1.2 The Street

The sky hung low over the street as Gerin Raevnes walked to the docks on the north extremity of the capital. The final draft of the Letter of Summons he wrote earlier was tucked away beneath his loose fitting robes. His feet carried him down the cobblestone streets which descended from the central citadel of Sisken, the capital city of the once glorious Nalin Empire which had fallen into decadence and fractured in the past hundred years.

Sisk expects the Lords to simply walk into the capital and accept him as true Emperor? Foolish. I thought he knew better than that. The Council will certainly be disappointed in his lack of foresight.

The last period of unification was some seven hundred years ago—Nivaek’s Peace. That was before the elf-like Gleshier appeared on the Dark Continent to the north; that was long before the slimy Deh Klon, half-breeds who sprung from the accursed sexual union of Gerin’s race, the Kraemen, and Gleshier, came to inhabit the Middle Isles.

Gerin shivered as he thought of the Deh Klon’s hairless, unnaturally skinny bodies, their gaunt faces and hollow cheeks almost always hidden beneath the shadow of a hooded dark robe. A race that dwelt mainly underground, the Kraemen saw them as aberrations—terrible results of illicit and clandestine sexual unions. The Middle Islands were crawling with them. Gerin hadn’t yet gotten used to their presence: the way they would sidle up to him, silent and brooding; the way they smiled as if they were privy to some secret he would never learn; the way they breathed so quietly and slightly, even after the most physically demanding activity.

Gerin shivered again. This time, it was because the cold night air had taken him by surprise as he emerged from the cover of the densely clustered buildings in the city proper. The dock was not much farther.

Summers have been colder than usual these past few years. Perhaps the spirits of the dead we’ve buried on the river all these years are coming back to warn us of some calamity. Though we cannot hear their wails of warning, their cold breath still buffets our exposed flesh as we scurry about in their wake.