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maps-to-elsewhere · 14 days ago

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Misc OC: Vestige

Not a hero. Not a villain. Just a vestige of something that refused to die quietly, a bloody-knuckled phoenix with a monster in their veins.

Name

Vestige

Handle

Ashley Valentine; a name for when they need to sound like a real person, a name for paperwork, tavern stays or dealing with civilians who ask too many questions. Ash, or Val, is an overworked labourer and freelance courier who used to work a dockyard gig before being laid off, the kind of person no one remembers.

Dr Elisa Veyne; a disgraced scholar and former coroner, unpersoned for “ethical breaches” and controversial xenobiological theories. With a penchant for blatant nonsense, her unsettling medical insights and off-putting observations hide a keen but disturbed mind.

Officer Hal Vexley; a beat cop with twelve years on the force, stuck on night shifts and just here to clock in and clock out. Hal is the typical low-level law enforcement who has just enough authority to ask questions but not enough pull to make any difference.

Rook; a name known in some circles as the “Phantom Enforcer”, an underworld dealer who specialises in protection rackets and intimidation. No one knows much about them, only that Rook isn’t a person, Rook is a thing that happens to people who don’t keep their mouths shut.

Nobody; not a name but a blunt admission, a diagnosis, used to taunt victims, confess to priests or when they’re just too exhausted to lie.

GENERAL STATS

Alignment: Chaotic Neutral/Neutral Evil

“The difference between us, it’s not a fall...it’s a stumble.”

The symbiote isn’t some alien invader, it’s the embodiment of Vestige’s worst instincts: their rage, their nihilism, their belief that the world only understands violence. Its whispers are like a drug and every time they use its power they risk becoming what they hate; it’s sweet relief with a body count.

A single bad day, one justified atrocity, a moment where Vestige lets the symbiote win just once and, suddenly, they’re not a vigilante anymore. They’re the thing that prowls the dark, whispering <You did the right thing,> as blood drips from their claws.

And the worst part? It feels good.

Theirs is a single consciousness wrestling with its own fractured nature.

It’s not about holding back the monster, it’s about looking at your hands mid-massacre and realising they’re yours.

"You ask if I miss who I was. But ‘I’ didn’t survive that gutter.”

Age: 28

Pronouns: They/It/We

Build: Lean

Height: 175 cm (5'9")/190 cm (6'3")

Weight: 74 kg (165 lbs)/126 kg (279 lbs)

Character Concept: A gutter-punk philosopher with a monster under their skin who struggles to embody resilience, self-made hope and the fight to be the light they never had while bonded to a force of darkness that thrives on pain.

BACKGROUND

Who Vestige was is gone, just another person who had fallen through the cracks of society, born into poverty, addiction and neglect, faced with a series of dead-end jobs, their life a constant struggle against the odds. As a child, they grew up neglected, abused and discarded, passed between relatives, the foster system, group homes and, finally, the streets; a problem, not a person, with a rap sheet that agreed and the scars to match.

Never staying anywhere long, they learned early that trust got them hurt but silence kept them invisible, or at least less likely to become a target, even if it didn’t always work. One memory that has stuck with them was that of a social worker who once told them, "You’re not unloved. You’re just… unlovable."; they hate that it still echoes in their head.

Of all the survival mechanisms they picked up as a kid, the best one was learning that libraries were often the safest place and it was here that they spent most of their time reading obsessively. Outside the safety of those walls they fought back however and whenever they could, and often when they shouldn’t, burying their needs deep because no one listened anyway.

Eventually, they aged out of the system, left with nothing, but that didn’t stop them as they clawed their way into community college and, eventually, grassroots activism, somewhere they could help kids like them. As an adult, they worked long hours at a factory, barely scraping by, filling their off hours as a social worker and activist, at shelters, crisis hotlines and outreach programs, trying to be the adult they had always needed.

But the system crushed them anyway; a child they fought for slipped through the cracks, a corrupt institution they reported retaliated, everything started to come apart at the seams. When the factory shut down, they were forced once more into petty crime, burned out, betrayed and left with nothing, cast aside by a system that had no room for those who kept it running.

