Many hours passed, but as the landscape shifted from gold to blue and the first traces of the silvery night began to dance across the sky, Galler finally slowed his pace. The whispers he always heard had changed, and now he was hearing mutters of the remains of a few depilated buildings sprouting up a few minutes down the road. Probably an abandoned town. Heaving breaths of exertion continued to burst past his lips, and as he slightly shifted his shoulders to ease the strain of his sleeping burden, his hands brushed over his ruined eye sockets out of habit. No liquid coated them, no slightly sticky sensation of blood any longer. Only the clotted, deep grooves that his own fingernails had carved that night of madness in the city. When he had seen It. Even now the voices – too numerous to count, whispered to him from beneath the soil, from inside the cracked remains of the stone wall surrounding what was left of the village, sometimes even from the very breeze itself. Telling him to do things.

And he couldn’t resist. A ceaseless din of words that tumbled from the throats of those beasts. A painful torrent of information, of knowledge he hardly understood. Yet he even did not want to resist; the torrent drowned out his own frail thoughts in the back of his head, the useless never ending stirring of his mind that constantly brought him back to the bones, burned black by scorching fire, that he had found in the ruins of his mother’s house in the aftermath of the fire that had engulfed the slums. Of the numb sadness that swept through his short frame on hearing that his brothers in the Blinders had been slain.

Of the tear in the sky that thethingthemonsterithadseenhimlaidbarehismindpleasestoppleasestopletmerestplease.

One of the scabs that coated his eyes cracked under his clenched fingers and began weeping again. He forcibly uncurled them, and Galler shook his head as he started towards the largest of the buildings. With luck, there would be some sort of food inside the building. Something that Ellie could eat. His own sustenance mattered not, he did not feel the need as often as he once had and when he did he could feed upon those he had… collected, but that would not do for Ellie. No, he needed to find bread. Or meat. Preferably both. Even berries would do at this point. Even though she had yet to utter a single complaint (or a single word), even Galler knew that her ribs shouldn’t be poking that much into his shoulders as she lay over them like a sack of potatoes in slumber. She seemed to be much more tired than she should be, too, and a child her age should be running, not sleeping this much. It was not good, and he would do everything in his power to see her safe. But he was limited in what he could do with the meager resources on the road.

Galler reached forwards, his hand tapping around the wooden door he had arrived at until the handle finally revealed itself. It opened with a creak of rusting hinges, and as Ellie stirred from his shoulders he stepped into the building as a breeze rifled through his matted hair.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Not bothering to pick her head up off of Galler's shoulder, Ellie rubbed her eyes as she glared at the cursed wooden door that had woken her up from her fitful sleep. All around the two were shards of broken pews littering the large room they had entered, with swirling motes of dust dancing in the beams of moonlight seeping through the broken stained glass of the chapel. She marveled at how it appeared as shades of gray in the pale light as a rough, callused hand grasped her shoulders. Ellie yawned as she was deposited from her perch on Galler’s shoulders onto one of the pews that was mostly still in one piece.

“Sit tight, Poncho. I’ll see about rustling up some grub. There’s got to be at least a heel of bread laying around here. If not, we’ll have to try our luck hunting.” Said Galler as he stumped into one of the side rooms in the building. Ellie nodded in understanding, and then swung off the pew to search the remaining side room in the back of the building. However, as she trudged through the open door, only more dust awaited her. She shook her head. Not even any furniture.

Turning in disappointment, she made her way back towards the room with the pews, pausing only to sneeze as more of the dust was kicked up towards her nose. Another sneeze threatened to explode out of her, the dust swirling into the air madly as the strange scent of iron and rust faintly littered the wind.

Galler emerged from the side room, his face set into a frown as he quickly trudged towards her, the strange people that were always dragging behind him knocking into the pews in his haste. Ellie sneezed one final time, looking back to the entrance of the building as the door squeaked open once more.

Silence followed, only broken by the sound of leather shoes brushing against the wooden floor as the stench of rust and iron intensified to an almost unbearable degree. She felt the air change and the dust settled, the moonlight looking all the colder without the tiny particles shining like pixies.

Ellie shivered as Bert’s frown deepened, cocking her head as something just barely outside of her hearing registered in her ears. A few seconds passed, and a voice spoke out in a strange accent.

“Evenin’ fellas, a right nice night out here, isn’t it?” With his words, she finally realized what she was hearing. An infant, crying faintly.

The strange accent brushed against her ears, distracting Ellie from the crying sound as she observed a tall man with a bushy beard dressed in a fine suit step into the room, where he stared at the two of them with a cheerful smile.