as his delicate head would allow, keeping his eyes tightly shut. Sand, water, or light, he could let none pass through his eyes. In the distance, beyond the waves, he thought he heard that goddess’ obnoxious laugh.
Shut up! He roared in his head, to its detriment. Recoiling from the new waves of pain, he succeeded in flipping himself over before his legs gave out and he fell, face flat in the water.
Salt. And rock. Furina tasted of everything he wished to escape, and yet now he was nose deep into her. Loathing turned to rage, and Lorenzo extracted himself from the submerged shore. Making sure to punch deep into the water as he was balancing himself, he managed to get up.
Suddenly the sky was below him and the sea above him, and Lorenzo flailed, taking several confused steps before the world righted itself again. Even then he couldn’t see much through the thin film of water. Outrageous.
Wiping his eyes, a beach came into focus, gleaming with heat. Beyond the greenery that sprouted past the beach, a dull, peeling wall rose to the sky.
A city? He couldn’t tell which one. Aquabus lines shot out from the city, gliding across the water and ascending to the sky. Lorenzo looked behind, and saw many kilometres of sea stretching into the horizon. In the distance, looming landmasses bore down on the deep blue.
None were a reliable way of telling where he was, though a hunch told him he was near the Court of Fontaine. From no other city could you get a completely unobstructed view of the sea and the lands that populated it.
Lorenzo was just about to turn and find a way around the city when he caught sight of a flash of blue in the greenery.
A garde emerged, mild surprise colouring his face. “Well I’ll be! Yet another one. You! Are you injured?”
“No.” He answered, after a moment of confusion.
“Good. Come with me. Let’s get you back to safety.”
Lorenzo nodded and followed. He stayed mostly silent, impervious to the garde’s attempts to make conversation. By the time the sandy path met a rock one, both had lapsed into silence.
When Lorenzo entered the Court of Fontaine he thought he’d guessed wrong on the beach. Impossible, he thought. This run-down wreck of a city can’t be Fontaine’s capital.
Then he recognised the flea market at the edge of the city, or what remained of it, and the squat residential buildings scattered all over the area. In the distance, the mechanical fountain in the middle of the Vasari Passage was turned on its side. Battered as it might have been, it was still the Court of Fontaine.
The smell hit him next. Though the industrial stink of smog and sweat in Fontaine’s lower city had been all but eradicated, what replaced it was not much better. Dead fish littered the streets, throwing up an ungodly smell that caused Lorenzo to double over and clasp his hands over his mouth. He squeezed his nose. Now the bile in his throat seemed to recede.
He made sure to step over the empty mollusc shells and weave around the oozing eel corpses as the garde took him to a shelter. He marvelled at the barnacle colonies that had formed on every building, and averted his gaze from a dead jellyfish hanging from a storefront sign. Filthy as the city might seem, however, it could not compare to what he had seen here before the flood, the lower city. In Lorenzo’s eyes, the area had been purified in a sense, scrubbed clean of the filth that tarnished it, both in the air and the hearts of the citizens.
After a short walk, they arrived. The crowd had begun forming long before they’d gotten near the shelter, and now that they were there it was near impossible to move. Most seemed to be moving out, thankfully. The garde told him that space was limited, and those who were well enough to walk on their own and return to their homes were quickly herded out to make space for those who needed it. He didn’t expect Lorenzo to stay for long. For that, at least, Lorenzo could be glad.
Cutting past the crowds with his shoulder, Lorenzo moved towards the crumbling entrance of the shelter.
Not a day later, Lorenzo found himself crouching in a cramped carriage, pushed up against a mass of men wearing striped prison uniforms like his. Where they were going, Lorenzo didn’t know, but that was natural. No one told them anything until they were neck deep in whatever trouble they had been thrown into.
The carriage rocked back and forth, occasionally jumping suddenly when going over a particularly bad stretch of road, or when something ahead scared the horses. Every time they stopped, the driver would slam a fist on his seat and let out a string of curses that made even the meanest, burliest prisoners blush. He was quite creative with them too, Lorenzo remarked to himself as both he and the footman argued a peddler off the road onto the crowded sidewalk.
