Carlos squeezed his eyes tighter against the glare of the tiny streetlamp that sat outside the filthy window of his closet-sized room. The opaque and warped glass intermixed with the heavy smog of Godsprings city, distorting the light of its alchemic fire into a greyish sickly hue that clung to the walls and floors like rainbow tinged soap scum. He slowly opened his eyes and watched as the shadows cast by the soot-crusted beams that peaked out through bent and shoddy blinds danced to the tune of the bustling city below. They shifted and swayed with the passing of pedestrians who scurried along the damp and dingy labyrinth of corridors that snaked their way chaotically along the steep canyon cliffs of the Abino Canyon. The impromptu nature of the city’s origins lent them a complexity rooted in a distinct lack of planning and organization. The city had been born from an unholy amalgamation of transients and ruffians who, over time, had come to pitch their tents to capitalize on the once pristine and formerly hidden spring waters nestled among the great Canyon. These had long since lost their luster, the source of the spring morphing into a muddy greyish blue. The waters bubbled and boiled; a product of natural minerals and alchemic properties welling up from a hidden and angelic miracle long since lost to the eyes of man. Despite its tarnished appearance, the waters of the spring held an invigorating and stimulating effect, the single source of reprieve against the festering ooze of the boil that was the city of Godsprings.

Carlos rubbed his eyes, breaking free the mucus-crusted membrane that was a hallmark of the miasmic air of Godsprings. The city held a permanent type of smog that clung heavily to the air. Palpable and infectious, it clung to any surface it could touch, coating them in layer upon layer of grime and soot as if the sins of its inhabitants themselves had reached capacity on the souls for which they clung and so, now stuck to the very fabric of the city itself. He coughed and sat up, his fingers racing over the rough and tattered sheets of what the inn had audaciously dared called a “bed”. Grime coated and stuck to them, leaving behind a sticky stain that many said “clung to you for days after leaving the city.” No amount of wash could clear it of its filth.

Carlos shook his head to clear the mental cobwebs that ensnared his half-sleeping consciousness. The first night in a new bed almost always meant a night full of half-waking nightmares for him; whether that bed was a makeshift mess of refuse and pine needles or the relative safety of an actual room. Here in this city of grit and shattered dreams, those nightmares seemed to feed off his delirium, off his repressed phobias and anxieties like buzzards picking at the half-rotten corpses of some unlucky carrion.

He hated how long it took him to return to full waking sentience. The nightmares always seem to fade so slowly, clinging to the shadows of his periphery like the way that leeches would cling to the legs when wading through thick muck and mire, slowly sapping away at his sanity before finally giving way.

He scratched at an itchy spot on his rough cotton trousers, the scabbing of hard clotted blood over an old surface wound breaking off within the leg of his trouser. It fell into the grime of the floor and intermixed with the filth that coated the crude wooden floorboards. He stood slowly, his vision swimming and eyes popping with a slow firework of stars. the fatigue of poor sleep coupled with a night full of strong slightly soured warm ale demanded their penance in the form of his strength. His stomach rebelled the moment the remanence of bubbles and backwash hit his parched throat, but in the end, he triumphed and his stomach returned to its usual state of apathy.

Pulling on his boots he crammed his feet deep into their leathery crevice, their tight rough leather forming a familiar shape around his chronically aching feet. They hurt, but in a dull familiar sort of way, their pain and discomfort provided a sort of well-needed sense of security. He had known what it was like not to have shoes, had known how much worse it could be. The soles of his feet still bore scars and unending needle-like pains as proof of that. Despite the discomfort the ill-fitting, improperly tanned leather of his cheap secondhand boots held, he welcomed their embrace with an open heart. If nothing else, they were reliable and had yet to wear or be torn. They kept his feet dry and free from rot and so were among his most prized possessions.

Carlos stood up as he heard a knock come from the other side of his cheap inn room door. “Sir?” an elderly voice broke through the wood in a squeaky, insecure voice. Its tone implied a history of abuse, coalescing in a culmination of insecurity that had only ripened with its owner's old age.

