• Clasping the envelope in his fist, a freckled, crooked toothed boy with ratty brown hair trudged through the empty, dusty street, past the identical columns of unmarked, square, wooden huts. He counted off each one, pointing at their doors with his arm extended. When he reached the propper one, he turned sharply and dissapeared behind it's threshold. There was no sign that anyone had lived in the hut in years, as no one had. The old man hadn't been on the surface since he could hold a weapon. The stairway down to the basement level was in the corner of the hut, beneath a trap door that meshed with the flooring. without putting down the envelope, the boy propped the door with one hand, then hoisted it with both wrists before descending the earthen steps.

    The old man's scarf was drawn tightly across his neck and face, obscuring the entire half of his face from his nose, inclusive. His head was completely hairless, save his thick eyebrows, which still held a ghost of their original blackness, dark strands standing proudly amongst white brothers, as pepper. His deep set eyes were glazed, yet wise, as if he were staring off at a distant truth that none other could see. His face was rough, but graciously untrue to his age. The boy could have sworn the man was dead every time he came down those stone steps. His pipe leaned limply from between his figners, cold, dark, and unlit as the hearth before him, and his head skewed over the back of his rocking chair, which stood still as a stone. The moment the trapdoor shut, the old man slowly righted himself, as though he had been wide awake all the while. His face was constricted into a pained wince as he adressed the boy. "Is it here? Do you have it, boy?" His voice was wet, nazal, and sounded as if there was a large object in his mouth.

    "I-It's right... here." The boy produced the small packet flat on his palm. The man snatched it with a shaky hand and emptied the contents into his pipe.

    "Get me an ember from the firehole. There's a good boy." The man clawed at his scarf until it draped about his shoulders, reavealing a greusome wound across his face: four thick claws had torn flesh from the back of his neck, dragging foreward to where the flesh of his cheek had been completely removed. The greusome sight of his rotted gums and teeth, openly visible through his torn cheek, added to the homely sight of the wound.

    Eagerly snatching the lit pipe from the boy, the old man cupped his torn cheek, and took a long drag from his pipe. As he exhaled, he slumped languidly into his chair, the pain in his ancient, dying body slipping away as though it never were.

    "So, boy. lookin' to learn more of the wretched?"

    "Yes, sir"

    The old man leaned foreward in his chair, shaddows setting into his features, shading his eyes and deepening his scar. "The wretched... souless bodies of men and women, wandering the plains and consu-"

    "sir," the boy interrupted. "where did the wretched come from?" The intensity of the silence that followed filled the boy with such regret, he clamped both hands over his mouth and whined softly.

    The old man only cackled softly, probing the shaft of his pipe into the side of his open face. "No respect for a good storytelling, eh? children these days." The man looked off into the distance with his glazed eyes, and minutes passed before he spoke again, the ratty child looking about nervously. "Before the wretched. Long ago. There was one world, in pergatory. Not paradise, mind you; humans are the scum of the earth. No planet with a human on it will bear Eden. They quarrel and bicker, brothers tread on the other to gain the power to tread on their fathers. This conquest for power led to the bloody practice of sorcery. Do you know what sorcery is, boy?"

    He continued without waiting for an answer.

    "It isn't magic, there is no such thing. Sorcery is a devil's game. The power of a soul, to fill a sack of meat and bones with thought and emotion; a powerful energy, that can be used in many ways. Sorcery tears the soul from a body, to make a change in the world - start a flame, topple a mountain, anything the soul would be able to accomplish in it's life, though that body. After the soul has served its purpose, however, it can never return to it's body. Never again. Do you know what it leaves in it's place, boy?"

    "A wretch?"

    "A wretch! mindless, soulless bodies that ravage and devour and force us to live like behind barracks and burrow like moles beneath our own homes! And what's worse, the demons never perish short of being completely obliterated by force and relentless butchery!" The man's words became incoherent, muttering staggered curses at sorcers and their fecal matter that plagued the earth; morever, he continued this way until the boy interjected,

    "what happens to their souls?"

    The old man's stammering slurred into a titter as he slowly turned to face the boy once more. "They were just as much trouble as the wretched, they were, until the espers showed up out of blinking nowhere to confront the sorcerers. These espers, they were strange. They wore strange, puffy clothes, they did. All the men from their land did. Not all of them we- excuse me."

    The man paused to cup his cheek and suck his pipe.

    "not all of them were espers, mind you. Espers were men that had learned to make changes in the world with their own mind and soul. They could passify the fleeting spirits of the wretched. Spectres, the spirits were called. But the Sorcerers, they would have none of it. They built their blinking temple and performed their ritual to try and make a spectre of the whole world. wretch it, like they had done to so many poor souls. Do you know what they did with that giant spectre? They used it's power to banish all the esper, and all their people to the world's spectre, and let it overlap it's wretch. Where you sit, right now, there may very well be one of the esper's boys, on this world's specter, in your place. What's worse, they sent the spectres after them. Whenever a wretch is made, his tortured spirit passes from this wretched world to it's spectre, to haunt the golden domed halls of the esper's people. Those glorious palaces where the eshper's men the eshpersss... perpeople. that they, that th- eh..."

    The old man's words deteriorated into dribble as his drugs took their full effect. The boy systematically stood and returned the old man's shawl before making off up the earthen stairs.