The man had to make his way awkwardly through the crowd, which meant unpleasantly squeezing past people that were sometimes mostly naked, delicately avoiding what looked to be a walking tree covered entirely in thorns, and at one point giving wide berth to a four-legged, doglike creature that seemed beautifully carved from dazzling green stone, that was also actively engulfed in flames. He held his bedsheets around his waist, fearing that they’d fall off - some people here might be comfortable going naked, but he certainly wouldn’t be. His bare feet still hurt from the cobbled streets though, which were wet (with what, he didn’t want to think about) and nearly caused him to slip once or twice.

But it wasn’t long before this street turned onto a much wider one, and the crowd thinned out a bit. He found himself able to walk next to Zhura and Paravel.

“You see that?” Zhura said as they were walking along. She was pointing to a lumbering metal giant, surface polished to a fine sheen, blazing brightly in the sun. It stood head and shoulders above even the tallest on this street - and the tallest on this street stood head and shoulders above the man. It had no head; rather, it had what looked to be a ring of four trumpets around a polished nub where a head should be. Otherwise, though, it had the general shape of a wide, stocky man, though the surface of its body was covered in odd buttons and slides, as if the whole creature were some sort of instrument.

“Brass boys,” Zhura went on, as the giant plodded past, “City guard. They say the Forum…ah, our government - they say they hired some madman genius dweomer to make them. Nobody knows who it is, though.”

“Because it’s not a single person,” Paravel said scornfully from underfoot. “They’d have many dweomers working on this.”

“Well, either way.” Zhura shrugged. “They have smaller ones, too, but they need the big boys around. Some of the visitors to the city can be, let’s say, vigorous.”

They went on, pointing out other oddities to him. There was a cart that sold flasks of murky liquid that its proprietor - a slim woman no more than a foot high, with hypnotizing blue butterfly wings on her back - assured passers-by were ‘dreams of wonder, power, love and lust’ that she’d sell for ‘a favor to be named later.’ Or the park they passed by, its trees full of large, brightly colored birds that could speak real language. Or an odd fellow who seemed to possess entirely transparent skin and muscle, so that you could see the blood pumping through his veins and the pulse of his organs. He was currently eating a scone, to the delight of a few children around him, who were watching it travel through his guts with fascination.

But there was far too much to see to stop and gawk at every oddity. Soon, they arrived at Ragged Square.

It was an open plaza paved with a startlingly blue tile, almost as if you were walking on the open sky. It was dominated at one end by the curve of the humongous rainbow dome, which, the man noticed with some interest, was given a wide berth by most people. It was ringed with small, crowded shops, and also littered haphazardly with merchants pushing carts. But it did leave enough open space for people to relax, as well. He saw the fish-woman that he had spotted walking down the street earlier; she and her mostly-unclothed litany were in the center of the square, performing some sort of acrobatics show that people were clapping along with, throwing odd, rectangular coins on the ground for the performers to pick up. Nearby, a ring of disinterested folk watched a shaggy man in an austere cowl and robe scream at them about the need to WORSHIP THE WORM because THE WORM WAS LOVE and ALL MUST RETURN TO THE WORM.

The man could make a guess why it was called Ragged Square, too. In the center of it stood an outcrop of rock, jutting out of the ground nearly twice as tall as him. Planted in the cleft of this rock was a fluttering, tattered red flag. As they approached it, he could see that it was covered in dense golden script that he couldn’t recognize. It fluttered on a breeze that wasn’t there. Standing in the shadow of the rock it was planted in, he got a strange feeling - though he knew nothing about the language, or why it was there, it evoked in him a sense of bittersweetness, of a victory that had come though it had cost everything.

“I feel such too,” Paravel said, after the man had shook his head and the feeling had died away. The little lizard-creature was staring up at it with a solemn expression, her ears laid neatly on her back. “When I look at it. It is an odd feeling, for me. The flag cannot be touched - hands pass right through it. No force seems able to lift or bend the pole. And so it stays.” She gave a little rattle of her tail. “Perhaps a memorial for some lost people’s forgotten war? Likely no one will ever know.”