Lorenzo too sighed in annoyance. He’d thought that maybe the flood would thin the crowds on the streets out a bit and make them easier to navigate, but the roads were packed as always. Motley throngs of citizens plodded past, some shifting home while others limped to the nearest shelter or anywhere they could take refuge. Horse-drawn carts trundled along beside them, each piled high with supplies bound for whatever place needed them. There was very little organisation in the way these relief operations were being carried out, Lorenzo noticed, though it seemed to be getting better as the hierarchy reestablished itself.
Lorenzo wasn’t sure whether to be proud of the resilience of the Fontainian people or annoyed at the fact that he could not be afforded even the small luxury of silence after the disaster. He was never a patriot, and had no allegiances except to those things that allowed him to continue living life his way. It was what he’d held closest to his heart, this way of life. He’d lived alone for most of early life, guided by nothing but his immature wits and luck. No parental figure had taught him how to survive on the grimy streets of the Vasari Passage, and the one person he could have considered a father…
Lorenzo shook his head, attempting to jar the thought out of his mind. What happened was in the past, and nothing could change it. It didn’t stop him from thinking, however. Cesar had been nervous, but excited, to perform the trick that no other magician could perfect. Lorenzo remembered hesitating, his hands shaking when he changed the position of the release switch. He remembered looking on in despair as he watched Cesar plummet to his death…
Lorenzo looked away from the drab walls of the carriage for a change in scenery, anything to keep himself outside of his head. Before long, the carriage halted again, the driver raising yet another storm of complaints. Any hope of the driver learning from previous encounters and trying to deescalate the arguments would always remain just that, not helped by the presence of his equally-hot blooded companion.
Lorenzo groaned. How long would they have to deal with this? It would have been faster to just walk, and from the whispers of the other inmates he could tell they agreed with him.
And if the prisoners were bored, one of the gardes standing by the edge of the carriage looked ready to clock out right then and there. The other, a young recruit by the looks of it, shrunk further into the corner than he already had since the prisoners had gotten into the carriage. His face, already scrunched up in nervousness, scrunched up even more.
Just then, Lorenzo heard something knocking against the carriage. The regular course of these interactions was heated arguing and yelling that slowly decreased in volume and intensity until both reached an agreement and parted ways, still disgruntled and steaming from the argument but reconciled nonetheless.
That wasn’t the case for this situation. The shouting grew as steam rises from a pot of boiling water, getting more intense by the second. Another knock came. Then another.
The sleepy garde, shaking himself awake, disembarked to investigate. As he rounded the corner of the carriage and strode to the front, the arguing seemed to simmer down. The other one sighed in relief, allowing his fragile, worried expression to fall away. He would not have to deal with another scuffle today.
Lorenzo shifted towards the garde. “Officer, what’s going on?”
The garde’s eyes shot to Lorenzo, his features tensing as he studied Lorenzo’s stature. Then the garde relaxed again. Perhaps he thought Lorenzo would be easier to restrain if it ever came to it.
“N-nothing,” the garde replied with a mask of indifference, a poor imitation of his partner’s. “Nothing that you need to concern yourselves with. Just sit and be quiet.”
Ignoring the garde’s attempt at an authoritative voice, Lorenzo sat back down. This was going to be a long day.
The commotion rose again, however, and eventually the nervous garde, sighing into his cap, had to get off and deal with the situation too, leaving the carriage doors wide open.
There was no one to stop Lorenzo from slipping away.
As soon as the realisation hit him, Lorenzo’s heart raced. Freedom was within arm’s reach, placed in his lap by coincidence. He refused to thank Lady Furina, as most people would have done. No, she wouldn’t have done this, not as the god of justice. Would she?
