For a thousand years, the Opal Quarter has spread and sprawled like a hungry, fungal organ from out the ventricle of the great City’s heart.

There are walls within walls, within tangles of odd architecture. 

Common masonry in the embrasure of uncanny angles. 

Ages of brickwork and beam, window and lintel without any confining uniformity.

The disciple, a supple newborn now to a lucifugous forever, dashes wraith-swift through the odd and lumbering maze. 

In the wake of her passage is left another count of crumpled and broken martinets. A few stragglers along the edges of the inevitable noose now closing slowly on the Hall of Stews.

She pauses, birdlike and precarious, upon a high, protruding outcrop in the shape of a bent horn. 

A great curving, incongruous thing. As though a giant had stopped and thrust its primeval drinking vessel into the flank of a tower.

Stilling herself, she opens to the spreading, vast symphony of uneven heartbeats of the Quarter’s hoveling inhabitants. 

Thrumming rough, smooth, synchronous and discordant. A great ocean of rattling palpitations.

She allows her conscience to drift. A few stray notions; thoughts curling at the edges like charily charring chits of paper.

So many l-

Her soliloquy is abbreviated by the awareness of a presence above her and to the left.

A glassless pit of a window. A flicker of rich, silken redness followed abruptly by an angry heat and heaviness. 

The sudden, unanticipated wrenching in her breast, pitching her forwards into the abyss of hollow night.

No, no…

I don’t like this…

A moment of dreaming inattention can be costly.

But she is now tethered too dearly to this world. Too heavy and too rarefied all the same. 

Her marmoreal flesh swiftly knots and knits the ruin wrought by the unwelcome arrow. Blood, like an odd syrup, staunches, dries and drops away in the passing of a breath.

She flails through the black like a hatchling hurled from the nest, only a short distance into the deep before colliding into another flourished, foul-caked outcrop. 

Here blind, scrabbling fingers find crumbling purchase.

There she clings, pendant over pitchy perdition. Ancient brick, rotten and soft as bread beneath her fingers.

The ruined shaft of the arrow she ignores as she climbs. It is now a distant, leaden moan above the implacable pump of her heart.

She climbs.

Through the languid, misty stink above the Opal Quarter. 

At last, she slips, a spare and soundless shadow-shape, through the rough aperture of her would-be assassin.