The Trouble With Death.

[Apollyon]

Here is a new story fic by me. The title is only temporary and as per normal I'll be adding bits as I write them. Hope you like it.

Chapter 1

A huge plain lit by fire. A thousand troops made of bone, stripped of flesh. They cast empty leers as they raise their shields to charge.

The sky is being infected by a purple glare. It seeps in from the north like a great ocean covering the dark blue land. The purple is not sky, though. A thousand, a million, more. Too many too count, the deep violet dragons pour over the land.

A dark tunnel - a cowled figure crouched on the ground. Below it lies a body, home to a hundred gashes and cuts. Blood flows freely. And the figure turns.

Breathe in. And his eyes opened with that sharp inhalation. An averagely built man sitting slightly on the side of scrawny with an unremarkable face except for a long scar line running from his temple right down to his fairly weak chin. It was this man that found himself at last awake, looking up at an unmeasurable black infinity stretched out above him. He hoisted himself tentatively to his feet and looked around. It was dark, but no normal darkness. His head span and his eyes blurred. Headache. Damn. He clutched his head, thinking, and found after some searching that he knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not his name, not his home, not his family and, most pressing, not this place. The vision before him swam into a chaotic focus. Yes, it was dark, but he got the distinct impression that the infinite darkness around him, despite feeling, sounding and smelling like space, was in fact a very carefully painted wall. This was puzzling. He did a mental check. All seemed well, if a little confused, except for the life of him he could not tell his temperature. He decided he should be cold and promptly shivered.

Ah, he thought, I know what I should be doing. The confused man turned slowly around, fearing any minute he might plunge into a cold oblivion, or perhaps a very black brick wall. "Ah, now isn't that something." A vast castle stretched impossibly upwards a few metres from where he stood. It emanated a green glow that was limited entirely to itself, presumably, so the man thought, to make everything that little bit stranger. The man felt that he ought to tell the castle that to be totally honest it really didn't need to look any stranger, but he felt better of it, thinking that the castle might take it personally. He shook his head. "Must've hit my head or something," He mumbled uncertainly. Yes, things were certainly stranger than he remembered them, not that that was at all difficult seeing as how he couldn't remember a thing. The citadel was huge, this has already been said, but it really was gigantic. Not gigantic in a physically big sort of way (althought it was pretty bloody big, truth be known) but utterly enormous in a mentally imposing manner. This poor bedraggled man really did feel as if he was being examined by the castle as if he were something nasty on the bottom of its shoe - if it had a shoe. He assumed it did and looked back at it with a slightly worried expression on his face or at least what he thought might be a considered a worried expression if he were able to see it. Afterall it was bloody dark in here.

And there it was, he'd thought it himself. 'In here'. Castles normally, in the man's mind, were outside, surely? So why did he feel like he was inside a big cave? The man took a minute to evaluate the rest of his sentence too. Ah. When he came to think of it the photologically challenged nature of the place really didn't matter when it came to trying to look at his own face. He felt sheepish for a moment until he realised that this would just make him wonder what a sheepish expression might be and that it would all start again. The man focused again, this time with visible effort, on the castle. To his left and right were sat two incredibly ugly and vicious looking gargoyles, each with very obvious claws and fangs, probably to make a visitor feel more at home.

[Apollyon]

A burst of light entered his vision and he followed it to its source with his eyes. The castle gate. The part represented the whole and this, like the castle itself, was vast and seemed sentient in its own right. It was empty, with no door or gate seated in its immense frame. Only a swirling fog of light and colour could be seen within the gaping breach. The man's breathing quickened and he felt drawn towards that gate. He watched as his legs propelled him unsteadily forward - closer and closer. The light tossed and giggled in its flowing eddies as it played on the man's face, running over his cheek and glinting in his eye. He could hear nothing. Nothing but his heart. Thump. Thump. The man reached out to touch the gate.

A sharp squeeling, much akin to a pig on helium, filled his ears. He suddenly felt very strange indeed, possibly in need of a lie down. The man closed his eyes and fell head first through the gate. The last thing he saw before losing conscioussness was a long spiralling vortex of green light, and at the end of it a hundred different off-shoots.

[Apollyon]

A man, clothed in spiked chain mail and holding a cruel twin-bladed scimitar. He smiles and twirls the blades around his fist menacingly.

A massive battlefield stretching to the horizon to meet land with sky. The two gigantic armies run together like buffeting waves, throwing eachother backwards with the impact.

A chase. A chase through a citadel to a doorway. Escape. Escape.

The man awoke to find himself staring into the eyes of a beautiful girl. Her cold blue eyes looked out to him from a pale face, edged with strong cheek-bones. The hair was dark blue, nearly black in places, and bounced down from her head in long slender spikes. He smiled and suddenly felt embarassed. She smiled back. Wehay, he thought. But she looked up again in second and got to her feet. This, while making him feel more than a little rejected, did give him the chance to look at his surroundings. He pushed his torso up so he could sit and craned his neck up and around to take a look at the area.

[Apollyon]

An enormous domed ceiling looked down on him, every inch of space crammed full of incredibly detailed images and carvings. He followed it's gradient down until it reached vertical walls. In the upper half of these walls, ringing the huge room, were a hundred little glassless windows. The bemused man's gaze dipped lower and lower until it came to what he assumed was the entrance and exit to the building. What he saw was a heavy oak door, easily twice as tall as he was and in-laid with steel and gold.

"This one's still present." He looked up a bit and saw that the proclamation had come from the girl who had been stooped over him just moments before. As he watched her he began to notice his more immediate surroundings as well. Just inches from him lay...lay. Well, he thought, they had  to be dead. Most people don't tend to get up when they're missing chunks from their heads. The man gagged while at the same time trying not to laugh. He felt very strange recently, even stranger than before. Before what exactly, he didn't know but he left it as it was and guessed there had to be a 'before' for there to be a 'now'.

