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.
"Go. False life, you do not belong here."
"Jonathan, I'm not here as a cop. Is that Trent? Is that Trent Henley?"
The eyes narrowed. "It was."
L.C. feigned relief, and released a sigh. "Then you got him. It's fine. It's alright. Listen, Jonathan..."
"Jonathan Walker is dead."
L.C. saw flashes, images, Jonathan walking hand in hand with Nadjia across a vast expanse beyond the terrible tree. "No."
Not now!
He could feel Driftwood's grim satisfaction.
"We can fix this, Jonathan. I can take you home. Your Order can fix this. Trent had it coming."
L.C. watched the green eyes close a moment, and reopen, the silhouette of Jonathan's head turned and regarded the rotting corpse. Then, those eyes were on him again.
"I care nothing of the dead thing here. There is no home."
L.C. drew a cigar from his trenchcoat pocket, and lit it. "I suppose we can stop pretending."
"Pretending?"
"Lying to one another. You're not Jonathan."
"...and you are abomination, false life."
L.C. drew a long drag from his cigar and exhales a cloud of thick smoke. "Well then, what are you going to do about it?"
No answer.
"That's fine. I'm not up for conversation, either."
L.C. drew his revolver and trained it on the silhouette in the corner. He saw a grin from on its face, those teeth that were all at once only teeth, and somehow sharp. L.C. fired, and the silhouette dodged the bullet.
Impossible.
Nothing is impossible.
(Run Polovatski!)
The silhouette agressed on him, and L.C. fired a flurry of shots at its center mass. Each shot struck his intended target, and the filth covered monster wearing the face of Jonathan Walker collapsed, sliding toward L.C. and leaving a body-wide slick of blood on the floorboards.
L.C., cigar clenched in his teeth, nudged the body. It was wearing the clothes worn by The Order. Without warning, it reach up and grasped L.C.'s ankles and pulled. L.C. fell onto the flat of his back, tucking his chin close to his chest as he did. The creature rose up to its knees as L.C. emptied the cylinder of his revolver, and replaced the spent cartridges.
The creature roared in pain, its body contorting. L.C. could hear popping bone, and tearing fabric splitting at the seams. It was growing.
L.C. pulled himself away from the creature on his elbows, rolled backward onto his feet, and fired his weapon again until the weapon was dry firing.
The creature fell onto it's back, its hands pulling at its clothes, tearing its shirt away from its body.
L.C. could see the bleeding bullet wounds, bones shifting beneath swelling muscle and skin. Flashes of pale white and cream feathers flashed through his mind again.
"Yanshuf..."
The creature sat up, its face twisted in an expression of pain, teeth clenched in a grimace. "...Bane."
It pushed itself to its knees, the cracking and shifting bone beneath its skin and muscle slowing.
L.C. was reloading as it rose slow to its feet. It was fast, and it was on him, a long blade and a short blade drawn.
L.C. spat out his cigar as Bane thrust the daggers down, and L.C. deflected them with his heavy revolver, the blades scoring the muzzle to the cylinder. L.C. answered back, pistol whipping Bane across the face and knocking him back onto his knees.
L.C. has six rounds left. The creature was not going to die. As Bane rose back to his feet, L.C. took slow steps away from him. He controlled his breathing, willed away his wild pulse, and ignored the adrenaline surging through his body. He aimed for the creature's knee and fired. The shot grazed the side of its thigh, and Bane howled.
L.C. fired again, squeezing two shots free, and watched as the creature's knee exploded in a spectacular shower of blood and bone shards.
Bane screamed, collapsing onto his injured knee. L.C. fired his remaining three rounds into Bane's chest and knocked the creature onto its back.
"I'm not waiting to see what happens next." L.C. backed toward the crumbling hole in the wall from where he came.
Bane pushed himself to his elbows, and glared at him from the center of the ruins. "I will see you again."
"Not today you won't." L.C. hurried out of the ruins, and for the first time in his life, he ran.