Zhura did not seem nearly so affected by the flag, however. She ignored it entirely. “Alright,” she said, turning to him. “First off, getting you some clothes. Those rags won’t last much longer and no one wants to see your netherlies. I know you don’t have any clink on you - money, that is,” she clarified, seeing his questioning look. “But I bet that could fetch a fair price. Enough to cover clothes, certainly.”

She was pointing at the little flower-globe, still clutched in his hand. The man felt a strong wave of indignation rush over him from some place he didn’t understand. “Oh…” he trailed off. Zhura sighed, and he shook his head. “No, I know it’s foolish…like I told you, I just picked it up when I first awoke. It just feels familiar, but so do other things.”

“Perhaps,” Paravel said quietly, “You do not want to let go because it is large in your memory? Hmm?” He looked down. The little lizard was staring up at him, face unreadable, those odd violet eyes unblinking. “In the memories you have lost, it speaks to you.”

Zhura frowned, looking down at Paravel, and then shrugged. “Or it could be that it is the object itself making you feel that way. There’s so many little warped things you can find here whose purposes were forgotten ages ago. Who knows what that thing was originally intended for?”

“I don’t know,” the man said, staring at the globe. Those little star-shaped flowers within it seemed so mournful. The amount of attachment he felt toward the thing surprised him. But then, after all, hadn’t it nearly gotten him killed when he refused to give it to Sark? Maybe it was best to get rid of it. “Alright, then,” he said, walling off his heart. “I’ll sell it. I need clothes, after all. This little bauble isn’t going to keep me warm.”

“Give it here,” said Zhura, grabbing it from him. Quicker than he could see, it disappeared into one of the many bulging pockets on her vest. “These sorts of things take time to find a buyer. I’ll cover the cost of clothes until I fetch a good price.”

The man was a little shocked at the loss of the globe. He had hoped that he would be able to hold onto it for a little while longer. He almost thought of asking Zhura for it back. But now that it was out of his hands, and out of sight, he felt his attachment to it quickly weakening. It hadn’t taken much, he supposed, to break that little addiction.

Zhura and Paravel led him to a musty, narrow little shop, filled with rows upon rows of a wild assortment of clothes, many of which looked like they were made for creatures with more limbs than he had. The only light in the place was the sunlight filtering through the dusty motes in the air, and the proprietor looked sort of human - except that he had six stick-thin arms, a face with eyes far too large and wide and a nose far to long and pointed, and he wore a gigantic black overcoat that covered the rest of him - and the man suspected that he looked far more inhuman beneath it. He greeted Zhura warmly, his voice having a sickly, buzzing quality to it, and she introduced him as “Mister Stills.”

The man’s appearance might have been unsettling, but he was very professional. At a few muttered words from Zhura, he crept out from behind the counter (and though his overcoat dragged along the ground, it sounded as if he had many more than two feet as he walked), and quickly went from rack to rack, his six arms pulling out clothes, seemingly independently while his head swiveled quickly to examine the ones that they chose, dismissing many with a sharp, jerking shake of his head. Even as he did this, two of his arms stretched out a needle and black thread and began making alterations to the articles he did keep.

Soon the man found a pile of clothes pushed into his arms. As he pulled these on, ducking behind a rack as he did so - it seemed he was expected to change in the midst of the shop, and both Zhura and Paravel made no attempt to give him any privacy - Mister Stillis scuttled into the back of his shop, and returned with a pair of sharp black boots that came up to mid-calf. And so eventually the man found himself dressed in a tight black vest over a billowy white undershirt, with a pair of long, dark pants that flared outwards before they were tucked into his boots. He was also given a heavy woolen jacket that came down to nearly the back of his ankles, with a hood for protection from the rain.

