The Lost Kings

The sky over Dis was constantly a rustic orange flooded with deep crimson drips.  It was the kind of sky mortals might mistake for dusk, but for the shadows of the afterlife, well, this was their forever daylight.  The living sun had not set on Dis for thousands of years and the sky was never the sapphire hue that one finds at midday, but it was rather a forever bleeding sky that would only fade to a starless pitch by nightfall.  For many of the Dysian souls, those shadows of eternity, the sky of the city was the sky of despair.

Jack always preferred the time just before nightfall when the black birds filled the sky in unison, together creating organic billows that swirled between the ashen towers of Dis.  The crows came out a quarter hour before the calming of the firelight in the sky and their timing was flawless.  Jack only saw the birds by candlelight as night descended upon Dis.  The light of the sky looked more like a dying fire than a transition of colors into darkness.

Most tormented shadows walk with a soft stroll suggesting they are attempting to hold onto a memory of an innocent past that was in the process of slowly fading from their minds. This stroll was not at all the walk of Jack.  Both of his soles were worn, but still clicked across the cobblestones of the street pathways with exhilaration, disrupting the flight patterns of the blackbirds as the echoing heels reverberated through the river banks like the ticking of a colossal pendulum. The cobblestone sidewalks by the riverside were always in disrepair, and despite that the pathway Jack walked across was uneven and half-submerged in river water, he was still able to maintain his giddy pace.

If anyone had crossed his path then, they might have let out a scream at the mere sight of the man, whose face and scalp were covered in scars, preventing any growth of hair. Time would have to pass before the skin of his soul would be able to repair these marks, which were so numerous that Jack currently looked more like a trauma victim of burns even though these marks were given to him through self-infliction.  The soul desired to return to its original form, but it was always just a matter of time.

There would be no straying wanderers in these parts of Dis, the center of the city beyond the Ivory Tower of the Law, for even more sinister than his character was the place that had attracted Jack.  The Cathedral he quickened towards had been named after the Italian Castle of Montereggione, but it was a misnomer as its designs had been based off that of the French Cathedral of Notre Dame, although paradoxically, it had been finished in the early fourteenth century, nearly thirty years before its mortal equivalent was completed.  Montereggione’s one hundred and fifty year construction had been a precautionary nightmare.  The several branches of the River Acheron that crossed through the city in both the East and West Districts, pouring from the archipelagos of Limbo and intermixing with the swamplands of the Styx, had joined together here where the rushes poured into some unseen level of the underworld.

Jack approached Montereggione with its gothic designs complete with lavish gargoyles and colorless stone.  In time, the building had begun to loom with its own terror like a mythological haunted house of neighborhood kids.  The Cathedral altered that of the Notre Dame in several aspects, but most noticeable was that the layout was obviously more symmetrical as an equilateral cross- complete with four main entrances leading to four major wings- all entrances of which were decorated with the Notre Dame trademark three gates and perfect circles of stained glass.  The building was complete with eight flying buttresses all centering upon one majestic spire.  Still, despite this opulence, every childish fear embedded within Jack’s mind told him to resist his will to enter.  He was forced to suppress these frightened voices, opening the goliath oak doors that had remained unlocked without fear of burglars or intruders.

The sound of creaking metal resounded through the walls like acoustic notes as the main door to the Cathedral broke off one of its hinges.  The Montereggione was a place of both spiders and the monsters that often recluse themselves to the darkest corner of human minds.  Regardless of its apparently poor upkeep, the candles seemed often replaced and well-lit, turning the Queen Anne nature of the interior into a Dark Gothic dramatization only appropriate for the stage.  But there was still a genuine sense of foreboding aching at the back of Jack’s mind, an understanding that the creatures which buried themselves here from the rest of the city were of the few beings in Dis that were more horrifying than himself.