Bane

November 18, 1993

He stared into the sky at the storm clouds, blinking away small droplets of rain as they spattered against his mask, and into his eyes. He lowered his gaze to the rusting park, the yellowed grass, and wondered for only a moment why everything there was dying, despite the constant rain - rains that persisted since his arrival into this prison world of men.

(You know why)

Bane shook his head sharply, and arched his neck first to the left, and then to the right. Those remnants of Jonathan Walker were less persistent anymore, but they were still there. They came more often if he had to sift through the boy's memories for something he did not know, as though he were waking the memories from fitful slumber. They were echoes - nothing more than echoes - but if echoes were somehow self aware. Aware enough that the body once belonging to the tortured witch hunter should be dead, mouldering in the soil. Those less than dormant echoes seemed somehow aware that the spirit that possessed this limited flesh was a foreign entity; someone - something - that did not belong.

Bane let go his legs, collapsing onto the grass in a dense thud, sitting in a place that somehow was not his to sit. The hill (our knoll, hers and mine) had the smell of memories all about it. Old emotions ran through the air, darting and racing around him. Old memories lived here, just out of his reach, and those feelings just beyond the scope of his understanding.

"Do you ever bother, anymore?"

Bane glanced over his shoulder. The girl who gave him the witch by the water (creek) stood behind him, her hands resting on holstered pistols on her either hope. He caught her eyes sidelong, staring over his shoulder, and said nothing.

"You've got police, and Inquisition looking for you. You've killed both. You've overstepped."

"...you have come to stop me?"

Gina stared down at Bane, considering his question. There was no challenge in his voice, no fury. "I'm not here to stop you. I didn't know you'd be here. I'm out for my own reasons. Disappointed."

Bane shrugged, and returned his eyes to the park. This place was something once. People celebrated here. There was reverie. In the short time in the world of men, Bane saw more, and more of Taal's kingdom bleeding through. The deterioration of the physical world from the dead god's corruption showed in small ways.

The tar in the roads were cracked, and crumbling. They took on the texture of oily grit, and grimy chunks of gravel. It was subtle, though. Not entire roads, or thoroughfares, but noticeable to anyone not in too much a hurry to stop and see the signs. At the edges, the highways, and the mountain roads, in the older parts of Driftwood, and especially in poortown - and sure it was expected in places where resources were lesser - but the decay was faster. Sooner. It was more, and more often.

It was not only the roads. It was in the people, those weaker willed than the faceless hunters slinking through shadows, or the swine whose conjuring was upsetting the balance... a balance that until his arrival, he did not care.

What were the troubles of mankind to a creature born from nightmare and flame?

They were his troubles now.

He turned his head slowly, sensing her beside him before he saw her, the girl from the creek.

"This used to be pretty."

Bane stared at the girl's profile. She was unfamiliar. Unspectacular. She stank of the faceless hunters' rites and blessings (so do you), but she was not one of them. His compulsions to destroy were absent. He could reach over in an instant and snap her into halves. He could break her bones, and tie her in knots, and leave her for the crows to pick at like so much carrion...