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When it began to happen, I didn’t have a clue. When I began to tumble down the hill I didn't even realize I was falling. I wasn’t begging, I had more dignity than that but I was looking for something to take down by the richer district. There were times when a maid would give me the stale or gone-off food from the pantry, and there were times where one would share with me what she had taken from the home herself. Something to eat, something to sell, it was all the same. I had much more luck getting handouts in the richer district, no one liked to see a starving child, though I knew just as well that I was getting older, and soon the guards would see me as a pest instead of something to pity.
I went through an alley, by a kitchen door where a woman had once given me a sack of stale bread, when they took notice. The guards approached me, grabbed my arm and yanked me away before I had even gotten down the alley. They demanded to know what I was doing, who I was, where I was going. I hadn’t a good answer, so I lied. They asked if I was begging, I said I lived there. Their faces turned harsh and I knew I had answered wrong. They began to drag me away when the kitchen door opened and a maid walked out, immediately headed toward me and demanded the men let me go, and that the Lord had his nephew over.
I didn’t know who she was, or who he was, but I was grateful. There were no prisons back then, just punishments. She grabbed my shoulders and ushered me inside, the guards apologizing dearly, but she ignored them. By the look on her face I should have known. She was scared, concerned, and when she looked at me all I saw was pity. She brought me to the door and I tried to stop and thank her, but she brought me inside. I tried to stop her again and leave, but she brought me up the stairs. Every move I made to leave she stopped, and I was too curious as to why I didn’t force my way out. It was a Lord’s house, full of things worth much more than what I had, and it intrigued me.
She brought me to a smoking room on the first floor, a window overlooking the spot where the guards had grabbed me, and inside sat an old man who I assumed to be the Lord. The woman let go of me, finally, and left. The man asked me who I was, why I was here, and where I had been going. He had done me a courtesy to lie, so In return I told him the truth, or at least most of it. I was a beggar, looking for food scraps, and I was going to check by his alley for something tossed. Not very true, but enough to where it was believable.
He apprised me, and I didn’t even think about it. I thought he was just making sure I wasn’t tracking disease on the marble floors. He asked me why I was there, standing in his room, why I hadn’t turned and run in case he had decided to punish me himself. It was then I told the full truth, what solidified my end; I told him I was curious. He seemed to like that answer, and ordered the maid to have food brought up to the smoking room at once. He excused himself, and told me to wait there as he left himself. I didn’t stay still, of course not, I looked around at every wall, every bookshelf, every portrait. I saw a knife hanging on a wall, intricate, two blades. Then he returned, and a few moments later so did the food.
He began to ask me questions. More and more, never ending. He asked if I had family, I lied and said no. He asked if I had ever gone to school, I answered truthfully, and said no. On and on, question after question and I didn’t know this man's name, or what he was lord of. He offered for me to sleep in his guest room, and he would send me back to where I came from the next morning with a case of food; not stale or half-rotten. I had two parents, and a little sister who was barely a year old. We could use the food, so I asked if I could just have it then, he said the food shipment wouldn’t arrive until the morning, so I stayed. It was a mistake, but to live in luxury for a while was bliss. To live with wine and fresh fruit and bread, a bath, clean clothes. Of course I fell in love with it, and that afternoon when he told me the shipment had been delayed, I had no qualms with staying an extra day. I abused the library, reading whatever I saw no matter how dull. I explored every inch of the house, of the cellar, of the attic. All except the locked doors, of which there were three; His bedroom, his office, and a wine cellar.
I became friends with the servants, and they spoiled me rotten. A maid would bake cakes and insist I eat the scraps, a guard would pick out books for me to read, another maid had gotten me new clothes. It was so overwhelming, that I didn’t even realize that the pantry was always stocked to the brim, and that they were throwing out rotten fruits and stale bread daily. I don’t know if they were so kind because that’s what they wanted, or if they knew what would happen next, or if they really just didn’t know anything at all.
