Bane

April 5, 1980

There was a path if you knew where to look, and once you found it, you could never unfind it.

Detective Polovatski never knew the path until he needed it, and Driftwood revealed it to him. The soul of the city, the collected, and collective consciousness of those like himself who lived and died never knowing what they were, it hated him. It considered him a traitor to what he was.

When time came to obey the will of Driftwood, Frederick Polovatski refused. He chose free will, and he chose that his will should be stronger than the city itself.

It all began with a simple command.

Show me.

How Driftwood fought him on it, argued and refused... but Polovatski was stronger, and it was his strength the consciousness of the city feared.

It all began with show me, and now he was on the hidden path. The gloomy skies leant no warmth, and the path was rabid with old, bad memories. A girl and her future killer once walked this path. The same girl once led her heart's only love the same way. Fear, and anger stank here, and there were spirits. The departed were weakened by the wall between the world of life and death, and they waited for the rains to fall.

Detective Polovatski, the Loose Cannon, tread carefully. He was here on his own time, no badge, no color of the law. An ordinary citizen essentially lost hiking some unknown trail.

The trail widened to a path, and L.C. felt the horror, and tragedy of a hunt that echoed over the trail from a time when Driftwood knew nothing of electric light.

The MacAllan ruins loomed over him, two stories of a partially burned home that stood and refused to rot through the test of time. The stink of piss and death was here, and something else. L.C. stepped carefully to the ruins, a gaping, crumbling wall the only visible way in, or out.

He stood in silence, knelt, pressing his palms flat to the dirt path. L.C. closed his eyes.

Show me.

Driftwood obliged, if not reluctant, and only in brief glimpses and flashes.

Pale white otherworldly feathers, green eyes, talons, scales, claws, and lashing tail.

He opened his eyes, a falling feeling in the pit of his gut. L.C. rose up to his feet with slow caution. "Impossible."

Nothing is impossible.

"Impossible. The Emim cannot leave the tree."

Silence.

L.C. took pause. Every sense he had told him to leave, to run. Even Driftwood found the gaping wound here unsettling, a laceration in it that would not heal.

"Fuck you." L.C. muttered to no one, really.

He continued forward to the hole inside of the MacAllan ruins, and placed a hand on part of the crumbling wall. Before he could pull himself through, he felt the agony of the house, the fire burning, cold stinging rain, howling and savage whooping. The Order was here once in antiquity, and the MacAllans were decimated by definition, dying in these ruins. Those lucky enough not to survive the initial assault burned and suffocated on smoke... and Driftwood, how it fought against the mass murder, raining down everything it could from every cloud it could summon overhead.

L.C. shook his head, and stepped into the ruins. He had to fight the overwhelming stench of decay. Dim morning light from the overcast sky shone through windows, windows still intact, onto a putrid corpse, visibly mutilated.

He felt the shift before he heard it, movement in the stinking ruins.

From the far left of the room, a drawing room L.C. imagined, where the light refused to touch, he saw wide green eyes fixed in him.