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mad city would become a makeshift sanitarium. Almost all
those interred here, died here. It was for that very reason
I resolved to make my temporary home in the bowels of
an abandoned asylum, the same kind of dwelling that once
suffered its insane tenants to waste away to the dry whites of
their bones. I had hoped to taste a little bit of the madness
that might have seeped into the crumbling walls and cracked
floors, for no artist is an island—I needed my inspiration,
and madness is the greatest muse of all.
I decided to sleep through the remainder of the night and
start fresh the following evening. Rats sought me out during
my rest, a few even curling up with me. I was thankful for
their warmth. I wondered at the number of their ancestors
that might have been made fat and happy on a diet of
neglected insane, sleeping off their feasts in filthy nests lined
with the bones of the mad. Upon waking, I even ate one of
my small sleeping companions, so as to share in the human
darkness that may have once nourished its family line. After
finishing my tiny meal, I rose in search of grander prey.
As I stalked the city, I encountered a great Wasting House
that rose and stretched far beyond the scope of any other
building I had encountered. It looked more like a castle fit
for the king of the mad, for the architectural embellishments
affected to its construction made me doubt the completeness
of its location within this world. The structure, like all art,
was an enemy of solid reality—it seemed to shiver beneath
the normalizing dullness of the common sky that crushed
in around its silhouette, trying to deny its otherworldly
pedigree.
I passed beyond the doors of the structure, eager to know
the strangeness pent within. Yet there was nothing strange
at all, only a great diffusion of riven corpses. The slaughter
resembled the revenge of children, earnest and impulsive.
Clearly, my next opponent had not done this, as his tastes ran
to the overly neat and tidy. This was someone or something
else.
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