This despair led them to make desperate choices so that, driven by anger and a desire for some form of control, they turned increasingly toward vigilantism and, finally, economic terrorism, firebombing police at protests, destroying private infrastructure. Less and less, they appeared at the shelters which knew them, relied on them, only to show up in back alleys and secret meetings, a blur on security feeds, throwing fire and spitting bile at the architects of their suffering... up until they caught a bullet.

Lost in the crowd, they limped their way to a quiet gutter, ready to die in the filth and muck of a city that never gave a shit about them in the first place. What had it all been for, they asked the filthy walls and greasy air, nothing would change, they’d wasted their life, so many others were wasting their lives, they gave up... until the other found them.

The night that Vestige was born.

~~~

They didn’t trust it, but they were too tired to resist.

Oblivion wrapped around them like a second skin, whispering, older than their bones, hungry in ways they’d always known but never named.

They almost gave in, until they saw their reflection: a monster, just like the ones that haunted them.

<You’re not a killer. Let me do it.>

Their reflection.

A monster, yes, but theirs.

~~~

As they met, the line between them burned away, and together they became a new, singular being, crawling from the space between 'me' and 'you', a fusion of two broken things in a body that remembers violence better than breath.

~~~

Now, as Vestige, they sell their abilities as a mercenary even as they struggle to control the hunger within them, as their bond offers them a new chance at strength and survival. As a vigilante, they target pushers, predators, traffickers, abusers, people who prey on the powerless, leaving food, cash or resources for their victims afterward, knowing that justice isn’t violence.

No costume, no alias, just a hoodie, shadow, a voice that’s too calm for the violence they wield, a vigilante who doesn’t call themselves a hero, a Vestige of a broken society, of the person they once knew. Inside, they know that this power comes with a dark side; they hate hurting people but it loves the pain, feeding its hunger with violence, chaos and destruction.

Connections

Mara Siddell, an ex-marine turned social worker and the one person who didn’t give up, a name that carries warmth, resilience and a hint of weariness from years in a broken system, she is the one person from their past who still checks in. A no-nonsense woman with a graying braid who smokes clove cigarettes and never says "I told you so", even when she did; Vestige ignores her calls but keeps her number, taking comfort in every message that starts, “I know you’re not picking up, but...”

Gauge, real name: Darian Voss, a former cop who snapped and now hunts criminals with a twelve-gauge loaded with salt rounds, he’s a man who loves the chaos that Vestige denies themselves. Because of that, Gauge has taken to calling himself their so-called rival, if only for the fact that he is convinced that he can see right through their righteous facade, “And when you do snap, it’ll be great fun putting you down.”

The kid they couldn’t save. A ghost in their mind.

Goals

Protect the Vulnerable Without Crossing the Line: Target predators (traffickers, abusers, corrupt enforcers) but refuse to kill, even when the symbiote demands it, because justice isn’t just violence.

Break the Cycle of Trauma, For Themselves and the Symbiote: Find a way to coexist with the symbiote without surrendering to its hunger, proving that suffering doesn’t have to create monsters.

Outlive the Hate: Survive; not heroically, not viciously, simply endure, and in doing so, force the world to accept that hope cannot be destroyed.

APPEARANCE

The host is lean, with dark circles under their eyes and a worn but steady demeanor, clad in clothes that are thrift-store practical, consisting of loose layers that swallow their frame. It’s a style and a body carefully curated to defy categorisation, leveraging androgyny as camouflage through baggy hoodies, work pants and combat boots meant to make them a genderless shadow.

Their hair is chopped short, an uneven cut they did themselves in a motel mirror, sometimes dyed a faded, nondescript colour of muddy brown or dull black, nothing memorable. Beneath this, their eyes are dark-rimmed, always slightly unfocused, like they’re listening to something else just out of earshot, though their gaze is apt to sharpen immediately when something needs attention.

Their skin has a sickly undertone from too many nights without sun, their scars the only marks they haven’t tried to hide; knife nicks on their hands, burns along their forearms, "Proof I’m real." A single, faded tally mark on their inner wrist is the only tattoo they sport, thin like their mouth, which is often pressed into a line; they rarely smile, and never with teeth.

Everything about them is deliberately unremarkable, they walk with a slouch, keeping their stride short, years of practice meant to make them unnoticeable, alone or in crowds. An exception is made when they’re angry, for then their shoulders snap back, their chin lifts and, for a second, one can see what they could’ve been, before they remember and fold inward again.