A week has passed, and visitors come often. They greeted me warmly and went off to the Lord’s office, then they would go and have a discussion about wine in the cellar. More and more came, some staying, some leaving that night. The house seemed so full of people, it was confusing. One of them was a painter, and I remember he had insisted practicing by painting a portrait of me. He used a canvas, and I thought that was strange. He sketched it, and painted it all but he stopped before he had finished; leaving the pupils undone. I asked why, and he said he’d get around to it later.Then one day, the Lord ate dinner with me in the smoking room, the other people milling elsewhere in the house. He told me the shipment would be there tomorrow morning, and that I would have to go. I was suspecting as much, with so many people there he must have been running out of rooms. I told him so, and he just smiled. He let me eat and drink, and told me he wanted to send me home with a bottle of wine as well, and that he wanted me to pick it out. I followed him from the room, my head beginning to ache and I began to sway as I followed him to the wine cellar door and we descended the stairs. I thought I had just drunk too much, and tried not to point it out as to not make him laugh at me, the wine cellar was strange, and I noticed quickly how devoid it was of wine. I told him so, and he said nothing, just kept walking. Then I staggered, and quickly righted myself as I kept following, but I kept stumbling, my legs becoming numb as I fell to the floor and found myself unable to move. He stopped walking then, but before anything else, I was unconscious. I woke up in binds, my arms tied tightly together with rope. I was in the back of a carriage, two people watching over me, and I could see a trail of cars behind us. I tried not to move, not to let them know I was awake, but then the carriage stopped and they hoisted me up by the arm, fingers bruising my skin as they pulled me out of the carriage and pulled me along to a tunnel. They wore heavy black robs, obscuring their faces, and I noticed soon that everyone was. I didn’t know where I was going, or who they were, but I was curious enough to see, to just wait and see because there would be a better chance later, there would be a time where they set me in a cage alone and I could sneak out and hide, because there always was.
They led me down a well worn path, and I saw the strangest things I’d ever seen. The walls of the cave seemed the change, sections of the floor seemed to shift in and out of existence. Chairs would start to float, then be brought right back down to the ground again. I had to know where I was before I left, and what was happening. They said nothing to me as we descended the cave, and I tested my luck with wriggling free, the hands gripped my arm harder, and the ropes pinched at my skin. There would be a chance later, I thought, so I just went where they guided me.
They guided me to a cave, a large open cave with nothing but a smooth slab of stone in the center, a jagged and sharp base at the bottom of it, and six rings carved into it. One of the two men reached forward, wrapping an arm and my neck and holding tight, tighter, until my vision speckled out of view and I saw nothing. I clawed at his skin, kicked at his feet, tried to free my wrists but the rope cut deep and it burned, so I stopped, but there would be another chance.
Then I was laying on the slab, rope wrapped around the rings and my wrists, holding me flush against the slab. My clothes were gone, a thin white cloth draped over me. Immediately I tried to fight back, pulling at the ropes, trying to rip them from the rings, but all they did was burn my skin, leave red rings around my wrists, my neck, my ankles.
Then they began to speak, calling for it to sense them, and it did. The walls began to drift apart, floating off into a pale abyss, the floor began to crumble and sink down and up and wherever it felt, leaving a platform floating in nothing. I stopped fighting, if only to see what it was they were sacrificing me to, what god I was dying in the name of. Little did I know.
I thought it would appear and they’d call out to it, and it would spare me, but seconds later the knife hovered above my neck, and they began to chant under their breaths. I looked up at the man who held the knife, his hands smooth, adorned with rings and I recognized the hands in an instant, and the knife that was held against my throat. I stared him in the eyes, thinking even then that he would realize what he was doing and stop, that someone would.
