Prologue

THE WICKEDLY

By

Louis M. Warde

Prologue

             A city can be something of a Pandora's Box, containing mysteries and wonders beyond the minds' wildest imaginings. Likewise it could harbor horrors that would leave minds twisted, warping their souls in irreversible ways.

             The creatures that inhabit these places are often jaded by their weaknesses; only seeing what their minds can handle. They cover their eyes in a veil, seeing the world in whatever guise makes their existence there most comfortable.

             In truth, each person can be capable of the same mystical features as the home where they reside, the city that holds them. One might, on the surface, be a professional individual with a calm and cool demeanor. Those that know them would think them calm and placid all the time. That person could, on the inside, be a horrible, vicious criminal who robs the poor, enslaves the weak, and brutalizes any who could speak against them.

             There are monsters lurking beneath the surface of society. Creatures that feed on misfortune, living for the endless search for what others have that they do not. They search, convinced that some material possession will eventually slake their thirst for more. They stop at nothing to take what isn't theirs in the self satisfying quest to make what does not belong to them a part of their public collection, to display with misplaced pride and a lust for attention, misguidedly believing that it will warm their hearts with acceptance and validation.

             They are the wickedly people that make the nervous members of the populous cover their eyes. They are why people choose ignorance over intellect.

             In this particular city, there are many of those. Some have fallen from their social graces, while others preserve their disguises to carry out their cruel deeds in continued secrecy. Crime was on the rise these days, but only because of the terrible outcasts from the world of the civilized. They lived on the streets, moving through the shadows in the evening time. No longer bound by law, they saw their new lives of total vagrancy as a liberation, giving them leave to fulfill their darkest desires without fear of repercussion. Still, with the smog of the new technologies on the rise, If the other unfriendly beings of the dark didn't end their lives, the pollution and rampant illnesses would.

            

             The streets echoed with the chuff of steam engines. The air was heavy with exhaust. With no medicines to cure them, those who fell ill of the smoke, normally found eternal sleep.

             A life of wealth meant security through community. Because you were known, not even the homeless creatures, thought only as a dark stain on society by the rich, would harm them. It was a sure way to meet an untimely end.

             Life as a homeless scar on the refined, cultured individuals, however, was something else entirely.

Author's Note

This is meant more to be read as a separate thought from part One, though Part one seems to function as a direct expansion from the prologue.