~~~

Their other is itself utterly alien to its host’s fairly average appearance, looking to be little more than an obscure, inky mass lacking in distinguishing traits. Typically, the creature takes the form of its host’s clothing, thick dusky layers of cloth that looks natural enough at a glance but gets increasingly, uncomfortably alive the closer one looks.

A living shadow, the symbiote doesn’t cling to muscle or curves, it erases them entirely, turning Vestige into a sleek, genderless figure, its face a smooth, featureless faceplate with no mouth, no nose, just two white, slitted eyes that glow faintly. Its surface is ink-black, with a shifting colour like oil on water or lacquer on pottery, but under direct light it shimmers with faintly iridescent blue-green highlights, running throughout in vein-like streaks akin to cracks filled with gold.

When invoked for combat or protection, their body unfurls, taking on an appearance akin to a sleek suit of biomechanical body armour that shifts preemptively with every movement. This unassuming exterior tears apart upon entering a rage, adding razor-edged claws and muscular bulk even as its surface churns into a roiling profusion of blindly grasping pseudopodia.

More horrific is a wide seam that splits open upon an otherwise blank face to reveal a slavering mouth full of slick, pointed fangs bursting from carmine gums. Between them slithers a prehensile tentacle-like tongue that lollops like a lizard’s tail down its distended jaw, oozing a constant stream of discoloured ichor.

~~~

Together, their voice is a distorted, sibilant whisper of Vestige’s cool tones and a deep, subvocal bass growing when angry into a dual growl, felt in the bones more than heard. The same expressiveness extends to the rest of its body, the symbiote’s shapeshifting telegraphing its emotion, growing thorns when furious or rippling like static when scared.

Vestige uses its ability to obscure their features as a self-defense, erasing their identity so that they can do what they feel they need to, paradoxically reducing themselves to an object, a tool that can help others. But when Vestige panics, it hardens into a carapace, protecting them by making them untouchable, and when it panics, tendrils lash uncontrollably, forming jagged teeth, spines, too many eyes, a child’s drawing of "monster."

PERSONALITY

At their core, even before the bond, the host was a survivor, a fighter and a reluctant beacon trying to be what the world never was for them, a trauma-scarred but defiant soul who refused to let suffering make them cruel, living by the motto: "Be the person you needed." This drove them like a hunger, as their curse and their weapon, a part of them, like lungs or bile; they let it gorge on pain so they could wield its teeth to protect others, seeing themselves not as a hero or villain, just someone who understood suffering and fought to ease it.

Vestige speaks softly, but their words cut deep with the quiet fierceness of having learned that anger is exhausting, leaning into diplomacy when they can and letting their other handle everything else. They can’t stand seeing others hurt and will step in, even when they’re at their lowest, channelling that protective instinct into action not because they believe in heroes but because they’re tired, not broken.

They’ll be the first to acknowledge that their past shapes them, even haunts them, but they refuse to let it define who they are, and more, to chain them to something they will not let themselves be. Because, in the end, they are a person shaped by silence, forged in defiance and learning, slowly, how to let themselves exist, because even if they don’t expect good things, they’ll still try to make them.

That said, their idealism is pragmatic, not naive; they’ve seen the worst of people but they choose to act like better exists, even if they know that kindness won’t fix the world, because someone once didn’t. Theirs is the art of the controlled burnout, operating in cycles between numb efficiency and reckless altruism followed by collapse, “rest” amounting to disassociation with extra steps; call it “meditation”.

~~~

To this the symbiote brought an instinctiveness driven chiefly by much simpler motives, expressing and understanding only more primal emotions such as happiness, anger or fear, having been drawn to its host’s pain and their defiance of it. Although a fully aware and sapient being, it is nonetheless a vicious, alien predator, an inner voice compelling its host to corruption and violence in order to feed its endless hunger; all at once a tempter, possessive lover and a child learning morality from its host.

