Tales of the Wastelander Ch. 53 - Teaser (Patreon)

Night belonged to the Underkin. Not sunset, twilight, nor the blue hour where surface eyes could still pretend they knew the shape of the world, but true night. The dead-black hour when the moon hid behind clouds, old stones cooled, and surface folk pulled their blankets tight and trusted firelight to keep fear at bay. That was when the city opened properly and the ruins stopped lying.

The young Hollowborn moved through Toledo as if the broken city had been built for him. His name was Kerrik, son of Dren of the Lower Brace, apprentice-listener to the Third Deepwatch, and currently one of the youngest scouts permitted to walk the upper dark alone. He was seventeen by the counting of the Underkin, old enough to bear a spear, young enough that his elders still expected him to come home with more questions than answers.

He was short by surface standards, barely above five feet, but there was nothing slight about him. Kerrik’s frame was broad through the chest and shoulders, dense in the limbs, with hands made thick by rope, stone, and toolwork. His skin was a muted ash-grey, touched by faint mineral undertones, almost as if limestone dust had settled into him at birth and never quite left. His hair was black and braided tight against his scalp, practical and close, with a strip of dark cloth wrapped around his brow to keep sweat from his eyes when he climbed.

Those eyes caught the dark like a creature’s, but they didn’t glow, and such assertions was surface nonsense. They reflected what little light existed and made use of it ruthlessly. Where a surface-born human would see only black shapes and guessing shadows, Kerrik saw far more. He saw angles, breaks, dust trails, old brick, fresh scuffs, and the faint shimmer of metal beneath the grime. Darkness did not hide the world from him; daylight did that.

He crouched behind the cracked stone lip of what had once been a planter wall, his fingers pressed lightly to the old concrete. The campus breathed beneath him. Not truly, of course, as stone did not breathe, but it shifted, carried and remembered weight. A footstep touched one walkway, and a second followed higher up, which told him someone was on watch.

Light-footed, female, confident by his hearing and Meludgen-heavy, not softskin-clumsy. Kerrik had learned her rhythm over the past two nights, Rayne, if he had heard the name rightly. She moved with care, but still with that surface habit of trusting sight too much. Near her, another moved with less edge and more warmth in the step. Mellany, who had a softer tread and was often close to Rayne, too close by the standards of people pretending not to be distracted.

Kerrik’s lips twitched, as surface folk were loud even when silent, but not always with sound. Sometimes it was with breath, scent, or the simple refusal of their bodies to stop declaring what they wanted.

He shifted, sliding down from the planter wall without so much as a scrape. His boots were wrapped in layered hide, the soles treated with soft fiber and wax, made not for roads but for silence. His spear stayed flat along his back, shortened for tunnels, the steel head narrow and darkened to keep from catching stray light.

The Underkin favored spears because tunnels taught truth. A spear kept danger at a distance, could probe a floor, brace a fall, and pin a Screamer through the skull before its teeth found flesh. A sword was romance, whereas a spear was sense. His had seen an equal measure of mundane and life and death use.

Kerrik moved low across the open stretch between buildings, pausing only when the stone under his fingertips told him someone above had turned. He froze as a pair of eyes swept the courtyard from an upper position, but they moved past him, not toward him. He waited until the watcher shifted away, then slipped behind the rusted remains of a fallen sign.

The old university had changed, and that was why he had been sent, as two weeks ago, this place had belonged to the cruel ones. Knife-makers and cage-keepers was what they were. Upper-flesh who dragged Meludgen and others into the grounds and did things the Underkin had smelled through the cracks in the earth. Blood, rot, burning chemicals, and fear so thick it had drifted down into maintenance channels, making even the old listeners uneasy.

The Underkin had not interfered then, as that was the law of the Deepwatch. Watch and first, then move only when stone itself demanded it. Surface wars were surface wars, and the Underkin had survived six centuries by refusing to bleed for every fool who mistook open sky for freedom. But then the city had shaken, and Kerrik remembered that night with a clarity that still prickled along his spine.