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gonna get outta there alive, but good luck tryin’ . . . Family
Man.”
With that, we took our leave of each other. I watched as
the hunter of dark roads disappeared into the dust that had
first unveiled him—a corpulent killer who feasted through
the terrible machines lurking his corroded shadow.
I stood upon a street severed by a portion of the massive
steel and concrete wall that surrounded the entire city—a
futile effort to contain what sleep would only free. Its length
was punctuated by gaping holes, torn open by a storm that
blew out from beneath beds and beyond sleep. I entered
through one of these massive breaches, lined with an
amalgam of encrusted human remains, warped together into
a frustration of biology and nightmare.
The city rose before me, denuded of all earthly obstruction
and covered in the blood of twilight, defiling the cold reality
that lay in shambles at its feet. New Victoria was almost
beyond 0at, the city seemed dead, at first. Its skyscrapers and
minarets looked no less than the crooked, chitinous limbs of
toppled insects, all of them frozen in an architectural rictus
of death. The Victorian skin of the place had rotted away in
places, revealing a nightmare of warped and fused innards
beneath, the thin veneer merely paper wrapped around
a fire. No single structure rose wholesomely to form the
city’s skyline, but only bent and skittered and crawled into
and across the sky. And despite its stillness, the metropolis
exuded a sense of movement—the unclean motion of a
corpse being eaten from the inside.
It took no time for the preliminary powers of the city to
test me, emerging without the corrupted ether, eager to infest
a fresh mind with endless nightmare, their alien outlines
manifest on this side of sleep as common shadows.
When they finally converged upon me, I could feel the
gossamer touch of unseen hands playing across my mind,
eager to find a door. Meanwhile, the invisible intrusion into
my thoughts caused one of my sisters to rise from her warm
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