That wasn’t important. What mattered was getting out, fast. His eyes darted around the street, scanning the various people crowding the street. Most had noticed the commotion and stopped to look, a foolish instinct that they would soon be regretting once the action got out of hand. Once they inevitably ran, there was no telling whether they’d be safe or not.
It was now or never. He gathered his courage, and like a man reborn, he stood.
Lorenzo saw the other prisoners raising their heads in incredulity as he leapt out of the carriage, his feet striking the ground with the force of a ruin guard’s punch. To him, anyway. He cut through the crowd, ignoring the pain flaring up in his knee.
The crowd, too dumbfounded by the commotion and the sight of a prisoner escaping, did nothing. As soon as some did reach for Lorenzo’s fleeing form, he’d already crashed through the moving parts of the crowd, weaving past horses and traffic accidents.
“Stop!” Lorenzo whipped his head around and found two blue blurs in the crowd, appearing and disappearing as if phasing in and out of existence. The scale on their caps was unmistakable however. Lorenzo had company.
Pushing himself faster than he had in Meropede, he knocked over a woman carrying a basket of bread and swung around into a narrow alley. The world seemed to shrink, the only light coming from the thin gap between towering buildings. He ducked under a clothesline and ran right through a length of red tape.
“Wait! Don’t go there!” a voice came from behind him, much closer than it had been on the street. Lorenzo ignored it.
A wide, empty boulevard greeted Lorenzo, flanked by a multitude of large storefronts and apartments. The sun flickered agitatedly behind the buildings, occasionally blasting Lorenzo with beams of light as he ran.
Frantic footfalls followed closely behind Lorenzo as he weaved through the rubble-strewn streets. He could hear more joining, a dusty stampede forming behind him. Probably. He wouldn’t dare look back for fear of tripping.
Sunlight lay at a slanted angle around the corner he turned, to a street full of market stalls that had fallen apart. Lorenzo’s heart slammed. A dead end.
Lorenzo whirled around, fully expecting a mass of blue to rise up and tackle him to the ground, but there was only the decrepit lobby of an abandoned hotel. They had yet to catch up to him.
He turned back, and found a conspicuous spot of shadow in the light. Between two commercial buildings was a narrow alley, not unlike the one Lorenzo had escaped through. Just as the footsteps rounded the corner, Lorenzo dove into the alley, concealing himself in a nearby trash container.
The gardes’ voices reverberated within the container as they approached, and Lorenzo pulled his arms closer to himself. He couldn’t be caught, he thought as he gritted his teeth. Not now.
One of the gardes knocked his baton against the container, startling Lorenzo enough that he had to stifle a yelp, before continuing down the alley.
As they left, Lorenzo felt no relief. Yes, he’d avoided being captured. For now. But he’d committed himself to a life of paranoia and unending fear. The life of a criminal.
He stayed in the container just a little longer, wondering whether he had made the right decision or not.
It was dark by the time Lorenzo huffed to a stop, clutching his sides and panting furiously. Above, the stars provided the sole source of illumination, peering through the thin film of sweat over Lorenzo’s eyes.
Nothing but the chirping of crickets accompanied him as he again shuffled through the dust-stained streets. It was silent, as seemed to be the norm in this new Fontaine. No one went outside during the night, even to walk through the inhabited parts of the city. There was no light, after all. In the deserted parts, it was as if you’d been transported to another world, a world of dust and decay.
Lorenzo’s shoes scratched on the fragmented pavement, and an echo rebounded through the decrepit monoliths around him. Momentary alarm came as Lorenzo’s shoe snagged on something, but subsided as he looked down.
It was a chandelier. The flood had undoubtedly brought it here, plucking it off the ceiling of some fancy hotel and casting it down on the side of the road. Even crushed and battered, a wavering gleam danced along each chain and prism, the fractures marring them splintering the light into many fragments. Like a call for help. Just as it had once clung to a carved marble ceiling, it now clawed at the dirt, devoid of its former brilliance and purpose.
This, Lorenzo thought to himself, was a world where the fire of humanity had been extinguished, and all that remained in the night were the scorch marks of what had once been.
