stroob

→@stroob/wishing-well

Chapter 1

Bloody sweat slips into Joe’s mouth between gasping breaths. His eyes adapt to the darkness in the rubble hallway, with light only from a room at the hall’s end. A broken staircase behind offers nowhere to run. Joe touches the open wound on his skull, wincing with pain as his hand comes back crimson. The floor is littered with trash. He finds a cloth and uses it to wipe the blood from his eyes.
He rises slowly, shedding old congealed blood that falls like dark hail. Hot beads of sweat run red down his shirtless body, his unkempt beard matted with it.
A shadow paints the hall as another figure appears from the lit doorway. Joe risks a glance, looking around the corner to see a man holding a blade of black iron, from an era before modern morality, ancient in its angle, cruel and effective. He reaches to the ground, searching for a weapon; he finds a fist-sized stone. He nods to himself in the dark, his hands clenching around the stone.

…