The man was just glad to have some sort of clothes to wear - he had seen too many varied outfits on the streets to know whether or not he stood out. He thought it rather likely that nobody really stood out for their clothing in this city - simply too many unusual sights for people to notice something as trivial as what someone was wearing. Zhura and Paravel seemed satisfied, and so he deferred to their judgment, thanking the shopkeep. “A pleasure,” Mister Stillis told him, with a wide grin that made him feel a little uneasy. “You were a pleasure to clothe. A fine subject. If only you had more time for me to really do my work. Come back when you have more time…and more clink. I will make you look spectacular.”

Once outside of the shop, the man offered his thanks to Zhura as well, but she waved him off. “You already paid me, remember?” she smiled, patting one of her bulging pockets - he actually had no idea if it was the one that the flower-globe was actually in. “Besides, Stills charged me less than he usually would. He charges less for the joy of working with a ‘beautiful canvas’, you know. I guess you were his type.” She jabbed his torso with a playful elbow.

Still, the man was grateful. The clothes fit well, were comfortable, and more importantly, gave him a bit of a sense of normalcy. Dignity, he thought, suited him. His surroundings may be unusual, but at the very least he wasn’t running through them half-naked. And I’ll be a little more prepared if I have to give these two the slip. Still, it was getting harder to imagine doing that. He was beginning to feel a bit of camaraderie towards his guides. Besides, if Doza was so dangerous, would they have just bought him clothes…? At least he probably wouldn’t be killed. Maybe he might get the two to open up about the subject before the meeting. “Alright, then, where to next? You said we might find someone here to ask about…well, me?”

Zhura fidgeted a bit and looked the slightest bit guilty. “Right, well, I don’t want to get your hopes up,” she muttered. “It’s a long shot that we’ll find anything, really. But where I usually hear my rumors is when I pop in for a drink at Hell for Hell.”

“Zhura!” snapped Paravel.

Zhura was immediately defensive. “What!” she cried. “I almost died today. I’m not allowed to get a drink?”

Something immediately fell into place for the man about Zhura’s appearance. He had assumed her red face was due to sunburn, perhaps. But it wasn’t. Zhura was a drunk. He realized with a sinking feeling that this little tour of the city might simply have been an excuse to go drinking. She might never have actually believed that they’d find anyone who might help him. But, well…she had kept her word about getting him clothes. And perhaps, he thought, If they get a bit drunk, they’ll open up about what to expect from Doza. “Well, I’m not opposed to the idea, even if there’s not much hope. But I’ve no, er, ‘clink’ to pay for anything.” Paravel threw her claws up in frustration and hissed something in a strange, sibilant language. It didn’t sound very friendly.

“Don’t worry!” Zhura said, suddenly all excitement and smiles. “I spent less on those clothes than I thought I would. I can spot you for a drink or three.” Ignoring Paravel’s grumbling, she took off across the square, stepping just a little too quickly.

Hell for Hell, the tavern she led them to, was an odd building even from the outside. Large and imposing, easily three stories tall, it felt almost more like a temple than a bar. It appeared to have been molded rather than built, a smooth, rounded shell of some hard, stonelike material the off-white color of an egg. The windows appeared to be a newer addition, crude holes chiseled into the side, though the glass itself appeared to have been carefully cut to fit them perfectly. The sides of the building were covered with a chaotic scrawl of artwork, denser at the bottom and tapering away towards the top. This depicted all manner of creative violence between demons, monsters and men of various shapes and sizes.

Stepping inside, he was hit with the heavy scent of smoke. The ceilings rose high above - whatever internal structure this place may have once had, now, there was only a ground floor. Long brown stains streaked the insides of the walls up to its rounded roof, and the persistent haze of smoke that rose above, like an indoor stormcloud, revealed their source.

Long cushioned chairs, surrounding circular tables that seemed to grow out of the ground, were scattered amongst the ground floor. It was certainly not full at the moment - the ground floor held room for hundreds, but right now much of it lay empty. Even so, the din of various conversations, in many languages, echoed off the empty walls. Some of the customers did not look even remotely human.

