It was early morning and dawn peeked over the Outer Wall. Its light sifting through the perpetual haze of the Lows. The clocks of the churches chimed in unison, waking the city from yet another night.

  Workers in blue overalls emerged from doorways marked by circles of ash, charms meant to ward off anything prowling the dark. Postmen and patrolling officers joined the tide of laborers flowing towards the industries. Steel behemoths dwarfing the slums and belching smoke even at dawn.

  Along a soot-stained street walked a young man. His clothes hung in tattered ribbons, fresh scars marking his skin. One arm was reduced to a stump, tucked close to his chest. Such injuries were common, the presses and cogs of the factories were as hungry for steel and cloth as the occasional limb. Despite his appearance, there was a spring to his step and a faint tug at the corner of his mouth.

  Wretch turned right, staring down an alleyway that he knew all too well.

  But memory failed to match the sight before him. A blue band swayed in the cold morning air, blocking entry. Beyond it, the cobblestone had been torn, the pipes ripped from their sockets and a red stain marked the grooves between the stonework.

  Wretch glanced to the sides, then ducked under the ribbon, walking forwards on light feet.

  At the end of the alley stood what remained of his old gang’s hideout. The entrance had been replaced by a fresh wall of mortar and brick. Naked hinges still exposed.

  They’d been quick to patch this hole. Maybe they know what’s down there.

  The windows were bolted shut with rough planks and he reached out with both hands. Only one extended. The other was reduced to a smooth stump. But where it had once ended below the elbow, a pink, fleshy mass now extended to his wrist. With time and effort, he’d regenerate it fully.

  Right, he thought.

  With a one-armed pull, he ripped the plank free, discarding it at his feet. He took a breath and crawled inside.

  It was dark within, thin rays of cold light shined through the boarded cracks, reflecting against specks of swirling dust. The stench of crude alcohol and burnt tobacco still lingered, now mixed with the iron-like tang of dried blood. It unearthed a memory. Laughter and lies, food and warmth.

  Don't get nostalgic, he thought. They were all bastards more than worthy of their fate.

  Dropping down to the floor, his boots crunched on broken glass. He winced, looking at his hand. A piece of glass had cut his palm.

  With gritted teeth he pulled flame from a core within him and his eyes lit with fire. The wound twitched and crawled as if a hundred worms moved under the skin, knitting the flesh together.

  He breathed out and reached along the wall, twisting a gas valve. The metal squeaked but no light came.

  The line must have been turned off.

  From his pocket he pulled a glowing stone the size of an egg with a rough black surface. It was warm to the touch and a light shined within. He’d found it in the brutalized ribcage of the rat-beast he’d killed. He didn’t know what it was but it felt valuable. For now it had to act like a source of light.

  He stepped deeper into the dark, finding an overturned and shattered shelf. In the debris lay a candle and a box of matches. He tucked the stone back into his pocket and lit a match with a burst of sparks, revealing the room in flickering hues of orange.

  He held his breath.

  Tables and chairs were reduced to splinters, spread across a floor darkened by dried blood. There were no bodies, but despite their absence, the stains told the story clear enough.

  A massacre.

  A bloodied crater in the far wall, dark handprints on another, a trail of someone crawling up the stairs.

  A discarded knuckleduster and broken knives lay by his feet. Akim’s sabre, the blade snapped above the hilt and covered in a cracked layer of coagulated red.

  It was you or me. Wretch thought, picking up the broken weapon. You’d never let me go. You know that’s true.

  He looked towards the back of the bar. The old entrance to the sewers had also been sealed with bricks. The thing was still down there, lurking somewhere.

  Wretch walked over the broken glass and scratch marks, picking up a three legged chair and an overturned table, he sat it down where Akim had once sat. Though that felt long ago now.

  He stabbed the broken saber into the wood and placed the candle before him.

  Wretch knew little of what it meant to be Blessed, such things were whispers, guarded secrets. He’d worked for a crime-boss to learn them, but in the end, the flame chose him anyway.

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  Closing his eyes, he drew his thoughts inward. The world fell away, replaced by a void of darkness. At its center something burned, a grey lump with a net of fiery cracks fighting against the dark. In its low light crouched a figure in reverence. It was Krii’ttch, the rat-thing with hairless skin, bowing its head as if in prayer to his flame.

