It was hard to estimate the passage of time inside Ma'aseh Merkavah.

Oak had slept twice, so he figured two more days must have passed. Three days of rest had fixed most of his injuries, even though his ribs still felt tender. He had a lot of fresh scars all over the place, and the hunger pangs had vanished.

That was not necessarily a good thing. It meant that instead of consuming food, his body was currently consuming itself. Time was his greatest enemy now. Oak donned his ruined jacket, since he did not have a replacement, put on his backpack and headed outside.

He had strapped the shield he had lost in the fight with Gluk to his left hand, and his sword was back in its sheath. Oak had gone out for a bit yesterday in order to pick them both up from the square. It felt better to be properly armed once more.

Geezer followed him as he made his way back to the park where Gluk had spotted them and settled behind the familiar fence, staring over the large road they had to cross to continue their journey west. The last time Oak and Geezer had been here, a Leshen had been walking down the road. Oak was not keen on meeting one, so he listened with extreme care for any noise at all that might warn him of anything walking down the road towards them.

No sound reached Oak’s ears. His magically enhanced hearing showed that the coast was clear and Geezer seemed relaxed. Nothing for it. We have to cross at some point, anyway. Might as well do it now, Oak thought and walked across with his ears peeled and head on a swivel. He wanted to at least have a fighting chance if some nightmarish creature tried to kill him.

They made it across the road without issues and headed down another alleyway. The alleys of Ma'aseh Merkavah were narrow. The only reason there even was enough room to comfortably walk down this alleyway was the jettying. Many buildings had second, third and subsequent stories that protruded beyond the foundations and the floor-space of the ground-floor.

This meant there was more room between buildings at the ground level and the extra space over people’s heads was still in use. Oak had always liked the look of such construction. He had envisioned that if he ever built a second floor to his home, he would use the same technique to give it the look he wanted and gain some extra floor space.

Thinking about home wasn’t terribly pleasant for Oak. There was a good chance Jarl Shaw’s carls and peasant levies had burned the place down if they had bothered to send any patrols that way before moving towards Jarl Cadoc’s lands.

It felt strange to have nowhere to return to.

Even when the old man had died and Oak had gone to war, the homestead had always been there, waiting for him. Now war had come to his home. If he ever made it back to the North, instead of a house and an overgrown potato patch, he would find ashes instead. It was not an encouraging thought.

Let's hope the chickens had enough wits about them to escape to the woods. The things are as dumb as rocks, so the chance of them doing anything sensible is pretty slim, but you never know. Now, I need to get my head together and start paying attention to my surroundings before some relative of Gluk’s comes for revenge.

Oak hoped Gluk did not have a giant family full of uncles, aunts and distant cousins ready to hunt him down, but considering his own luck had been very poor of late, he was giving the possibility some consideration.

At least Geezer would not go hungry. And who knows, maybe if I get hungry enough, eating an ogre won’t seem like such a bad idea.

A crunching sound up ahead cut Oak’s musings short. Both he and Geezer froze. After making sure the sound was not moving towards them, Oak continued forward for a bit. He wanted to get a look at whatever it was with his new and improved ears before they skirted around it.

They crept closer with careful steps, sneaking down the alley and through one small intersection before they got close enough that Oak could make out some details through the waves of sound. He signaled for Geezer to stop, got on one knee and listened. At first, the images the sounds provided made no sense to him, but after a brief time of focusing, he had to admit to himself he was not misunderstanding the signals he was getting.

According to the Ears of Amdusias, there was a larger intersection of alleyways up ahead, which formed a small square in front of a church. In that square was a wolf-chimera the size of a small house. It had one gigantic wolf's head at the end of its neck where you would expect a normal wolf to have a head as well. Unlike a regular wolf, the chimera also had two thick tentacles extending from its shoulders, which had smaller wolf heads at the ends of them. Its tail also ended with a wolf's head.

The crunching sound which had warned Oak of the monster's presence resulted from the chimera ripping large chunks of flesh from a dead, horse sized spider and eating them.

I might be slowly getting used to this crazy place, because ‌this does not surprise me. Of course, there are chimeras and horse sized spiders. Why wouldn't there be?

He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that, so he and Geezer backed up, and took the long way around the many headed killing machine and its prey.

***

There was a certain sense of character to the neighborhood Oak and Geezer were walking through. The alleys and roads had lines covered in little faded flags and banners crossing over them, and every building seemed to have some type of colorful sign in elvish or old common which told you who had lived there over three hundred years ago.

Most of the buildings were made of wood and the former inhabitants had decorated the front doors with carvings of different animals. There were no poles for street lights, but little lanterns were bolted on the sides of the buildings to provide light to weary travelers of the night. Sadly, Oak had not come across a single lantern that still burned in this section of the city.

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If the houses had been filled with people living their lives and as you walked down the streets and alleyways, you could have heard all the little noises of life that escape from the confines of a house or an apartment, the neighborhood would have been very cozy. Now it just felt wrong to be there.

Like everyone has just left for an errand and you have come to their home and heart uninvited.