“Mimeon!” Zhura cried, as she approached a wooden bar that stood by the entrance - this furnishing, at least, did not seem to grow out of the floor. “How are things?”

Behind the bar stood a curious looking machine-creature, which seemed to grow out of the floor like a plant. Its trunk was a silver tube no wider than an arm, from which extended four spindly-thin, many-jointed arms, which were busying themselves making two drinks at once from the fantastic array of mysterious bottles that took up nearly the entire wall behind it. Topping off the trunk was a globe of multicolored lights, which swiveled upon hearing Zhura’s voice, some dimming, some brightening. “Hello Zhura!” it replied, the voice seeming to come from nowhere and having an odd quality to it, as if it were strained through a thin mesh, and seeming artificially cheerful. “Paravel. Didn’t think I’d see you here - I heard Doza had all of his boys down in the Tangles. Who’s your friend?”

“He’s, uh…his name’s Adahn,” Zhura said, stumbling a bit.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

The man frowned quizzically and opened his mouth, but Paravel tugged on his pant leg. “Better to not mention that you’ve lost your name,” she purred at him, her tongue snaking out between her sharp teeth, as he bent down to listen to her. “Some might think that bad luck. A curse.”

Zhura was busy constructing a story about how they had found the poor fool wandering the Tangles, lost and confused, with no memory of how he got there, or of his friends or family. “He knows he’s a bit of a dweomer, and well, look at him. Bit unusual, yeah?” Zhura gestured towards the man, confusing him once more. “He doesn’t look like a vagrant to me. I figure someone conked him good and dumped him in there. You heard of anybody looking for someone like him?”

“No!” said Mimeon, still with that tone of force artificial cheerfulness. “But hey! I’ll keep an ear out for you.” The cheerfulness dropped from his voice. “Are you going to order?”

Zhura wilted a bit. She had said she didn’t have high hopes, but apparently she had been hoping for more of an answer than that. “Yeah,” she muttered, giving an embarrassed half-smile. “Sure.”

She stayed by the bar to place their orders for them - the man had no idea what to make of the drinks on offer, and some of the alcohol seemed to be actually glowing. He was sure he saw one bottle swimming with black tadpoles. Paravel, in the meantime, led him to one of the tables, and he helped the little lizard stack cushions up on one of the nearby lounging-chairs, as she was too short for it to serve as a suitable seat otherwise. The table, the man noticed, was covered with the same sort of artwork that had covered the outside of the building, drawn in the black and white of a pencil sketch. He traced a finger over one portion of the drawing, depicting a dog-headed demon with a body of curling snake tails on a field of corpses. To his surprise, it reacted to his touch. The demon, its dog head snapping and growling, was lifted off the ground as he slid his finger across the surface. When he removed it, it immediately plummeted back towards the bloody field, where it crumpled, broken and twitching.

“Oh, I didn’t mean to kill it,” he muttered to himself. He hoped that hadn’t meant he had broken something. He awkwardly tried to cover up the mess with a napkin.

Zhura joined them, and it wasn’t long before a server - a pale, silent woman with short, tawny hair, dressed in scandalously transparent red silks - came by with their drinks. Paravel got a stone bowl of what looked to be a sticky green syrup, Zhura got an enormous tankard of something cloudy and yellow which shot out little orange sparks where it met the air, and which seemed to have one of the little tadpoles swimming in it, and he…he got a pint of what looked to be a normal dark lager. At least Zhura had kept his order reasonable.

He tried to offer the serving girl an appreciative smile, and she glared back at him with an expression that, impressively, clearly communicated I would skin you alive and bury you in salt if I could.