Carlos strode to the door, pulling over his cotton undershirt, its rough texture scraping over his weathered and leathery skin, hiding a mess of ugly curved scars that spiderwebbed across the surface of his world-weathered skin. He ripped open the cheap wooden door of his room wide and faced the wrinkled and shrunken face of the innkeepers' assistant. The Inn-keepers assistant’s face wrinkled in a flinch as if expecting to be struck. “The master humbly requests your presence sir” he mumbled in a stuttering and wavering voice which sounded as if it were very nearly on the verge of tears.

The elderly man had a face that looked as if it had been carved from a log. It was twisted and weathered by a lifetime of labor in the extreme heat of the desert canyon city of Godsprings. He wore a jacket of bright pastel colors; pink, yellow and blue squares interwoven in a checkered pattern, with the feathers of a macaw stuck the sleeves. The old man looked down and away from the gaze of Carlos. However, Carlos noticed the shoulders of the old man shifted down into a slightly more relaxed tone when he realized that he wouldn’t be struck. “The master, he says he just wants a word, anyway.” “by your leave sir?” he trembled before scrambling backward from the balcony of the inn room, scampering back onto the long ladder of the cliff-cave inn. Carlos watched as he hastily scampered downward towards the central chamber of the lobby with a speed not often seen in a man of his age. All this, before Carlos even had a chance to grunt out a response of thanks or acknowledgment.

Carlos sighed; he had grown accustomed to such events. The price, it seemed, of his reputation. On one hand, it was good for business, on the other… well it came with early morning disturbances and a mountain of expectations. He stepped onto the patio, the soft glow of lamplight illuminating the filthy urban scene of the canyon both above and below him.

Godsprings was a cliffside town, its houses were carved straight into the cliffside itself, interconnected by a dizzying array of ladders and balconies that stretched up through massive rock walls of the Abino canyon network.

The Abino canyons were a network of deep cliff-like ravines that stretched out in a large natural labyrinth, snaked by a lazy slow-flowing river. Small cavern outlets often fed into mineral pools, fed in turn by hot springs that cracked up through rock crevices, the water stubbornly peeking through hardened granite, infinitely fed by a vast underground freshwater ocean deep beneath the canyon floor.

Here, at night, the pollution from the miners coupled with the filth from the industrial pipeage was blanketed by darkness, providing the canyon city a short reprieve to the blistering and corrosiveness of the toxic fumes they exhumed. Only the sprawling and bobbing mess of lamplights carried by the scurrying of the late-night shop owners, opening their black market stall signs, or the vast network of miner brothel-pubs provided any semblance of light, blotting out what had once been a dazzling cosmic theater in the sky above the canyons.

Carlos mounted the old and creaking wooden ladder of his Inn room, climbing down its rickety rungs down towards the main lobby. The ladder squeaked out its complaints under his weight, groaning under the strain. Years of exposure to the acid rains had weakened its wood, warping it to a barely serviceable hazard. Shoddy and impromptu repairs studded along its length, doing little to prevent half the rungs from freely spinning in their loose sockets.

A fall from this height, Carlos thought, would be quite the ironic demise. After a lifetime of training, the years of fighting and hunting, his recent misfortune and hard life of vagrancy on the road and through exile, only to slip on a broken and neglected ladder rung in the most despised city on the entire continent.

His foot touched solid ground, jarring him from his daydream. The balcony of the entrance was cluttered with an odd assortment of junk and dust-covered furniture, obscured by long flowing patchwork tarps. A single sign hung above the entranceway to the lobby, softly glowing with an eternal alchemist’s fire. It cast a pale and dull green glow twisted into the shape of a large pixie. In her mouth was a large rose with words that read “The Blitz” in large curling cursive font. Carlos strode towards the entrance of The Blitz, his hobnail boots making a deep hollow thud as he made his way across the loose wooden floorboards.

He flung open the swinging double doors and entered the cavernous space of the main lobby. The elderly man from earlier stood wobblily, his eyes continued to point downward in a permanent submissive stance. Behind him was a wall of keys, their brass rings jingled intermittently with the canyon breeze. “In there” he mumbled, gesturing with a leathery leopard-spotted arm towards the only clean object in the entire place, an ivory white door.