  Its glow was weak, he’d drawn too much from it to regenerate his body. The more he drew, the louder it whispered, speaking of things too ancient for his mind to understand. He didn’t dare listen closely.

  He opened his eyes, holding the candle in front of him.

  “Thank you,” he said to the candlelight.

  The flame didn’t answer, only flickering its tongue to cast orange light across his face now covered in scars.

  “Now, I can start climbing upwards, just like you told me.” He continued.

  He barely remembered the man. Not his voice, not even his name. Only the glow of his eyes under that wide-brimmed hat and a smile with teeth that were just a little too sharp. His father had left him only one thing, a book of horrors pressed in ink, and it was the reason he’d returned to this grave-filled hole.

  He sank back into trance and knowledge bloomed like stars behind a thinning veil of smog. The message of the flame was clearer than his sight, more certain than his most treasured memories.

  Wretch, The Rat-Eater

  Ember

  Times Kindled: 0

  Regeneration: Consume flame to restore broken flesh. Purging rot and poison. Greater wounds demand greater cost.

  Flesh Stealer: Consume flame to reshape the body and take the form of any blessed you have slain and devoured. The change can be overwritten only by a new shape. Each change decreases your maximum flame permanently.

  These were his blessings. To heal wounds and steal flesh, fitting for someone like him. Though he found it surprising how clearly it was expressed, lacking much of a mystery. Though so far he'd only tried the first.

  He opened and closed his palm, pushing the urge to experiment to the side. There was a reason he was here.

  Akim must have had similar rules and stipulations, he thought.

  He’d seen the old gang boss use his powers often. Turning pence into the hue of pounds, make signatures and stamps appear on blank paper. That was surely one of his gifts.

  His other blessing was stranger.

  Plucking things from angles no one was watching. Purses, daggers and the like. But never had Akim made something appear that wasn’t close or the center of attention, why else would he have needed a thief.

  “It had to be something in your sight,” he said, to the cracked and bloodstained sabre. “But, only yours. Isn’t that right Boss?”

  He turned to the side, glaring over the broken and massacred room.

  “So you moved it, when I reached from here.” He said, imagining the room in its past glory, filled with heat, light and a copy of himself reaching for his hand. “But you didn’t look away.”

  So you hid it somewhere over there.

  He scanned a corner of the room. A lone wall, splintered copper vats and broken glass. Had he gotten it wrong?

  He trailed his gaze upwards. Beams of wood, barely visible in the candlelight, and wedged in a corner was a familiar shape.

  A smile grew on his face.

  He knotted two frayed ropes together, weighing the end with the leg of a chair and threw it upwards. On the second try, it sailed over the beam and caught the book's spine. The tome tumbled free into his waiting arms, and he caught it against his chest a with a sigh of relief. His only treasure, found again.

  He sat back in the candle light, wiped dirt from his hand and opened the book.

  The thick yellow pages were filled with black prints of monsters. A massive crow perched atop a black tower, four grotesque, human-like limbs bursting from its chest, slim and ending in pale, bone-white fingernails etched with macabre signs. Another, an amalgamation of rotten sea behemoths standing on broken crab-like legs in a drowned city.

  The candlelight reflected off the ink, making the shapes writhe as if ready to slither from the page.

  He didn’t know if they were simply art, or if they really did exist. If they were real, they were Blessed, just like Akim. Just like the thing in the tunnel, like his father.

  Like him.

  At the bottom of the first page, scribbling ink formed a sentence. He couldn’t read it but knew what it said. He’d copied it long ago and forced many to translate it.

  Grow thy flame and meet me at the summit.

  What remains of you, I shall call kin.

  Now that he had a flame to grow, he would become a hunter and finally start climbing upwards in the ranks of the Blessed.

  He breathed out, tucking the tome under his arm. From a corner, he took a torn coat and threw it over his shoulders.

  He left the candle where it stood, walked to the window and gave the hideout one last look. The stone walls covered in stains of red and dried gore were silent.

  “Now then.” He said. “Let's find some officers.”