A sudden chilly wind swept through the area, stirring up a grainy mist that stank of the sea. Lorenzo pulled his arms closer to himself in a futile effort to keep warm, but it stopped neither the cold nor the stink. He leaned on a wall and looked up. The stars flickered, extinguishing what little light they had granted him, and Lorenzo was left to face the wind on his own.
It was close to that time of the year. The time that, Lorenzo believed, people romanticised far more than was necessary. The time when Fontaine’s temperate summers and autumns were swept aside by frigid winter winds, freezing great lakes and bringing the cursed snow upon them all. Perhaps a foreigner from Sumeru or some other arid nation would jump in joy at the sight of that wondrous substance, but Lorenzo dreaded the onslaught of joint pain that inevitably accompanied the cold.
He chuckled. He was turning into a gnarled miser from one of those old Fontainian tales, the ones who grumbled at others’ joy and rejoiced at their pain. The realisation that he was no longer who he used to be should not have been a surprise, but he stopped all the same. What was that inside him now? Had a frigid blizzard smothered the warm breeze of his youth?
But there was no point in worrying about that now. Every blizzard began as a breeze, just as this cold wind heralded the beginning of winter. And at such an inopportune time. If the government didn’t hurry up, half the city would be frozen under stray pockets of water yet to be drained.
Lorenzo continued onwards, taking a risk and turning into a residential block. Judging from the meagre, yellow light flickering in the windows dotting the buildings, they were inhabited. And there were quite a few of them too.
He came to a stop by a hollow office building. Before the flood, large windows would have been the first distinct feature of the building, with golden lettering on it reading “Pellegrini & Co.” A sign would have hung above with the same name carved into it. His office. He’d been forced to sell it when he’d been imprisoned, and although it was necessary he’d been loath to part with it. The flood had destroyed the glass, and the sign had been ripped from the horizontal post it hung from. Perhaps it was lying at the bottom of the ocean. Lorenzo would never know.
Regardless, Lorenzo barged in, allowing the door to shut behind him. Whatever the new owner had left on the desk would have all been swept away, but there was a slight chance there was something in the drawers. Lorenzo yanked each of them open, thrusting a pale hand into their dusty innards. In the end, he came up with nothing but a broken lamp and a pen knife, but pocketed the latter. It might come in handy.
Lorenzo shuffled up to the smashed window, watching the lights coming from each home flicker gently. The words of a half-forgotten man came to his mind. “In the dead of winter, the Sumeran man will gather the firewood, the Liyuean man will find a piece of flint, and the Mondstadt man will fan the fire. But the Fontainian man, he will build a village of wood and stone with the warmth of the flame”.
Lorenzo had believed that. Believed in Fontaine’s superiority and eternal reign. When he’d been drafted all those years ago, he’d marched to the front lines with patriotic pride blooming in his chest.
That fire had since dimmed. It certainly did no better on a cold night like this, where even his bones seemed to shiver. As the cold air seeped in from the broken window, Lorenzo felt a metal bar in his stomach curl, sending waves of spasms that caused him to shiver even more. Why had it suddenly become so cold?
The reality of his situation cut him deep. He had nothing, everything stripped away the second he turned himself in, and he’d added yet another charge on top of his counts of murder. His connections, the legal ones anyway, were sure to be moot, and he had nowhere to defend himself or even hide if danger came his way. Everything he’d worked for had gone to waste, and he was now no different from any other beggar on the street.
Lorenzo’s fingers dragged across the counter, curling into tightly-wound fists that seemed to pierce the skin on his hand with overgrown fingernails. Everything I have, gone. Gone with the wind. The same wind flowed through the window and caressed his cheek mockingly, its icy touch amplifying the waves of despair that shook his body. He found his thumb frozen, locked against his fragile fingerbone. He was petrified, completely helpless.
The darkness encroached upon Lorenzo as the firelights dispersed, like the advancing scourge on his heart. Lorenzo had escaped. But the darkness in his heart followed him always.