The First Act [The Fallen] - The Deity that Fell on His Bottom (1)

Carl walked through the streets, keeping to the narrow sidewalk. Looking down at the uneven surface, at the grey bricks that went up and down like waves up till a bend in the corner, his mind was preoccupied by the strange occurrence that had taken place just this morning.

Gazing around the deserted block, at the red brick road that went up steeply, at the cars lining the sides, sounds of quarreling fell on inattentive ears. At first, he looked up, at the second floors of the buildings, at the washing lines swaying, at the clothes flapping in the breeze, thinking the noise came from up there, but then he heard it again, coming from his right, a distant kerfuffle.

Droplets of washing water sprayed on his cheeks, his face, his eyes, reaping his attention. The smell of detergent was faint. The freshness, the coldness. It stung him, but in a good way, and he relished in it. He blinked. Then his eyes drifted to the right, to where he thought was the source of the noise.

It was the darkness that stared back at him. A narrow canyon squashed between two rigid buildings, with some crumbling bricks darkened with moss jutting out at random places on the walls.

Sprayed graffiti danced across one side, a cacophony of bright colors - shades of violet and aquamarine, dimmed by the shadows. It looked out of place - the greyness of everything around glaring at it. No doubt unwelcomed.

The distorted words continued endlessly across the bricks, blending into the dark, simmering and dispersing into nothingness. Words that represented today's society, representing people's protests against injustice. He could not see what it read, but he was sure.

He gazed into the blackness for longer than he intended, his thoughts temporarily relieved from recent problems. With prolonged exposure to dim-lighting, his pupils widened, searching for the tiniest crack of light.

Accustomed to the pitch blackness of the alleyway, his eyes began to make out more of what the dark had covered. A dumpster, propped against the far side of the wall in a corner a little further overhead, and dabbed with semi-transparent green paint, with yet more of the graffiti splattered on the bent surface. Grated rust had deteriorated the corners, the paint peeling to reveal dull steel. Thrown back, the lid was exposing garbage, unleashing the stench. Going smack-dab into his nostrils it went riding the wind that whizzed past. His nose filled with the smell of rancid bologna and used diapers, old bone and rotten fruit gone soft.

Reeling over, he made to go away but was stopped in his tracks by something that caught his eye. Over the side of the dumpster, nearly toppling to the ground, was what he thought to be a broken doll. An abandoned puppet. Lifelike it was, a giant of a man. It bent in the waist upwards, seeming to hang onto its last moments.

Its head, only the silhouette Carl could make out, touched the ground, with some kind of liquid dripping down it. Bouncing off what little light there was, a puddle below it. Sounds

of running water flowed into his ears, seeming as if it actually was churning inside his eardrums, into one ear and cascading down the other. Washing his brain, the water was tranquiling.

He felt a tingling wetness, a line of water droplets, the warmth of something that just came out of his ears trickle down his neck. Reaching up, his hand felt for the scruff. What he found was blood, as his hand instinctively went for his nose. It flared with the iron scent of it. Now that he was aware, he felt numb around his ears, the prickly feeling of an opened wound, deep inside the cavity.

Dizziness overcoming him, he started to feel a sense of nauseaty. Vision blurred, he went staggering back, hands blindly reaching for a grasp behind him. The air was the only thing to greet his flailing. Suddenly scraping a rough surface he was up against the wall and breathing heavily now, taking short intakes of air, rasped gulping accompanying it. Blood spraying from his nose, wild thoughts raced into his fleeting mind. He had a flashback to the time he caught influenza. The feeling was the same now; warm, sticky fluid overflowing his nose holes. Dripping into his gaping mouth the taste was overwhelming.

Trapped now in his own world of suffering, a world that seemed to be beating him black-and-blue, a world of gurgling pain and blurry vision, he slid down the wall, clothes bedraggled and stained. Numbness stopped him from any feel as he slammed the marbled ground. Concrete never seemed so soft, so warm. Warm with blood. Dull, stinging pain on the collisioned parts of his body brought tears to his eyes. Seeing no end to the suffering, he started to feel the first bouts of despair. How had it come to this?

Taken suddenly to a fit of ragged coughing, blood drew up to taste, choking him. Each gulping gasp as he tried to pull air that wouldn't come. Lain on his side, he struggled to make sense of what was happening.

In the midst of his misdemeanour an ear-splitting shriek diverted his attention from even his pain, his ignorance of anything else, aside to get away, far, far away from the insufferable pain that was, right now, engulfing his very being. His sight passing in and out of focus, he felt himself being drawn to the sound. Before he knew it he was facing into the gloom of the alleyway, to the direction of the shrill. Through distorted eyesight, he could see It did not seem to be a dead end. Though he could not make out where it opened into. Was there even an alleyway here? Swimming in and out of consciousness, thoughts disarrayed he could not recall there ever was.

He was lying on his stomach now, head steadied looking straight ahead, trying to see deeper into the abyss. His eyelids dropped in his exhaustion before he lifted it again with all his might, struggling to muster strength and suddenly he couldn't see anything anymore. Something had blocked his view. It was the shadow of a being looming over him and when he lifted his head to look upwards, to see who it was he had to stifle a scream.

The most terrifying face Carl had ever seen was looking down upon him - it seemed as if the being was stooping low, so that its head was almost level with Carl's. He thought he'd seen the embodiment of a true nightmare of a face in that split second their eyes met, but something stirred in him, making him double over in wretchedness, and when he strained to lift his eyes in all his agony to confirm his worst fears, to see the grotesque excuse of a humanoid face hovering right above him again, he had to stifle another scream.

The face was changing. Dimples and warts on its calloused, weather-beaten forehead were squirting out puss, becoming smaller in the process. And its eyes, a gaping black hole surrounding an eyeball in a sea of yellow liquid, faded into the mottled gristle of a skin not unlike those of a shark's. Yellow sulfur poured out of a hole on its head, creating sheets of acid rain gushing and splattering on Carl's scalp, his agonized screaming blundering the walls and creating echoes of sheer agony that rang out onto the streets.

Carl could not think for the life of him why he was still alive at the moment. He seemed to be coming into something of unknown territory, something beyond dying, beyond the boundaries of life and death, beyond the REM phase of eternal sleep. Pain had seeped out of his neural system long ago, and his soul was now experiencing the sharp tug of the Grim Reapers as they attempted to pull it out of his severed and already unrecognisable body.

The Grim Reapers, twins they were, were wary of the being that stood in front of them - it was well known to them that Creatures from the Ancient Kingdom had many times tried to interfere with the job of the Reapers, and that they would be seen lingering around dying people - like the current person they were dealing with. The Hrule - as the Creatures eventually came to be called - in front of them was a Phase 3, which meant it had undergone two threshold evolutionary breakthroughs - a rare calamity. It had consumed at least five hundred and twenty six souls of dead people, a few of them being eaten right here in the alley. Phocoena, one of the Grim Reapers in the alley, had witnessed already seven people on the verge of death, their souls being brought from all over the city into the makeshift alleyway made by the Hrule. The bodies, after forcefully being left by the souls, would disintegrate in a matter of seconds, but also depending on the frequency of distorted time and space in the area made by the Hrule. But one body, it seemed, did not disintegrate in the same rate as the norm. The body thrown in the dumpster.

When the Creatures entered Earth, they would need to tear a rift between two dimensions that connected both worlds. And it was not an easy feat to accomplish.