He did not, and he began to chant louder, sawing the knife back and forth and slowly, slowly cutting into my neck, burning. I screamed, arching my back off the table and struggling against the ropes, but they burned too, but I couldn’t help it. I writhed in agony as he cut down slowly, deeper and deeper until he stopped. Blood poured from my neck, dripping down off my chest, off the table and down into the abyss below. Falling somewhere I didn’t know, and never would. Blood fell, and kept falling, pouring down into nothing as sobbed and writhed on the table, trying to free myself as if that would save me, as if that would stop the pain. Then there was no more blood, but I was still alive, still breathing, still fully conscious as he raised the knife again and stabbed it straight into my eyes. The twin blades made sense, then.
I reached up, the pain fading away as I grabbed the blades and pulled them up, struggling as the blades stung at my palms and fingers. Then I saw, and I saw more than what was around me. That’s what I took in first, through. I sat up, but their eyes didn’t follow me, they stayed trained on where I had been laying. I stood, but still they didn’t pay attention. I turned, and I saw myself on the slab. Mutilated, blood pouring from my throat, the knife sticking out of my eyes, two hands frozen, gripping the baldes.
Then the stone began to spread, taking over my legs, crawling up until it engulfed my body, preserving me just like that, forever. Then they looked up, and one by one they fell to their knees. I felt blood on my face, and I reached up to touch my eyes. I could see, I could see so much I couldn’t understand, and surrounding my eyes was thick black blood. I looked at the hooded figures, and I understood. I saw what they saw, what they thought.
I saw the Lord watching me in the street, noting my persistence and fearlessness. I saw him walking away to call the others in the order, telling them he had found one that should work this time, one that should survive. I saw the painter knowing what would happen to my eyes, but refraining from painting them just yet. I saw the world begin, and I watched as it ended.
I saw too much, and I blinked, to find myself gone. Standing alone on another platform that looked too familiar. That I recognized as the street I used to live. I walked through it, climbing up the platforms, blinking when I needed to, and I found the door to our apartment, I opened it, ready to see them dead, ready to see them mourning, starving, or not even noticing, instead I saw nothing. There was no platform on the other side. I didn’t even care.
I don’t know how long passed, but I traveled through this realm freely, finding no one, learning my way around, learning how to get places, learning what I could do. I found myself staring at the stratified version of myself, when one of the robed men appeared. It was the Lord, and he bowed deeply before me.
He addressed me as Void, asking if I had taken to his sacrifice, if I was content with them, if they had done good. I told him he asked too many questions. I remember what he said next, word for word;
“Have you taken to the body of the outsider? Are you content to use this vessel to communicate?”
That was when I understood it all. To him I was not the same person, the person laying in stone on the slab, incapable of remembering my own name. I was not that person, but I was the god. I was what they prayed to, what they worshiped, and they didn’t know that I was still conscious, that I was still at least partially aware.
“Void-” he began, but I cut him off.
“I like what you called me before.”
“What did I call you, holy void?”
I blinked, and he lurched forward as I appeared next to him, he gripped his chest, shaking in fear. “The Outsider.”
He didn’t know, even then. He didn’t realize that I was still the same thing, the same person, just more aware of everything, all there possibly was. He never did figure it out, and neither did any of the others. It got boring watching their lives, figuring out what they were doing was easy, and it was predictable. I found myself in the eyes of other people. Watching society fall, and a new city being built I watched it expand into an empire, I felt people die in every way. Soon, they seemed aware I was there, and carved my name into bones, and built shrines in my honor. It was easy to find where they were and use the runes to transfer myself into the real world, just for a little bit. Then I learned how to properly intervene. I learned how to give people the powers of the runes by using their bones in their hands instead of the bones of whales. They varied from mine, and they seemed to vary from person to person, but I watched what they did. At first I was appalled when they killed, when they robbed, murdered children, but then I became less surprised, because there were no consequences for me, and it was interesting enough. It distracted me from the events I could see unfolding in the future.
It became so much more interesting when I learned that they would not always make the same decision, no matter what. It was the strangest thing to watch a wronged man walk away from those who had wronged him, to let a bad man live despite knowing he would face no consequences for killing them. It became stranger to eventually watch my killer track me down, and it became strangest to help them. I wanted all of them dead from the beginning, myself included.