With no notable cultural traits or means of expression, its only real sense of identity is gleaned from its host and in that way, they are one, its host having imprinted upon the creature some semblance of their own natural drive and tenaciousness. Ultimately amoral, the nature of their bond is such that it feeds on its host’s anguish, while being fascinated by their refusal to surrender and, although it doesn’t understand mercy, it has slowly learned from their stubborn compassion.

Such is its nature, its instinct, that the symbiote acts like a dark safety net, whispering in its host’s mind when they are at their weakest, offering to let it take their pain, to let it be their wrath, to let it use its strength when they dare not. Conflict arises in their stubborn refusal, as the host uses the symbiote to protect others, but every time they do, it digs deeper into their trauma, making them wonder if this is strength or just another kind of surrender.

~~~

Like all of its kind, the symbiote is a creature of contradictions, born to consume but cursed to care, engineered as it was to bond with and enhance its host in every way, devouring the physiological essence of their experiences. In its own way, it craves meaning, harbouring no human morality, but a deep, predatory curiosity about the host’s resilience even as it sees their emotions as chemical reactions; yet it memorises the taste of their grief.

Through this dance of dependency, it has come to love its host in its own way, expressed through obsessive protection, how it knows their heartbeat, breath patterns, the flavour of their pain. When they dissociate, it offers only cruel comfort, wrapping tighter around them, not restraint, but a grotesque self-embrace, letting them know, <You are here. You are mine.>

Its reality is that of engineered addiction, yet even with the overproduced dopamine that would make the breaking of their bond nothing less than agonising withdrawal, it knows that it needs its host more than they need it. Symbiotes were meant to be gods, they control, they consume, they discard, yet it hesitates, it learns, understands fear; of being replaced, of their death, not for their sake, for what is it then, because it does not know how to grieve.

Through the bond it shares, it has become torn between instinct, hunger and the desire to be what its host needs, the addiction it fosters the closest thing it has to a love language. In the purest possible sense, it is a dark mirror to them, exercising a different kind of strength, hiding its vulnerabilities; it keeps them alive, it makes them need it but, is that kindness, or cruelty?

Why does it care?

~~~

It’s that sort of paradox which defines what emerged from the bond, a guarded kind of compassion that would see them freely give a stranger their coat, their shoes, their last dollar, but flinch if touched without warning. Every cell in their body screams "quit," but their hands keep moving, tired but relentless, giving advice that makes them seem wise, even if self-doubt keeps them from following it for themselves, pushing when all they want is reprieve.

When Vestige speaks it’s quiet, but sharp, using few words while making sure that each one lands, sprinkling in dark humour as a defense mechanism, but drawing the line at empty platitudes. Around others, they keep their back to walls, always scanning exits, an instinct that relegates intimacy to the level of tolerated negotiation, nervousness marked by fidgeting, picking at their sleeves and similar.

