Eric paused in his frantic pacing and looked back, as he did our breath caught. He was nothing like the haggard beggar of a few hours before even though physically nothing changed. No, he still wore his matted fur cape that looked to be made out of sewer rats but now he wore it with the gravest of dignity instead of the gaunt fearfulness he once had, now he had an aura that would make powerful men and women blink. On him it seemed like a fine ermine cloak painstakingly crafted by the most elite of craftsmen, and the musty stains on it did nothing to detract from it for it was the man-no, the king-that wore it that made it great. He still pawed the beer bottle between his hands that used to be full just a few minutes ago but now he the way he grasped made it look almost like a scepter, pronouncing his authority to all and sundry, if not how uncertainly he held it close to him. He waved it around in his hands as if he was proclaiming something magnanimous to a crowd and not anything like the symptoms of withdrawal he was experiencing. He could have paraded around on The Street of Legends and not have been out of place, he could have made the people bend a knee to him despite his stark poverty. The image of a Grand Prince or Supreme Emperor would have been complete if he could just keep his heart in it all. If he could just believe that not everything he touched would hate him. If he could but he couldn't so he held himself closely as he worried over why he received a reprieve from the downward spiral he had been clearly heading. Eric presented an image of shattered grace.

Nonetheless, it was incredible what a sense of purpose and excitement could invoke in him.  Just a few hours on the trail and he looked more and more like the man whose name was once a hero known to all but now people couldn't be bothered to spare him a glance for he was forgotten from the short memory of fame. The few people that did remember him either turned away in disappointment or vowed to kill him for what he did to us. Like we would after we were done with him.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Flashback To Several Hours Earlier----------------------

Beggars come from all walks of life and in all shapes and sizes but they all have a colorful background no matter who they are. There's the cliches from the banker who went to the bottle to the stereotypical soccer mom who couldn't handle it all. There's the unusual in the telepath that Glimpsed the wrong dimension-walker and the gambler that won it all and lost it all again the day before in the Chronos Casino. And then there's the most despicable ones like me; the fallen heroes. They were supposed to be Paragons of Virtue, The Untouchable Ones, The Great Good, yaddayaddayadda and so on and so forth. I was considered to be the best of the best, poised to seize the top, but like in any good story I Fell. And fall I did, I fell and fell and fell until I reached the bottom of the barrel and when I did I just kept on going right through until I reached a point where not even Hell wanted me. So I seemed destined to live out the rest of my short and pitiable days clutching a bottle, twitching from starvation, and with only the flies to watch over me until a tall, dangerous blonde walked into my life. 

The brick-and-mortar alleyways were covered in numerous forms of suspicious grime and rot, so many were the shades in fact that they could pass for what passed for art these days. The dead bodies of humans and things found in fairy tales quickly spoiled the artistic value though. It wasn't always like this, Macmillan Street was a fairly gentile place surrounded by a cesspool of dirtiness that shone like a beacon of hope and light, until some jealous plebeian that didn't like the fact that not everyone was wallowing in the filth let loose Literal Hell in the middle of Macmillan Street. The generic demons we handled quite well; they were tough, angry, and packed a punch but so did we. We called down arcane rain, whispered maddening death, and rippling confusion down on them, we nearly pushed them back in an hour but no matter of magic could have saved us the old son-of-a-gun Beelzebub itself appeared. The pestilence he spread was nothing like we had ever seen and believe me when I say we've seen a lot. We started dying by the lot; some of us from having our insides dissolved to the consistency of custard cream, some of us from our flesh becoming as soft as wet paper that fell apart at he slightest movement, some of us just had our brains melted the old-fashioned way. 

Stolen story; please report.

I vaguely heard a voice call out somewhere and even more vaguely I thought I heard my name but I gave a small mental shrug and went on to my daily business of trying to look more pitiable than the day before. Sadly, I have gotten quite good at it. When you were busy dying in a part of town that not even the toughest of gangs would enter for fear of the rampant diseases around here that I miraculously hadn't died of yet, you quickly become an expert at it. 

I heard the voice call out again, this time I was sufficiently aware that I could tell it sounded feminine and more than a little annoyed. Ha! Pissed off women was something that I was more than used to by now considering how I am! 

I heard her impractical high heels click there way over here and I felt the shadow she cast on me as she loomed above. "Mr. Hailstone, how would you like to be a hero again?" I blinked my crusty eyes and ran what she said through my head. 

After thinking over what she said and I concluded that she wasn't kidding, I decided to give her a few more minutes. She took my silence for interest and continued with "I grew up hearing the stories they told about you, about how you were the darling boy of all society from the most rarefied circles to the dirtiest bars. I heard about how you could never say no to someone in need. I heard that your magic was like nobody else's, that it didn't resemble anybody else's," She hesitated for a second before adding on "I need you to help me with something only you can, something only your black breath can reach,"

She wasn't talking about how my breath smelled when she said that, she was talking about how I could shape reality from the black mist that belled forth from my mouth. How it could become a blade, how it could bring life into being, how I lived and breathed Black Armageddon. It could kill an entire room of people by suffocating them, it could take away a part of my personality to create something sentient and unlike anything else in the world, it could do anything but save me from my own heartbreak.

Shaking my regrets away from my mind I thought it over in my head, should I keep on slowing dying or get up and do something? Well, I could always come back to dying a later time I suppose. The fact that she sounded like an angel laced with honey had nothing to do with it, of course. Yep, that sultry voice that promised all sorts of things I couldn't mention here had nothing to do with it, nothing at all.

"Mr. Hailstone was my father's name, call me Pinocchio since that's what I am. A puppet that could never become a real boy," The silence that responded to me gave me the impression if maybe she got the wrong person or maybe if even she did, I might have gone insane a long time ago.

"But my 9 o'clock is free so far. I'm sure I could fit you in into my schedule," I rushed out before she ran away. "But my demons are a fairly ornery bunch so I would appreciate it if what ever business you have with me would get wrapped up quickly," 

"I'm certain that they would understand if you were a little late, they seem like patient folk," She quipped back at me dryly, not expecting anything better from me than generic depressing humor. 

I raised an eyebrow that she couldn't possibly see under all of the dirt covering my face and wondered if that was supposed to be an attempt at a joke. 

She presumably decided that I was going to listen to her story and abruptly walked off, expecting me to follow with the confidence and stride of a woman who always got her way. I smirked at that and pried myself out of the garbage I was mired in to follow her. "Oh well," I thought, "It wasn't like staying here was going to kill me, considering I'm not even real enough to be affected by the diseases here. But maybe perhaps some kind of horrible monstrosity will kill me soon if I follow the pretty lady," With that happy thought in mind, I stumbled on after her like the ragged wreck I am.

-----------------------------------------Don't Forget To Vote And Follow-------------------------------------------------------