Devis' Apartment

[Devis]

Devis' second-story apartment is directly across from the Lead Feather. The owner of the building he lives in, a quiet dwarf carpenter by the name of Grant Forgeborn, lives on the first story.

The building is in a general state of mild disrepair. The area of grass out front is home to a solitary oak tree. The small courtyard contains a similar tree that has grown too large for the building. The walls are sealed around the branches where they broke through.

Devis' two rooms are in worse condition than the rest of the building. The floor slants oddly in one room, and a branch of the tree has grown through a window in the bedroom. Devis currently has a scrap of paper with a hastily written song upon it pinned to the branch.

The walls of both rooms are in ruins. A row of holes the size of fists adorn one wall in the bedroom, several gashes decorate another, one is covered almost completely with paper and parchment, and the other wall appears to have mostly removed. The wooden framework of the building is visible along that wall and is used as shelving. The walls in the other room have similar adornments. Chains hang from the ceiling in the bedroom. They apparently are stuck in the rafters. There is a desk in the bedroom and a table in the other. They are both strewn with papers. The desk has a dagger embedded deeply into the wood, and the table has several glasses of alcohol in varying degrees of emptiness on it. The bed is never made. The only semblance of organization is apparent in the closet, which has neat rows of folded clothes. The closet's door has been ripped off and leans against the wall nearby.

[Devis]

Devis leans on the broken windowsill. He watches the people move through the cobblestone plaza down the street, noting that no one ever stops moving, even for a second. He sighs and turns away from the window, fingering the collar around his neck. He reclines against the windowsill for a moment.

After a while, he walks up to his closet and pulls out his trenchcoat. He dons it, fishes his leather-bound notebook out of a pile of papers, and walks downstairs. He nods to Grant as he passes by, but the dwarf is working to hard to notice. Devis steps out into the front yard and closes the door quietly behind himself. He starts to wander through the streets of the city.

[Devis]

Devis climbs his stairs quickly, skipping most of the steps. Grant isn't here at the moment. All the better.

Devis makes his way to the desk in the bedroom. He sweeps the papers off of it with one arm and pulls the crumpled paper out of his cloak with the other hand. He drops it on the desk and looks at it. It seems to move as he looks at it, almost like it is trying to uncrumple itself... or like something inside is trying to get out. Devis shudders and reaches for it, holding his breath. He quickly flattens it out.

A scream forms in Devis' throat and begins to claw its way out. He chokes it back down with some difficulty, breathing heavily. He closes his eyes, relieved. It wasn't what he thought it was, just the shadows playing on the folds of the paper. It had just been so... so real in the Evensong. Devis shudders again. He knocks the paper off the desk with his hand and sits down heavily on the chair. He rests his head sideways on the rough wood. He places his arm on the desk and stares at the scars that stretch across inside of his wrist, mercifully too preoccupied to remember where they came from. His breathing slows down gradually.

[Devis]

Devis awakens with a jolt and sits up quickly. He is bathed in cold sweat, and shudders uncontrollably. He can't remember what he was dreaming about, and is grateful. Even so, he can't seem to calm down. He sits on his bed, shivering, for a while.

Eventually, he stands and drapes a blanket over his shoulders. He takes an almost full glass of alcohol from the other room and walks back into his bedroom. He brushes something with his foot and jumps back, swallowing a scream. He sighs and brushes the spilled alcohol off of his arm. Just the paper from the other day. He shakes his head and walks up to the window, placing the glass on the sagging windowsill as he does so. He stares out at the empty street and feels very much alone. He wonders if everyone else really is gone, if the world moved on and left him behind. He doesn't sleep any more that night.

[Devis]

As soon as the light from the sun begins to creep over the horizon, Devis dresses and walks downstairs. He steps outside and makes his way to the big church he's heard about.

[Devis]

Devis is staring out the window when the wave hits him. At first he thinks that it's just in his head (he has always suspected that the entire world is just in his head, though...), but then he looks out the window and watches the other humans begin their march. The end of the world, then. Devis shrugs and puts on his cloak.

[Devis]

Devis paces around his room.

This isn't his fight, damn it. It's the human's fight. Or maybe it's the end of the world. He hopes it is. All of the fucking hate and ignorance erased in a moment. All that's left of the world is just the memory of a nightmare, surfacing in decayed pieces, like the bodies of all the captains who went down with their damn ships.

Even if the world is doomed to end as just another bad memory in the collective mind of the uncaring gods, Devis wants to be part of it. Not as just another crazy poet, churning out feeble songs as full of fabricated anger as they are full of goddamn lies, but as someone who made some sort of difference in the fucking rotting corpse that is this world. He wants to stare the gods in the eye and then stab it out, make them remember him somehow. If not the gods, then the whole damn world.

If he dies, he hopes the earth chokes on his corpse as it pulls him down into the dirt with the rest of the heretics.

[Devis]

Devis slams his fist through his window. He tears a large piece of glass away from the wood. He holds it in his hand, imagining that it is the world. The whole world in his hands...

Devis closes his hand, crushing the glass. He smiles grotesquely at the pieces of the world embedded in his palm, covered in his blood. His blood drowning the world. Yes, the world would know him then. The whole fucking world would know him; the gods, the heartless bastards, would know him then. And they would remember him.

Devis exits his apartment. He begins to walk toward the Library. He begins to jog, then run, then sprint as if all of the demons in his head were chasing them. He doesn't look back, just in case they are.