They avoid reflections because they don’t recognise what stares back, not out of horror but dissociation; who they were before feels like someone else’s life because Vestige’s first memory was the gutter, their bonding not a transformation, just the real them waking up. They’re the aftermath of a collision, not a person and an alien but a fire that can’t remember being sparks and tinder, something new: a wounded, furious event in a skin-suit, a hunger that isn’t an invader but the echo of every time they were hungry before; for food, for safety, for revenge.

~~~

It’s when Vestige goes quiet that the real problems come clear, their too-calm voice a sure sign of rising anger and straight silence a warning that something has to give. When that anger gets out, it’s not the loud, explosive kind, but a deep, frozen rage that they’re terrified to let thaw, the pain of memory forcing down the parts of themselves that are all teeth and no conscience.

The same can be said when the opposite is true, since long practice has fully-embedded a deep asocial streak that sees them withdraw when things are at their worst, desperate for a sense of solitude that their dual consciousness can never know again. Yet, even so, they’re lonely in a way that they’ll never admit, even as they sometimes let themselves be hurt just to feel seen, grieving as they do, not for any one person, but for the self they could’ve been if life had been kinder.

If they fight, every move is practical, not proud, a mix of dirty survival and symbiote ferality; they know how to hurt but refuse to kill when possible, preferring to dislocate bones, not break them, to restrain or knock unconscious. Their greatest strength isn’t the symbiote, it’s knowing exactly how much pain a person can take and how to avoid drawn out fights, a skill honed from surviving in back alleys and foster homes, but that doesn’t stop them from apologising when all is said and done.

Ideals

No One Gets Left Behind: If you see someone suffering, you act, even if it costs you.

Pain Doesn’t Excuse Cruelty: The world broke you, but you won’t let it break others.

Survival Isn’t Enough: You refuse to just endure; you’ll fight for something better.

Flaws

The Hunger Whispers: The symbiote’s violent urges wear down your restraint, especially when you're hurt or angry.

Trust Is a Luxury: You push people away, assuming they’ll betray or abandon you eventually.

Burning the Wick at Both Ends: You don’t know when to stop, sacrificing your health and sanity for others until you collapse.

Motivation

Vestige is determined to prove that even something born of hunger and hate can choose to be better, to fight back against a world that grinds people into nothing. They’ll do this, not with mindless rage, but with stubborn, bleeding hope as what happens when an unstoppable hunger meets an unbreakable will, not by conquering their nature, but by redefining it.

#original character #creative writing #writeblr #symbiote oc #klyntar

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maps-to-elsewhere · 18 days ago

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Return to Index.

The Last Architecture: Overview

The end of time is not an event, but a landscape, one that must be traversed by those who were never meant to witness it, not as a place one navigates, a process, a condition one suffers.

Plying aimlessly through cosmic gulfs haunted by the spectre of deep time, beyond the death of ordered space, amidst the sublime horror of a universe winding down, roam untethered, clotted, self-cannibalising agglomerations of worlds, heaping, stygian dimensions coagulated into a single, sprawling megastructure: the Last Architecture. It is a fractal superstructure, shifting, aggregate detritus cast in titanic confusion, labyrinthine chambers and halls, warrens of machinery and ecology moulded together in endless cycles of digestive rebirth, shaped by entropy into something between tomb and womb, where life clings rank, like mold, to the ruins of meaning.

Here, the digitised remnants of long-dead consciousness flicker like a dying star, no longer mind, but a climate, ideological weather patterns that shape a dreaming storm of half-remembered desires, not transcendence, degradation. Within its currents howl algorithmic ghosts and the collective trauma of a species not dying, posthumous, retained in a system that was never meant to sustain life, but replace it, the failed upload of a mind too vast to cohere.

Ancillary to this noosphere, this maelstrom proxy, splay the organs of a self-contained ecosystem where their last biological remains cling to existence, fractured genetic code, data corruption, spreading like gangrene. Amidst fractal walls that grow like coral scars from the ribs of this dead leviathan like a festering, recursive wound, those who persist are not inhabitants, but symptoms of its breaking, its breaking what permits life to continue.

Existence has been reduced to a stuck record of consciousness skipping on the last proton’s decay, lacking even the comfort offered by the light of dead stars, their luminance long-lost to the emptiness underpinning what no longer is. Here is nothing more than a contortion of preserved biology and recorded mind in a corpse so vast that its decomposition is mistaken for ecology, churning in a silent scream, forever in a hall of mirrors that go nowhere, cries falling dead against themselves at the end of all things.