There was a lightness to Oak’s steps that had not been there before. His body felt strange and the constant hunger was not the main culprit this time. Four days had gone by since Ashmedai had made him into a Warlock, and the physical benefits were slowly beginning to manifest.

He felt a tiny bit stronger than before, which was miraculous considering the lack of food and the injuries he was still suffering from. According to Ashmedai, this meant he was also slightly faster and tougher to hurt than he used to be.

Not that he was going to put that to the test and start cutting himself.

I bet something with too many mouths and limbs is going to do the testing for me soon. Oak winced. Fate, please do not take that as a request.

Oak and Geezer arrived at yet another intersection, and Oak realized he was quite lost and didn’t know which direction they should take. He considered the problem and decided that it would be simplest to just go inside one of the nearby apartment buildings and head to the roof.

If he could see the obelisk Ashmedai had told him to use as a landmark, he would know the direction he and Geezer should head in. Breaking down a door and making a racket in the process seemed like a bad idea, so Oak started trying doors.

The third door he tried swung open silently, which he felt was a bit bullshit. No hinges he had ever seen would do that after three hundred years of neglect, but this was the Old Empire. It seemed even hinges had been better in the good old days.

Oak stepped inside the building with Geezer on his heels. If man-eating horrors didn’t fill every shadowy corner of the city, he would have just kicked down the nearest door. Breaking doors down was a lot of fun, in Oak’s opinion. Much more fun than building or repairing them, as it was with most things.

It was very dark, but Oak had his echolocation, as Ashmedai had called it, and the layout was not complicated. The building had a hallway with doors that led into apartments, and a set of stairs leading to the second floor. He headed straight up the stairs and kept walking upwards until he reached the fourth and final floor.

There was no attic hatch in the hallway, so he kicked in one of the apartment doors and went to the balcony to have a look. The other buildings around him were also four stories tall and he could not see over them, so grabbed the edge of the roof and climbed up.

No matter how you looked at it, despite the fact that the city was a madhouse of terrors, Ma'aseh Merkavah was a spectacular sight. The sheer scale of it alone impressed Oak, and the architecture was nothing to scoff at either. As his gaze wandered across the city, a detail jumped out to him.

There were a lot of churches and comparatively fewer temples. It made sense. When the first foundation had been laid down in what would later become Ma’aseh Merkavah, God had still been alive. The city was a mosaic of the past, and the elves had always been slow to change.

Cathedrals and churches had been built here for untold centuries before God ripped out her own heart. After the wars and strife that followed, some people had found others to worship. There were pretty clear signs that someone had converted churches into temples for different angelic choirs and demons.

I wonder how many had to die to make that happen, Oak wondered. What tales could the rocks tell me, if they could speak?

Finally, Oak focused on the matter at hand. He found the obelisk easily enough when he searched for it in the distance and cursed. They had drifted a bit off course and would have to take a left turn and start heading towards the massive ziggurat at the heart of the city if they wanted to get back on track.

As Oak crawled backwards towards the edge of the roof, so he could climb down to the balcony, his foot snagged on a loose roof tile, and sent it flying over the edge. He froze and stared in horror as the tile tumbled through the air, smashing down on the street and shattering into a thousand little pieces with a bang that echoed across the district.

Oak cursed his luck, hopped down to the balcony and ran down the stairs with Geezer in toe. They were out of the apartment building in record time.

“Come on Geezer, we need to put some distance between us and this place and we need to do it fast,” Oak said. After those words, he saved his breath for running.

They rushed through alleys and down streets for a time. Oak kept his ears peeled and strained his hearing to catch even the slightest hint of anything moving to attack them, but for a good while, only the steady beat of his legs and Geezer's paws filled his ears.

In the end, his vigilance saved their lives.

The scraping of claws on tiles above him alerted Oak to dark shapes diving from the rooftops towards him and Geezer.

“Up!” he shouted, and Geezer got the message, straining his neck to look upwards, and seeing the pale, humanoid forms falling towards them.

Oak dodged to the right and when a monster landed right where he had been standing a second ago, he cut its head off with a swing of his sword.

+ 1 Soul

Not worth even a unit of fuel? Figures.

Geezer jumped to meet one of the falling creatures and snapped his jaws around its neck. Snarling and hissing, the pair hit the street and rolled around like a veritable ball of violence. Geezer ended up on top and bit through the struggling monster's spine. It convulsed and lay still.

More monsters were jumping down from rooftops or climbing down the walls of the buildings on either side of the street to get at them, drool dripping from between their fangs. Oak had no time to watch Geezer. The hellhound would have to manage on his own.

As the monsters landed ahead and behind them, he got a good look at the creatures. Ghouls. They were fairly tall and wiry, famished looking things with long fangs and sharp claws. Ribs shone through their pale, gray skin. Their faces looked like a twisted mockery of humanity, with small, almost completely flat noses and gaping lipless maws filled with razor-sharp teeth and a long, thin tongue.

The ghouls encircled Oak and Geezer as more and more of the things kept dropping on the street. Large black eyes stared at them from all directions, and slimy drool dripped onto the cobblestones from hungry maws, as the monsters rushed forth to sink their teeth into the flesh of their chosen prey.