“Well,” Zhura said, as the man turned back to the table a little perturbed, “How about a toast to ah, Adahn, here. Our newest addition to the City of the Lost!” She raised her enormous tankard - which looked almost too heavy for her to lift with one hand - and then, without waiting for a response, began taking massive gulps from it. Paravel darted her tongue in and out of her drink, and the man shrugged and took a swig from his as well. Though he did test, with a small sip at first, to ensure that this was actually normal beer.

It wasn’t. It rolled across his tongue with a strange, deep sweetness that settled in somewhere behind his nose, and which seemed to irresistibly prick a smile from his lips. Well, it might not have been normal, but at least it was pleasant.

It didn’t take long for Zhura to become clearly intoxicated. Where her face had usually been worn, even a bit hard or suspicious at times, it now eased into laughter and smiles. Paravel, well, he wasn’t sure what lizard-rabbits looked like when drunk - or even if she is drunk, a voice in his head said, who knows if she can even metabolize alcohol? But her long tail was becoming more active, lashing back and forth, as she drank. They regaled him with tales of the sorts of drinks you could get here - some of which sounded like they caused psychotic episodes rather than a state of drunkenness.

“You know, Zhura,” he said, interrupting her as she was describing a drink that had caused her to see floating eyeballs everywhere for a week, “I heard you mention that I looked…unusual. Do I really stick out so much?” He had the impression that he ought to avoid that sort of thing. At least some of the…things that he had seen on the streets looked as if they might eat people.

She put her drink down. The black tadpole in its depths seemed to be swimming about a bit nervously now that half of its home had disappeared. “Well,” she said eventually, “Yeah. You do stick out a bit.” She fell silent again, studying him, considering. “Nothing…crazy, I suppose, just to look at you.”

When she did not elaborate, the man decided to press the issue. “How, exactly?”

“Well, you’re unmarred, for one.” Zhura frowned into her drink. “No scars. No signs of disease, blemishes. In this city, that’s already unusual. And you’re very…fair. Very….” she struggled to find the right word. “...symmetrical.”

“You’re very handsome,” Paravel interjected with a titter. She reached out and stroked a strand of his long white hair with her claw. “Beautiful, even. I’m not even your species, and I can tell that.” The man felt heat rising to his cheeks. He hadn’t given much thought to it, or to examining himself - whatever glimpses he had seen in glass had been all he knew. He supposed, really, that he didn’t give much of a damn what he looked like, but it was impossible not to be flattered by the compliments.

“Right,” Zhura went on. “It’s a bit unusual. Enough to make you stick out, especially here. You definitely don’t look like the sort of person who hangs out in this part of the city. You’ve got what my maw would have called, a ‘noble look about you’. There’s a reason why Stills liked working on you so much.”

By now the man thought he might be as red-faced as Zhura. He resisted the urge to cover his face in embarrassment. They think I’m handsome, a little voice inside of him preened. It wasn’t good, he reminded himself. Anything that drew attention to him, here, was unlikely to be a good thing. “I, er…I suppose I didn’t realize,” he said, into his mug, as he took another sip.

“And that isn’t all. You’re a dweomer, and there’s always something about them that people can tell. I’m not sure what it is, but most of the time, you watch someone for a bit, you can tell that they’re a dweomer.”

“And,” Paravel said quietly, between laps of her drink, “He has the Gift.”

“He does?” Zhura said, looking at the lizard-creature in surprise, the same time the man said “I do? What gift?”

Paravel’s three purple eyes blinked slowly in succession. “Yes, talented one. You can taste minds, as I do. It is untrained in you, of course. But you have likely already felt some of the effects. You can tell the serving-girls here are a little odd, yes?” She nodded across the room, to where the serving-girl who had dropped off their drinks was now taking orders from another table.