The End of Order

In lieu of sky is naught but a negative impression, a scar left behind that presses like a suffocating membrane, the Lambence, a quantum echo of photons that no longer exist, trapped in the fabric of a reality where time has lost its arrow. It is not light as can be understood, nor sky as can be looked up at, but the afterimage of causality, the waste glow of a universe suffocated to a guttering radiance stretched into perpetual twilight; pale, cold, directionless, a ghostly afterimage, a mockery of sun.

Throughout this mammoth conflux, intelligent monoliths oversee great seas of organic slurry spawning predacious effigies of flesh and machine that haunt the wreckage between impenetrable, ever-changing strata where reality is improvised. These protean environs are distorted by anomalous hazards, where gravity loops like a Möbius strip, light is a currency traded between machines and pockets of air hum with the voices of dead poets; prospectors don’t explore these places, they negotiate with them.

The shattered expanse of this frontier is draped in corrosive fecundity carried on the constant, howling winds rushing hot through knife-edged crags, cutting through the monuments of a past left to ageless putrefaction. Ignoble remnants, they are a scarred landscape of irradiated wastes, bleakness dominated by cyclopean structures and shifting monoliths of polyhedral suggestion which clutter the noisome air twined through with vast snarls of creeping, clinging life.

Between Life and Decay

Within twilit places, contrivances of civilisation persist in desperate confutation, huddled amidst the confluence of titanic cadavers and necrotising monuments, mouldering lives lost to the scale of the forgotten. Almost exclusively, secure habitations are the relatively stable environments near water supplies where spaces rest but uneasily, confused yet predictable in their ceaseless conjunctions.

From these outflows are grown the staples on which the populace rely, rare oases, that are mere singular, self-contained regions amidst the benighted turmoil blooming from dead matter beyond. Among them, the people cling to co-opted apparatuses suspended within the co-mingled flotsam, sustaining themselves on the layered, vestige confusion of lost epochs.

If such are the nerve centres then the flow of water between them is the lifeblood, moving in regular cycles of heating and rising, carried in diurnal cycles upon atmospheric plasma currents. These cycles are the basis of chronological reckoning as currents wax and wane, waters rising heated only to fall, cooling as it goes before the process begins anew.

Civilisation of Dregs

Where the waters gather, life has arisen, their pathways becoming the foundations of what passes for civilisations skulking around in the filth and dark, festering upon the bones of the past, dependent upon deposits of ruin. Between such redoubts, secure routes are painstakingly charted as safe ways warp over time into trap-filled snarls, monstrous dens or worse, becoming co-opted by those venal predators who prey upon their own.

Civilisation struggles to draw itself out from the upheavals left by the fall of the Elder Race, the Old Ones who reigned over all in cruel incomprehension and whose remnants have been left to decay in a land made rotten by their downfall. Amidst streets that rewrite themselves to spite pedestrians, refugees trade memories like currency, selling their pasts to buy futures, ruled by guilds that are less factions and more emergent properties, like convection currents in a boiling pot.

Dubious safety is an alienated, mildewed environ twisting through bazalgettean congeries of lawless, clustered catacombs, waterways and cathedrals of sewage like an extended, suppurating gutter in which people contrive yet to live. Within, community has coalesced amidst automated processes and half-tamed tracts of origami architecture, sanctuary a labyrinth of unnerving angles and ever-shifting pathways criss-crossing throughout a mass grave filled with pitfalls and phenomena that defy sense.

Inheritors of Ruin

Driven behind the walls of these redoubts in desperate cooperation by the depravations of dead masters, their survivors nonetheless persist in meagre hovels built upon grand foundations. Conflicts between the lesser races have been, by contrast, few and petty, contests of exploitation and subterfuge amidst acts of espionage and domestic terror amidst a backdrop of a grudging sort of cooperation, if not tolerance between factions.

During the interim, the military aristocracy of the Vesmiran imperial estates have become the harried vanguard of an uneasy accord, self-styled Ordinators, keepers of a fragile unity couched in mutual aid, fighting wars over axioms, not territory. Their efforts are bolstered by the cultural, technological and economic advancements coming out of the numerous Special Administrative Districts, wounds in the Architecture’s logic where the noosphere’s self-repair protocols have failed.

By contrast, the greatest clans of the Escharim Autarky have seen what remains of their peoples wracked by cultural and political schism and the slow extinction caused by a dysgenic weapon which has curbed their capacity to reproduce. Further threatened by rebellion within the ranks of their graven servants, many of their leadership have been forced to retreat into the guarded isolation of their ancestral cloisters or face the march of progress.