"Well... can't we kill him anyway? I could do with a nice new coat." A man said, grinning his way. The grin would have been a toothy and somewhat threatening and suggestive grin had it been executed properly, but the man could tell that, one, the man was a novice at threatening grins, and two, he had no teeth. While the grin wasn't threatening as such, the man did find it a bit disturbing and sat down all the harder for it.

"You know we can't do that." The blue-haired girl regarded the lost-looking man with a thoughtful expression. "Take what you can from the others and let's call it a day. There's only an hour left on our shift anyway."

"I'll stay a bit longer, didn't get a lot today." A different man called from where he was inspecting a body a few metres away. This one was very tall and had facial features reminiscent of a bird.

"Not a lot?" The girl asked indignantly, "You hauled at least a hundred commons from that dead ugly thing."

"The troll? Yeah... well. I kinda..." He looked down at his shoes and shuffled from side to side, "I sort of... sort of spent it."

"What? You spent it? You only found it a few hours ago! What the hell did you spend it on?" The hawk-faced man blushed crimson and shuffled some more in response. "Oh, forget it. I get the feeling I really don't want to know." And with that she lifted a bag from the ground and began to walk away. She turned half-way to the door, as if suddenly remembering something.

"You coming or not?"

"Er. Me?" The bemused man felt like he had suddenly materialised in a book that prior to this he had only been reading.

"No. I was talking to the dead bodies."

"Oh. Right." He'd seen stranger things and he refused to let himself be caught out.

The girl sighed and put a hand on her hip. "Yes, you, idiot. Come on."

The man felt a bit hurt but got up and followed her all the same. She slowed as they came to the gargantuan door.

"So this opens with... magic, right?"

"Don't be silly," she spat, "Right, on three we push"

"Er, ok?"

"One, two, push!"

They pushed together in unison and the door scraped reluctantly along the stone ground. It creaked and squeaked and made some noises that the man had never thought a door would make until now.

They stepped out together to be greeted by pitch black. Nice, he thought, very momentous.

"Ah, we're just in time for dawn."

It started right up ahead, high up in the dark skies. An orb of light. It grew and grew and then suddenly stopped. The man felt a bit disappointed at this and was going to tell the girl so until something else happened. A beam of light shot directly down from the orb, illuminating everything around it until it struck a tall stone column that protruded from the ground. All of a sudden he could see. Looking around, the man almost wished it had remained pitch black...

[Apollyon]

Chapter 2

He felt sick. Very, very sick. The ground wobbled threateningly above him. Yes. Above him. What he had at first taken for the sky was now very much more solid with the revelation light had offered. He was hanging upside down looking up at - well, no, down at - the ground. The man turned a very pale green.

"Eh? What's wrong?" He heard the question, but it was hugely far off. Much too far to answer. "Ah, that's right you're new here... Well that there above us is the Outlands, and us here - we're in Stulkrit."

"S-S-St-Stulkrit?"

"Yep." The man felt that he and vomit would soon become acquainted and he tried desperately to force his eyes back down - or up. Why couldn't things be simple? Why did this weird kind of stuff always happen to him? Finally with a manly yelp of effort he managed to force his eyes back down to the ground on which he stood. The ground was a dull grey colour that exhuded the word 'slum'. This was quite impressive in itself, as the man had never seen an inanimate object, expecially not the pavement beneath him, exhude anything more than steam and questionable smells. The word, 'slum', floated up in large bubbly yellow writing to pop suddenly before his astonished eyes.

"What makes the ground, I mean what... you know... float above us?" The still slightly green man asked while the the word 'slum' began to appear in various places on his bare neck.

"Well you see, Stulkrit and the Outlands are each on two facing sides of a huge canyon. If you go far enough past the Docks you reach The Edge. Likewise if you go towards Telmalora Tower you reach The Unscalable wall."

During all of this the man could see (or more accurately, could not help but see) a large bright pink ball rotating slowly towards where they stood. There was only one road leading from the building they had just exited and it was down this sloped hill it slowly rolled, keeping a constant speed in its approach. A few times it turned slightly to the side (as much as this was visible on a spherical object) to seemingly converse with passers by; Here an old man with three arms, there a torsoless pair of legs, each with the unshakeable determination that only people in a crowded city have (although most have absolutely no idea where they're going). The road ahead twisted upward cautiously and rather reluctantly until it was quickly engulfed by a pack of grimy buildings. The buildings, like the cobbles on which he stood, were a joyful shade of grey with black around the edges. "Um, what's your name by the way?" He asked, tearing his gaze back to his immediate surroundings (despite their being only slightly less bizarre) and in doing so remembering his manners.

"It's Dystrel, but I doubt it'll matter. What about you? Can you remember?"

"Well, now you mention it, no, and I've been meaning to ask you about that-"

"-It's 'cos you're dead."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Dead. Well, nearly dead anyway. That portal you just came through," She pointed back over his shoulder towards the imposing structure beyond,"Generally only thunks come through there."

"Thunks?"

"Oh, yeah, sorry. A thunk is a dead thing."

"Why a thunk?"

"Because they go 'thunk' if you drop 'em."

The man took a moment to consider this before conceding the point. "So how come I'm not... a 'thunk'?" He asked, experimenting with this new word but still not quite confident enough to feel safe using it without inverted commas.

"Well, every now and then you get people who just can't bare to let life go. They're the ones that end up here, in our fair city of Stulkrit." Obviously the word 'fair' must have taken on a completely new meaning, the man pondered, surveying his surroundings and with a rather uneasy shudder realising that he was being stared right back at.

"So... we're all.. half-dead?"

"That's about the sum of it, yeah."