“Well,” said the man, “I thought she might have been a little unhappy, but…”

Then he paused, watching the serving-girl from across the room. The more he watched, the more the noise in the rest of the room seemed to die away. She was all smiles, giggling flirtatiously with the other customers. One might even say she was being a bit seductive, what with the revealing outfit she wore. But something about her made his skin crawl. He was dimly aware of the feeling of floating, drifting across the room, as if some part of him was being pulled towards the serving girl, drawn into her-

Suddenly, his mind was filled with horrific visions: screaming gray skies, a city choked with dust, starvation-thin arms clawing up at the sky, a thousand voices screaming, begging for mercy where none would come, people coughing their lungs to dry and brittle desiccation, black and reeking boils, flesh rotting off the living bone, the throbbing heat of infection, and all the while a voice screamed triumph, an inhuman, endless voice, “WITHER, WITHER, ROT AND WITHER, SHRIVEL AND DIE, DEATH, DEATH DEAAAAAATH-”

The man’s eyes snapped open. He found he was sweating profusely and gripping the edge of the table, staring down at it. He could almost feel the serving-girl’s stare boring a hole into the back of his skull. “What in the world was that?” he asked raggedly.

“You see? You have the Gift. I helped guide you a bit, but I could not have done so if you did not have it.” Paravel lapped greedily at her drink, then raised her dripping snout to smile smugly at Zhura. “I told you the help here was strange.”

Zhura frowned, giving the serving girl a concerned look. More of her drink was gone, and now the black tadpole was flopping helplessly in the dregs. “If you say so. But you see, there’s all that about you that makes you unusual.” She leaned in, playing idly with one of the zippers on her vest, and said confidentially, “I’ve got some ideas about you, though.”

The man, still recovering from his visions, glanced up in surprise. “You do?”

“Sure.” Zhura leaned in even further, so that he could smell the alcohol on her breath. “I mean, waking up in a tube like that - who does that remind you of, Paravel?” The little lizard creature groaned, covering her eyes. Zhura just grinned. “That’s right. Fred. The Plague of Freds.”

“Fred…?”

“That’s right.” She was slurring a bit, now, but Zhura was clearly delighted to have a chance to tell this story. “So a while back, years ago - this bint named Fred shows up, right? Friendly enough, says he’s new in town. And then more show up. More Freds. More of the exact same guy. Each one friendly, each one saying he’s new. They don’t recognize each other, though. When two Freds meet, they just treat each other like strangers. And then every day more Freds keep showing up, until it seems like some places in the city are half Fred.” And then she wheezed with laughter, wiping a tear from her eye.

“I never knew why you thought it was so funny,” Paravel muttered. “This went on for moons. It was terrible.”

“Oh, you’re no fun. Oh…” Zhura still struggled to hold in snickers. “Anyway. As it turns out, some weird new building had made its way here, forgotten from some other world…and all it took was a smart dweomer to figure out that it had all sorts of machines inside that could grow people.” She sighed wistfully. “Hallifax the Left-Handed, he called himself. Of course, once the Forum figured out what was going on, they weren’t too happy. The Guard rounded up all the Freds, and the rumor is they locked Hallifax up with them, somewhere. With no food.”

The man shuddered, pausing as he raised his glass to his lips. His drink didn’t seem so appetizing anymore. “I don’t get what that has to do with me, though,” he sighed, setting his drink back down.

“Just this. Fred wasn’t born, he was grown. There were no baby Freds. And I spotted the Guard when they were smashing up and carting away some of the equipment, when they destroyed Hallifax’s funny little farm. It wasn’t tubes, but there were big glass bubbles that they grew the Freds in…Eh?” Zhura gave him a sly smile. “Maybe you were grown, like him, eh?”

“But I have some memories,” the man protested, feeling a bit offended by the idea.”Or at least…something like memories.” He hadn’t given much thought to his beginning, yet - for goodness’ sake, I’ve only just recently gotten some clothes. But something about the idea of being grown, like some sort of fruit, offended him. Then again, the skeleton-machine abomination had called him newborn…

“Here’s what I think - I’ve heard rumors about this sort of thing.” Zhura’s voice had dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Imagine it. Smart, powerful dweomer wants a bit of immortality, wants a bit of youth. Builds himself a new body. Figures out how to hop from one body to another…”

“Oh, just like that, is it,” Paravel tittered into her bowl.