The door seemed to shine in contrast to the smudged, soot-covered walls and dull grey-green alchemist light that decorated the lobby. A sign hung above it, polished brass screws holding the clean and shiny surface of the ivory sign in place at the top of the brilliant white door. The words “Kentwood” snaked their way across the side in brilliant gold engravings. Carlos turned and walked to the door, ignoring the drunken patrons slumped over their whiskeys and the table of gamblers heavily engrossed in their game of craps.

The patrons largely ignored him as he approached the bar, several shooting him cursory and dismissive glances before dismissively returning to their debauchery.

Carlos looked filthy, his cotton trousers were overworn, characterized by gaping holes and stains that came from years of vagrancy and wild living. His trousers were deeply frayed at the seams, the hems of each of the legs exposed dangly bits of cloth and string, which were dragging through the grime and tobacco spit that caked the lobby floor. Carlos was a drifter after all, which is why he was able to tolerate and even embrace the run-down conditions of the Blitz inn. In fact, to him, it was quite the stroke of luck to have been chosen as a recipient of free room and board on his first attempt to find work.

In fact, the very elderly Godspring native who previously had fetched him to see the master of the house had been the one to recruit him. He had wordlessly shuffled by as Carlos had slept against one of the few refuse-free rock piles that he could find among the dizzying corridors and balconies of the lower city.

Carlos had made it to the city merely three days prior, having stowed away in the crevice of one the large caravan boats that often busily sauntered down the river that cleaved the canyons. Those boats, with their steam engines that piped out billowing clouds of superheated smoke. Inky black, they intermixed with the toxic and suffocating expulsions of the miner’s canyon pipes; adding additional layers of suffocating smog to the thin canyon air. In one of these ships he had stowed himself away, stashed away in between boxes of coal and tools in the ship’s boiler deck. It was the novice’s move (as it had turned out) as those tools had snarled and ripped his already worn trousers and bruised his back and thighs as he attempted to minimize the noise he made while sleeping. Even now, dry and warm in the lobby of the Blitz, he could feel the effects of his journey, his bruises still throbbing in a constant dull ache.

Carlos shook his head, trying to shake off the daydream. Since his time in the boiler room, he had found it increasingly difficult to focus on the present. Perhaps it was a side effect of the blistering inferno of the boiler, an inescapable heat that had felt as if it had boiled his brain with its intensity. His vision swam struggling to refocus his attention back to the present.

He was facing that great ivory door now, its shining white surface seemed to glow invitingly and hypnotically, the gold carvings at its perimeter and the unblemished, untarnished sheen creating such a stark and extreme contrast that it seemed to swallow him up and wash away the grime of that cursed city. It felt so warm and inviting to stare at its beauty. Carlos slowly reached out a hand towards the slick curvature of the doorknob. Its brass was twisted into an intricate design of an elephant’s head, its trunk proudly curling skyward. Carlos felt as if the Elephant-doorknob could move, its inlaid ruby eyes shining an intense crimson color, the surface of the meticulously polished stones catching the odd ray of alchemist lamplight, refracting it into a brilliant rainbow. The effect made it seem almost as if it was winking back at him. The trunk too, felt as if it was triumphantly trumpeting a song of nobility and power.

At that moment, when his fingers touched the smooth surface of the elephant’s trunk Carlos swore that he heard the sound of the elephant’s call. The sounds of the Inn faded away, only to be replaced with the constant hum in his ears and the sounds of the elephant. At this moment, something seemed to wash over Carlos, a sensation that was warm and inviting. The feeling seemed to wash over him, filling him from his toes to the roots of his hair. It filled him with blissful delirium much like how the confident but gentle touch of a teacher might grip the hand of a student only to guide and trace their hand into the correct shape of letters. Carlos felt the confidence of that touch on his consciousness. The warmth and strength of delirium made him feel so very tired, and with no struggle at all, Carlos relinquished control.

Carlos was merely a passenger now. He saw his hand first grip then press down the knob of that great white door and turn it. The door made no sound as it smoothly glided open and the light of real fire warmed him, casting benevolent dancing shadows along the walls and cutting through the dim melancholia of the weaker alchemic light of the lobby.