I: The Falling Rain

The great forest loomed above him, wild and green. Animals screeched and called in the distance, lost somewhere in the mist. The handle of the sword felt sweaty and sticky in his grasp with blood, and the mud sticking to his boots was slowing him down as he ran. He could hear the beasts behind him, howling and cackling in glee as he fled. He was starting to feel weak and the trees and bushes started to blur together into a single green-brown mass spinning around him, making his eyes hurt.

That's when she appeared, the bird-faced woman with the iridescent blue snake scales. The woman that held a great speckled egg within her clawed hands, and watched him with keen, predatory bird eyes. Silently she held it out to him in offering, and wavering on his feet, he reached towards it with a single, bloody hand...

---

He opened his eyes to the shadows of the thick, grimy rainfall spattering across his window in a slow, steady drizzle. The sounds of the street below his tiny, mouldering apartment were muted and even the constant wail of police and ambulance sirens sounded as if they were travelling across a great distance. He watched as a single chip of avocado green, out of style for at least thirty years (and questionable even then) fell from the wall across his bed to the small mildewy pile on the floor where so many others before had fallen over the past several months. Flashes of orange neon light reflected from outside pulsed across his vision. A lone cockroach ambled lazily across the baseboard.

Vasa groaned and wrestled his tangled bedcovers off. Somehow in his sleep he had turned himself around entirely so that his head was at the wrong end of the bed. He sat slowly, wincing from the fresh bruises on his body, and rubbed his face, feeling the prickly three-day stubble of his face and stared at the crumbling wall. For a moment he thought he saw the cracks like a great tree sprouting up from the baseboard, the fallen portions like white leaves, and the mess of deterioration were as the boughs and branches.

He shook his head to clear it. He had dreamt of the forest again. The forest and blood.

Sighing, he glanced at the clock, flashing 5:36 am. Outside and one story below, the crash and groan of metal on metal erupted, followed shortly by the screaming of people in the street. The neon sign outside of his window proclaiming the bottom floor to be a sex shop buzzed as it shut off on its timer, seven minutes late.

---

He stood alone in the rain at the crosswalk, the greasy drops coating his jacket with city grime. The woman next to him under her headache-pink umbrella chattered loudly on her cell phone about trivial matters that somehow had him feeling resentful. The radio in the battered car nearby suddenly blasted forth some horrible white noise that reminded him of harpies screeching before tuning to the local news channel. From the overly loud, yet drab, voice of the announcer, he heard that yet another catastrophe had occurred in some distant part of the world to claim the lives of thousands, and more terror from the middle east. He tuned it out as he strode across the crosswalk with the crowd of others there. The grey sky continued its steady drizzle upon the sad, grey buildings.

Heading for the restaurant where he worked, he wandered down a nearby alley, trying to avoid looking too closely at the contents of the dumpsters, and the collected detritus at the edges. Escape ladders dripped heavy drops to oily puddles below. A lone pigeon sitting in some dry nook under a windowsill watched him. He was thinking about mist and forests.

A noise startled him from his reverie, and turning to face it, he found himself confronted by a group of three men, teenagers really, each holding a battered looking pipe. All of them were covered in percings and tattoos, and seemed heedless of the rain dripping down their greased mohawks. In unison they grinned wolfishly. He had a moment to realize their intent before they advanced on him en masse, their bludgeons raised. The rest became a bloody, painful blur and the hooting cries of his attackers as they ran merrily down the alley, leaving him broken and barely concious amid the rubble of the alley.

A short while later, he watched a cockroach crawl across the dirty bricks across the alley, heard the soft cooing of the pigeon as it returned to its dry nook to watch him. His breathing came in ragged, painful gasps that shot fire through his chest and made his vision blur. He watched his blood mingle with the water around him, and felt the slow, steady fall of the rain erode away his mind until there was nothing left but the sound of the rain pattering against the cement, splashing in puddles, and dripping down the sides of lonely, forgotten buildings.

And, eventually, even that was gone.