Zhura blinked in surprise. “You can’t tell me you haven’t heard of such a thing. Luck, you’ve been here longer than I have.”

“Yes. I hear of this, now and then. Eternal Migo was one. Nasty man - always made bodies with very big heads. And too many mouths. Some say he was originally a dozen or more dweomers, all crammed into one skull.” Zhura gave an idle wave of her claw. “He tried to overthrow the Forum and declare himself the new King on sheer skill of Art alone. Killed three Postulators. He turned out not to be so Eternal when they threw him from the highest spire in the city with all his tongues cut out.”

Zhura slapped the table in satisfaction, perhaps a little harder than she intended; she blinked, as if startled, when it rattled. “So you see? It isn’t unheard of. Of course if you’re gonna grow a new body and all that, go through all that trouble, what are you gonna do? Make it strong, beautiful…”

The man really did bury his face in his hands as Zhura waved her hands in his direction. He tried to force words out past his embarrassment. “Are you saying that I did that? Just hopped into a new body? But I don’t know the first thing about doing any of that.”

“It is a possibility,” Paravel said, after a moment. “Though Migo was the only one I knew, and he died centuries ago…”

The man forced himself to bring his hands down. He had taken a breath to speak, but paused for just a moment to glance at Paravel. Did the little lizard imply that she was centuries old? But he barreled on. “If this were the case, though,” he said, “Why don’t I have all my memories, then? And wouldn’t there be some, uh, old body to get rid of?”

Zhura shrugged as if these were minor details. “Who knows? Maybe something went wrong when you hopped over. Maybe that was the ‘ripple in the art’ Doza’s dweomers felt. Something went wrong and it warped your head…”

“But the body,” Parevel insisted. Her long tongue slithered out to lick the last few drops from her bowl. “I think he was wounded, and the chamber he was in was meant to heal him, and then he lay forgotten for a long, long time. Why else would he have been so deep in the Tangles?”

“Now that, I don’t know.” Zhura reached into the bottom of her glass to pluck out the wiggling tadpole, then tossed it in her mouth and bit down with an audible pop. “But everything else makes sense. Unless -” suddenly, she froze, looking towards the doorway.

The man glanced where her gaze had fallen, and gasped. There, by the doorway, darker than the shadows, stood Sark. Or at least, it was someone that looked and dressed exactly like Sark - completely covered head to toe in black, and wearing a frozen silver mask. The only difference was that this mask looked simply bore a calm, unemotional demeanor, instead of one contorted and deformed.

He made his way over to them, his dark cloak barely moving as he did so, making it look as if he were floating across the floor. He stopped by their table and stared down at them. “I thought that I’d find you here,” he said, in a gravelly, rasping growl. Then he gave a weary, put-upon sigh. “So, how did I die this time?”

“Incinerated,” Paravel replied. “In an instant. Poof, nothing but ashes.”

“No body to bring back,” Sark grumbled. “Figures.” He jerked his head towards the man, who was still staring at him wide-eyed. “Who’s this gawking dullard?”

“He met you, before you…” Zhura made a gesture with her hands implying an explosion. “Sark has, well…let’s say, a bit of a deal with our boss.” She smirked. “I don’t know if it really counts as immortality.”

“Close enough for me.” Sark bent down, until he was leaning over the table, his silver mask staring blankly at her. Zhura stared back calmly. “Speaking of our boss. Is this guy what we were looking for down in the Tangles?”

Zhura made a show of taking her time to answer, pretending to take one last sip from a mug that had already gone dry. “Yeah, we think so. He’s totally conked, though. Doesn’t remember a thing.”

Sark straightened. The man hadn’t seen it change, but it seemed now that his mask bore the traces of a cruel smile. “Well, then. Let’s be off. It’s time to meet Doza.”