I wandered for weeks, losing track of which was when, before I found a sane, habitable area. I was high above the ground where the old machines were cold. The citizens I found at first were mostly vagrants who ignored me when they learned I had no food. I was in some strange space between hunger and satiety, though I hadn't eaten the entire time. I found myself tiring sooner, and sleeping longer, but my body was somehow sustaining itself. I even did without water, and the little I perspired turned to nill. Urination was a thing of the past. And so I was of no use to the starving amblers of the district they simply called 'Red Side'.

My first long term acquaintance was a boy called Tythus. I first saw him when he'd been beaten and thrown into a heap of refuse, though I suspect I'd encountered him sooner. I remembered the first time I'd caught sight of Eris; her back against the wall, a targ leaning over her chest with a thermal blade. I saw him in the same position, only his violation had been completed, and the movement I saw from the web of catwalks I'd been properly lost among was only the twitching of his foot. I found a boda in the junkheap, and though I doubted it contained anything healthy, I held it to his lips, surmising that he would only improve from feeling any sort of moisture on them. The boda was empty, and the look he gave me tore my heart in two. Though I knew nothing of the boy, I held his hand and sat by him as he died. He wore a chain around his neck. The pendant had been broken from it, but the weave was of a unique, vine-like design. I took it as a token that I might show it to people I met and learn what sort of society would treat a child so.

So much death! I called it a junkheap. It was. A human junkheap. And not a tyfloch, antagarthan, or lucien junkheap. Humans alone were tossed in bags into that pit. And they'd been thrown in there by the score. I discovered this when I began climbing out, and I took hold of a large, glossy black bag and felt was undeniably a skull within it. Somehow it took realizing the nature of the refuse to open the door for the stench. I'd smelt it, of course, but one expects a pit of trash to stink, and so I was guarded until I saw that I was within a mass grave. Tythus reminded me of Astus, and those feelings of restrained fondness for what turned out to be a mere projection rekindled, so I emptied a bag that was less rank the others and put him in it so I could lash him to my back with the length of rope I found in the pile. It was stained. Perhaps the neck it once wrapped around had rotted, letting the head drop off like an over ripe apple.

I found a ladder in the wall opposite, and when I'd risen from the pit I opened the bag to see that I had somehow confused it for another bag. I held it over my lap while I looked into the pit, using my truesight to spy a bag with still a spot of warmth. Then I rolled the false bag over the edge and retrieved little Tythus, who for some reason I felt deserved a better grave than this. For three days I carried him around, and must have looked a sight indeed to those we encountered. A man in armor, covered in flowing white garb with a strange hood of silver rings that covered his whole face, carrying a wearing a child's corpse as a cyamodus wears its shell. Most people gave us a wide berth, while others rolled their head to one side, then back to the other, the vision of apathy as they sat against the walls of the high ceilinged corridors that made up much of Red Side.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

First I took his chain to show people, then I wanted to find him a solo grave, then he became some sort of ornament. Perhaps my sanity had become a casualty of Tarthas, or perhaps this was merely an affinity for death that comes from being incapable of it. I pondered over death a lot while I had the dead boy in tow. I wondered if I'd have to be unmade in some horrific way as Belial was, or if there wasn't some simple method, perhaps a weapon like the one Doctor Danders attacked me with that left me a bonafide scar. I also wondered if I was truly immune to death, or not rather experiencing death in a prolonged manner, my mind and heart and soul each withering a little after my many resurrections. I would find mirrors here and there.

I found a hall with a series of mirrors hung on either side. They were not native to this part of the magnacity, but taken from some more opulent area and hung here as trophies, or perhaps some mad provost fancied them as portals. I looked in them as we walked, reflecting on the pure white hue of my skin. I wondered if the fluid in my veins was something other than blood, so I drew my knife and let some out. It was as red as it ever was, and steamed a little when it touched the cold steel floor. Corpse white and devoid of hair or perspiration, but hot red blood comes out when I am opened. I am a strange creature. Fitting, I suppose, considering who worked on me after my progenitor died.

But my body is a whitewashed grave. I may look beautiful and pure according to my Eris, but whatever another might see; a tall white fountain, a winter that never ends (or am I a summer that never seems to come?), I am a vessel for rot. Inside me lurks a parasite that despises the logic of the world, and hungers for the absolution of a past generation that did not live to suffer from the consequences of their titanic error. I've seen it. Turk did not realize that when we entered the shared dreamscape I could see the shameful after image of his strongest thoughts. One day, while I slumbered and he labored, he cut me open and examined the beast entangled around my spine. He saw the segmented horror with its tentacles as fine as fungal roots, sprouting by the millions in descending scale so thoroughly that one could almost argue that I had been attached to it.

I grew tired of walking, and more tired of thinking, when we had crossed the hall of stolen mirrors and found a barren space of grated floors and a thin rail that kept us from falling into a truly immense chasm. There were gas lanterns with bulbs the length of a field above us, but the space was too big even for those lights, and they were old and jaundiced anyway. All the light offered did was show us just how huge a space we'd found. I peeped over the rail, searching my belt pouches in my mind for something vestigial to throw over, when I thought I felt movement in the bag and almost fell over when I jolted out of surprise. I set the bag down and rolled it back over Tythus's head, hoping that I had been wrong and he had simply been in a healing sleep. But his eyelids were closed shut and the spheres within them still. Also, pus had been seeping out of his nostrils and ears. I tied the bag around his head and laid him down, then went to sleep. He was gone when I woke up.