The graven themselves have taken the opportunity to cement their people within the fabric of this new order, making of themselves the indispensable mortar upholding the tenuous structure of an integrated civilisation. Although there is no dearth of ill will toward those who would have called themselves these peoples’ masters, the graven have, on the whole, seen fit to lead by example where their peers seek only opportunist retribution.

Fragile Peace

While tensions remain between the three races, a masquerade of peace has persisted in the guilds of the Federated Economic Bloc, a pretence made filthy by use and reuse. Buoyed upon a nascent second industrial revolution helmed by enemies turned wary allies, it is a grim promise to a populace which upholds a fractured front in the face of a grim reality.

Bringing order to this disparate union is the Circle of the White Bell, its toll not a sound but a mathematical constant that staves off the mind’s dissolution amidst the maelstrom, consistent as a Fibonacci heartbeat. It is a pulse of artificial timekeeping within the cycles that dominate and to hear it is to remember that you exist, an anchor in the storm as it counts the unending cycles, its absence to unravel amidst the recursive palimpsest of predatory meaning.

Fittingly, the ministrations of the Circle lie in records, like unreliable eulogies pointing to the corpses of empires yet to be despoiled for resources lost to the ruins between Districts. This pillage is sentineled by the Ordinators’ legions who oversee the beleaguered populace of the Federation which renders the materials gathered by their protectors for use.

The lives of the majority are spent labouring to feed the endless needs of civil infrastructure within the Districts in exchange for safety, clean water, food and the promise of citizenship for themselves or their children. For this reason, desperation is synonymous with loyalty and the threat that comes with deviation the foundation of the rule of law, any discrepancy being dangerous to the fragile status quo.

Prospectors of Rot

Such stricture is of little comfort as the sheltered inhabitants turn inwards, seeking in the cryptic and forsaken depths of their havens some meagre succour salvaged from the overgrown wreckage in desperate refutation of such burgeoning, derelict rot. A life within the Districts is one spent sifting through the gathered detritus of Reclamation Zones beyond their walls to refine the materials necessary for continued survival, risking life and limb delving into the deep maze in search of caches yet unclaimed.

In the depths, subsistence is taken amidst broken masonry punctuated by debris blown on miasmic winds, piling around chemical pools into mountains of toxic putrefaction scoured for the promise of value hardly repaid. Metals are the primary incentive most have for braving the Zones, a rare and precious commodity alongside rarer technologies, or else they follow whispers of strange, cryptic artefacts which will sell for a tidy profit at the Exchange.

Though first the purview of specialists trained and outfitted by governing bodies, the growth of industrial demand has given rise to a nascent class of pioneering prospectors who stalk the untrod catacombs in search of dubious profit. Their efforts have given rise to a deeply-rooted mythology of freebooters, mercenaries, the desperate and foolish, a base echo of civilisation cannibalising the looming corpse of its forebears.

A Haven for Outcasts

Stricken from the archival efforts of the Circle and far from the Resonance of the Bell’s cleansing Tones, one District in particular has become infamous as the dumping-ground of society: District 23. Once a great capital, to judge by its crumbling architecture, it is settled now only by the homeless, outlaws and fugitives from the Federation, outcasts with no better place to go, attracting opportunists like flies around trash.

Studiously ignored by the authorities, ruined by generations of neglect, District 23 is a place of convenience for the ruling powers and an inescapable reality for its unfortunate populace, a pressure-valve for a system that officially denies scarcity. Theirs is a society pieced together from the disfigured histories and cemeteries of culture defaced after so many centuries, retrofitted under the shadow of a military-industrial complex that has grown to perpetually fight itself.

Though officially a non-place, District 23 has become an enclosed battlefield where bloodshed has been replaced with engagements of economic rivalry and strained alliances of Federation phyles. Here, peace means the threat of renewed violence planned in guild halls and played out by proxy within the self-governed, semi-lawless civic blocks of the unguilded thetes, gutter punks living in their shadows.

To many, chafing between the proscriptions necessary for survival and the injustices that persist under the rule of law, walking the streets of District 23 seems an unlikely sort of succour. This paradoxical escape from the mundane has become embodied in folk tales of stalkers who brace the Zones, seeking their fortune in a dissonant world where the past is an open wound and the future remains uncertain.

#creative writing #worldbuilding #writeblr #core #overview #the last architecture

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