Prime

It is like a mouthful of scurvy, this skyline that chews the cloudscape over New Chimera; all crumbling spires and sooty chimneys, jaggedly black against the porphyria thunderheads. The autumnal storms, fresh from the Great Verdant reek of iodine and the air is charged with the peculiar, cupric taste of thaumaturgy.

Across the city gutters overflow, forming cascades of sooty water. Cataracts plunge from rooftop, to rooftop and then to narrow alleys, flooding the silent courtyards. In the dark quarters, the Judetown Wards, the forgotten streets wallow ankle and knee-deep with all the flotsam of neglect gliding like the ragged corpses of eldritch seabirds.

Rhafensflod, the great black river of the south, froths and muscles its way through the city, rubbing its dark flanks against the pale stone embankments. On the quaysides the blank-faced warehouses, their doors piled high with sandbags, gaze with empty eyes across the churning water and restive drays stamp at the slick cobbles of the depot yards.

There is an aftermath of electricity, a crackling potentiality, a dim smudge of St Elmo’s fire that still clings to the lightning rods of church steeples and factory chimneys.

And through the hissing spill of runoff, through the copper tang of wild magic, The Grey Man paces as though the world were his to command. Along the wide avenues that border Finn Park he walks, his morning suit is the pale grey of birch bark, his waistcoat the silver grey brocade of fish-scales.

His passing is like the coming of winter.