Like a snowball concealed in faint darkness, the city of Boneclad dwelled. A place where the sun hadn't graced its cold lands of white for fifty years. In its heavy snow, a wearisome walker's boats sunk deep as they walked underneath a black hood. Those steps were delayed by the conflict of emotions erupting within their mind. It was not a positive surprise, it was rather a horrifying observation. The white city was tarnished by the insides of its residents, as the wanderer walked through this unpleasant sight, their mind and heart rebelled against the vision flowing through their eyes.
In the otherworldly neo-gothic architecture and technologically wondrous sights, the smell of blood and fuel intertwined forming a choking scent of death, alongside the grim sight of snow-coated gutless corpses of young men and women, the portrait of hell had received a thousand brush stroke. The contrast between the city and it's insides assured the existence of a once glorious past. The city that once soared the sky, Irongate.
Morbidly interesting were the streets the wanderer went through. Something about those countless departed souls and blood-drunk snow triggered the sleeping memory in the wanderer's brain. They could hear the chattering on each doorstep concerning a battle, and they could see the heartbroken families picking whatever was left of their brutally killed loved ones.
The wanderer cursed the day their eyes were opened, and with each racing breath, they hoped to awaken back in the bright memory of the glorious city they recalled. It was strange to witness how casual everyone seemed to deal with this grotesque sight, a woman smoking a cigarette as she sat on a chair in front of her clothing boutique with the remains of a once human being scattered across the sidewalk. Or that man collecting the teeth out of every head he sees, not smiling or frowning, just calmly doing what seemed to be quite normal. That was not a memory the wanderer remembered, that wasn't Irongate, the city were the world envied its residents in hope of ever touching its ground. The wanderer recalled how hot it could get, they recalled the sun never escaping the fancy streets where they lived their childish fairytale.
Behind that hood, the very weak sunlight showed an odd yet beautiful eye color that pierced right through the streets in horror. The eyes were ocean blue sparkling with an innocent yet exhausted curiosity of a young heart, these eyes suddenly grew colder with every step, and the sunlight strayed away from them shamefully, these eyes carried something holy yet damaged, and the wanderer decided to cover themself once more, wandering the streets breathless and weak.
The mechanical owls hovered above their shoulder, unaware of the wanderer's identity they only managed to make the wanderer flinch in surprise, almost tripping over the mountain of snow they walked over. The mechanical owls were made to secure the city from its current enemy who might be dwelling within the slums of the city.
Words were too tangled inside their injured mouth, the wanderer had lost its strength to wonder where they were. All they knew was that their eyes were lying on where it should be. An old crumbling house that marked the familiarity of home, yet not being it precisely.
The wanderer's steps grew faster and faster, and the sound of its gasping became louder, but it took the first step and knocked on the door, once, twice, and thrice.
It had lost its energy.
A distant sound of an old man's coughing approached the door, "I'm coming!" he said as he continued to cough violently, by the time he opened the door, the wanderer gasped loudly in pain and the old man rushed to carry them as blood dripped from their clothes.
The old man carried them inside and let them sit down but once he took off the hood, his eyes widened as he howled in fear, running backwards as he grabbed a knife threatening that horrifying creature he just saw.
"What..What the hell are you?" He cried in a genuine freight. The creature he saw was a young girl, almost fifteen with a shaved head and a terrifying bionic arm and jaw, only her glimmering blue eyes looked human, the old man's knees were shaking once he saw her, he knew one thing for sure, its a Mooncaller, the city's longtime enemy.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
"You..You're goi-going t-to help me." She stuttered as she suddenly coughed a huge amount of blood on the man's floor, his expression grew quite comforted once he saw a tattoo carved on the girl's neck, he wheezed as he looked like a certain memory popped in his brain, he hit his head with the back of his hand and slowly walked closer to the young girl with tearful eyes, "I-it can't b-be" He trembled, "Abigail?" He cried out as he inspected the dove tattoo on her neck.
"Little Carvo grew to be an old man now.." She said, weakly moving her arms to the old man's face, gently touching it with her mechanical arm, but once she did, the man known as Carvo jumped back and the fright returned to him stronger than before.
"Abi-Abigail was killed" He paused, "Who are you?" He shouted at her in disbelief, this time, he jumped back to his table and took a crossbow pointing it at her.
Carvo was almost sixty with gray hair and similar ocean blue eyes, he wore an eye-patch and had monocular glasses over the other eye, he had a burn wound on his face indicating that this man might have been in the protector legions before, he wore a lab coat and the old house he was living in was nothing but a huge laboratory with dozens of decapitated Mooncallers preserved in glass and complicated machinery with colorful chemicals on each table and wall.
"I was..I'm dead, Carvo.." She trembled, this time, her voice faded away and her eyes were closing against her well. Carvo let go of his crossbow once he found several people knocking on his door, he gasped in fear and kept nervously circling around the place knowing that he was currently hiding a Mooncaller within his house.
"Just go away.." He cried like a child as he carried Abigail to the basement before they break in.
"Open up, Carvo!" One of them shouted, Carvo ran to the door, breathed deeply and opened it.
"O-oh! Bandel! a-nd..Stevey..and Cronos..and Biley ..Why are you all here..?" He asked as his eyes darted across the several people standing in front of his door. "We were looking for someone" One of the men said, rudely observing the house without getting in. "Someone..?" Carvo pretended to be oblivious to their allegations.
"Some people say they spotted a filthy Mooncaller early this morning, so we thought you might-" One of the men paused as his eyes fell on the bloody floor, "Know something" He continued as his tone grow more suspicious and his eyes were flaming with doubt. "What's that blood?" Asked the same man as he eyed the blood suspiciously, and looked back at Carvo. Carvo took seconds to think and felt a lump in his throat. What could he say? He kept looking around him, his heartbeats growing louder in his ears and everything almost blurry as their eyes were only looking at him. These few seconds felt like a year but he finally managed to let out few words.
"It's the blood of the Mooncaller I'm dissecting, want to take a look? A baby wolf, poor young one.." He said, in a way, he was mocking them, however, his answer was quite satisfying given the fact that it was his job. "It's no use.." Sighed the man, they all looked at each other nodding in agreement to something. "If you see something suspicious, call us" Their leader said as they all left.
Carvo closed the door, and rushed to his chair, sitting down and letting out a sigh of relief as his shaking hands stopped and his racing heart calmed down, he fixed his monocular glass and went to drink a cup of water, and as he was doing so, his eyes widened, Carvo forgot that he was in fact, hiding a Mooncaller in the basement.
The fullmoon was not so far away, and once its light touched the earth, the city's rivals would cloud the skies, lustfully searching for their preys regardless of the method. As Carvo investigated that body, he knew Abigail was one of them, and when the time comes, she would mindlessly devour him, yet, he couldn't bring his heart to kill her, who was she to him?
He lied beside her, looking at how disfigured she was, he then carried her body to his experimental table, willing to fix her, but after that, he didn't know what he could do.
The peaceful moon veiled the city as Carvo infested Abigail's body with dozens of electric cables, he didn't pay attention to her sense of pain knowing the fact that her heartbeats were unheard, and as the clock struck twelve, Old Carvo was fixing the insides of his dead old acquaintance with tears running down his wrinkled face, the gruesome sight of her fused flesh and bones with steel and iron made his hatred towards the one responsible for that atrocity grow more, and his for The Mooncallers become more numb.