Prologue

She slipped and fell in the mud for the third time that day. The rough stone beneath the sludge didn’t so much tear away the skin this time but instead started to rip away at the raw flesh itself. She didn’t cry out, it wasn’t like there was anyone else to here. Instead she stumbled back onto her feet and continued to run. Behind her a naked man trotted calmly through the tunnels, stopping every once and a while to sniff at a streak of blood on the walls or maybe just taste a little on his long, thin tongue. He did this with the careful savouring of a connoisseur tasting the first dribble of wine before greedily downing the entire bottle.

She turned a corner and continued to run. You would not believe it but she was, for all intents and purposes, a God. The man, who himself turned the corner a few seconds later, was not a God. He was, in fact, barely a man although he looked like one because he felt it made him appear more tidy. The girl ahead slipped again but managed not to fall. As she flailed wildly in the air with her ruined hands she managed to catch a glance back towards the man. He caught her eye and waved jovially, but he didn’t smile.

She regained balance and took one more step forward, screaming. His hand reached her back but instead of stopping passed right through. Spine, ribs and various organs ruptured beneath his fingers. The girl stopped suddenly and looked slowly down at the arm protruding from a very messy hole in her chest. It waved again, spraying tiny droplets of blood into the torrent running down her legs and into the mud.

“Now don’t you wish we could’ve done this in a more civilised way?”

The girl started to choke on her own blood. He groaned and began to sort through the wreckage that was her chest. He found the lungs and plugged them back into the throat.

“Where is she?”

“No,” said the girl. The man gritted his teeth.

“I said where is she?” he said in the kind of calm a sea has before it turns into a tsunami and casually destroys a civilization.

“No,” she repeated.

He could’ve burned her with infernal fire. He could’ve sent sparks of magic deep into her flesh where it would eat away at her very being until she was nothing more than ash and she would still be screaming, but he didn’t. Later he would regret it but his rage called for something more immediate. He tore off her head and shattered it against a wall. The body crumpled.

It didn’t matter. There would be more, less stubborn, people to ask. He would find her. It was not in his nature to admit he could be beaten and that was part of the reason why he could not be. Most people when told there are Gods would fall to their knees and praise the heavens or just dismiss it out of hand.

He had just made himself worse than them. There is not much point in describing him. As has already been said he wore his body like an ill-fitting suit that he yearned to discard. He had made it muscular and lean out of an unexpectedly human vanity and he had given himself long brown hair that curled almost angelically around his face. His face was the only part of him that showed anything like his true nature. It was smooth, not out of youth but more due to an aversion to smiling, but the eyes glared out from it as though they were the only things keeping something horrible inside. There are some people you would not like to meet alone in a dark alley. Those people wouldn’t like to meet this man backed up by an army in broad daylight.

He ran his hand along the stone of the tunnel and felt the raw energy and power that lay just on the other side and just out of reach. He had been surprised to hear about this place. The old ones had made it millennia ago and rumour had it that this was where they had returned to and where hiding somewhere in its depths. That had remained a rumour because no one had gone looking for them for fear that they might actually find them. So now the labyrinth’s original use was long lost to the remaining gods and they didn’t see any reason to find it out. They were perfectly happy to just use it as a rabbit run from one place to another and leave it at that, same as they had always done. The man looked down at the corpse. It hadn’t helped her. She must have become lost in the chase. Leaving the labyrinth the wrong way could just as easily place a God in London central or in the centre of an exploding sun. They thought twice about just jumping randomly through any exit that sprung up.

He kicked the remains with his bare foot and grunted. There was no point musing, there were people to see. Taking a step back he eyed the wall carefully to make sure it was definitely one that would get him back to earth, braced himself against the dirt, and leapt.

Reviews

[The Perfectionist]

This chapter definitely has its ups and downs. Starting out with murder is an often used but very effective hook, and your little chase scene was well done. It is marred by the fact that it is REALLY short, and could have stood with a substantial amount more description.

Your language is another point I'm back and forth on. At one point, you're absolutely brilliant: your dialogue is good, but in particular the line about meeting people in dark alleys is sheer genius. You falter at other points though. The metaphor about a stormy sea could have worked, but you worded it oddly and it lost its punch.

You need to clean up your grammar too. The list of mistakes is too long to go through here, but you need quite a few more commas than you have.

One last thing. In general, it's a bad idea to speak to the audience as an omniscient narrator. I suggest changing that beginning to this:

"It was hard to believe that she was, for all intents and purposes, a God."

[Emily]

Wow this is an amazing first chapter. It caught my interest immediatly. I want to know who the girl was and who is the girl the man is looking for.
I didnt see any grammatical errors and the only spelling error I saw was in the first paragragh. You wrote "there was any one else to here". It should be "hear" Either way I liked it.
-Emily