Chapter Text
“It wasn’t my fault!”
The lie burned on Melancholy’s tongue. A pleasant burn, in some ways, as much as could be expected for a criminal confession.
Of course, the jury at the time, circling around her like vultures waiting to feast, had called her bluff.
“You bludgeoned a young man who wasn’t aggressive toward you in any way.”
Mel’s fingers flexed on the wood of the podium. All that was true, and she knew better to go into the details. She didn’t dare go into the sheer manic euphoria that flooded her body during the battery, the thrill at vengeance toward someone who had crossed a loved one. It felt different from her instances of robbery in the past.
The thrill was gone now, replaced by… not shame, per se, but a clawing desperation for a lie or truth to grasp onto—whatever might lighten her sentencing.
Her eyes darted from the jury, to the judge, looking as if she was daring anyone in the courthouse to fight her. Green eyes roamed everywhere but the assembled crowd—she knew she’d see some familiar faces in the trial if she dared to let them consume her focus. “He was leering at my friend Cyn and I got suspicious. And sure enough, he stole her hand charm.” She drummed her fingers on the podium. “I couldn’t just let him get away with it.”
“And rather than reporting him to the authorities, you knocked him unconscious with a pipe.”
Mel shrugged, her lips turned up in a crooked smirk. “I take matters into my own hands. Besides, it was a spur of the moment decision.”
A hand lifted, a folder shining in stark white under the harsh fluorescent lighting.
Mel fell silent. A barely-audible “shit” left her lips before she could stop it.
The jury reviewed the contents of the papers that lay within. Diagrams of routes. The man’s name, photo, and address downloaded from the Internet. Scribbled notes with “Ambush Ideas” blazing in scrawled crimson lettering. A premeditated plan.
“You were saying?” prompted the judge, brown eyes peering at Mel under his neatly-trimmed black hair.
Mel crossed her arms, looking more pleased with herself than anything. “You’ve gotta admit, the plan was foolproof.”
“Melancholy Hill.” The judge’s tone was laced with an acid warning.
A wince was Mel's response, all traces of mirth gone from her face. She shrank in her seat. Skating by on charm and a silver tongue would only get her so far.
“You are aware you could be charged for attempted murder, right?”
The then-18-year-old exhaled sharply, forcing herself to straighten with an air of cool nonchalance. “Okay, so the battery itself was… premeditated,” she admitted. “But I didn’t intend to kill him and I can prove it.” She pointed to the file. “My intent was only to incapacitate him. Look on the back of the Ambush Ideas. I wrote it in black and white, see? ‘Bodily harm, not lethal harm’.”
The flipping of pages echoed through the courthouse as if flicking through an ancient tome. Indeed, the note shone in ink on the corner of the Ambush Ideas page, just as Mel said it would.
“Be that as it may, you did clearly intend harm.”
The rest of the trial passed in a blur. Any remnants of the haze of invincibility at the moment of the crime quickly waned as evidence from both sides was swapped as if it were being passed around by drug dealers.
Eventually, the courthouse echoed with the sound of a gavel. 18 months imprisonment. The only silver lining Mel could see was that less than two years was far more preferable than seven years minimum.
However, that matter didn’t mean it was any easier to look the crowd in the eye.
“Happy birthday to me,” Mel hummed to herself, crumpling up her release papers and stuffing them in her jeans pocket. “I guess getting out of that shithole is a gift in itself.”
18 months from that day at the courthouse, Mel stepped outside the prison on weighted legs, as if treading on sacred ground. It might as well be. It was far preferable than the prison walls which had held her for the past year and a half.
She knew the staff were observing her, analyzing the most minuscule of movements in case she dared to commit another crime the moment she got out.
The 20-year-old had no intention of doing so. Oh, part of her mind itched at the inclination, a bit of celebratory carnage as she was set free from the doldrums of her cell. But as much as Mel relished the idea, she quelled her impulse. The last thing she wanted was to end right back up in that dingy room, with only an uncomfortable mattress, a thin window, and her thoughts for company.
Mel wrapped her jacket around her, inhaling the crisp autumn air despite the cloudy weather. The freedom she now had felt strangely stifling. After having been confined, with limited human interaction, the idea of being free, of going home, felt daunting.
She did, however, end up returning to her home, a two-story brick domicile where her parents waited for her. They greeted her with stiff demeanors, her mother in particular eyeing her with a critical gaze.
“You’re out.” Mrs. Hill’s tone was clipped, her auburn hair in a tight bun in contrast to her daughter’s. “I can only hope that you stay that way.”
Mel only spoke in short phrases at dinner that night, picking at her food as the eyes of her family burrowed into her brain like maggots. Her mind spun, caught between a tidal wave of elation at being free and despair at the cloud of misconduct that hung over her head.
She needed to have just a little more time on her own. She needed to think.
Sighing, Mel excused herself from the table, heading past the living room and toward the front door.
“And where do you think you’re going?” her father called.
Mel didn’t turn around. “New year, new me, I’m going out to get some stuff.”
A lie.
Not unusual for her.
The front door clicked shut behind Mel, and a gust of wind wrapped around her, chilling her to the marrow. She wasn’t sure if the breeze was a mere coincidence or the heavens admonishing her for her lie.
No, it had to be the former. But knowing her luck, she could believe the latter.
Leaves crunched under Mel’s feet as she tread along the sidewalk, passing the nearby shops and making no move to enter them. Instead she walked until the buildings grew sparser, turning under an ornate gate until headstones greeted her.
The local graveyard.
She considered calling Cyn, as most times she would come here she was accompanied by her friend, but her chest felt heavy at the thought. After being locked up for so long, Melancholy needed room to rest. To breathe.
Mel was jolted out of her thoughts by the squawk of several crows flying overhead, dislodging several leaves from a nearby red maple tree. A fallen leaf smacked her in the face, and she brushed it away. The withered leaf continued its slow descent on the wind, landing on a headstone.
A glance at the marking on the grave caused Mel to stop short in her trek.
The name and date on the grave, as far as she could see, had been lost to time. But a distinct carving was enshrined on the tombstone as clear as day. An outstretched hand, with an eye at the center of its palm.
Mel blinked. That’s the mark from Cyn’s charm… Brushing away the leaves that crinkled underfoot, Mel knelt down next to the grave, eyeing the marking. A memory echoed.
“So what the hell is the hand thing, anyway? It looks like that old evil eye protection symbol if Tim Burton made it.”
“Ha ha. Very funny, Melancholy. Some old symbol of immortality.”
A smile crossed her face at the memory as her focus drew back to the symbol. “If Cyn saw this she’d flip.”
Mel brushed her hand over the mark on the headstone, intent on brushing the dust away to see it clearer.
Pain resulted instead.
“Damn it!” Mel swore. She drew her hand back with a pained hiss as the stone cut into her flesh. She turned her hand, looking at her stinging palm. It looked raw, dotted with dirt and stone, but not enough to bleed.
On the headstone, the eye in the center of the hand glittered in a sickly green.
Mel’s eyes widened, her gaze darting before snapping back to the symbol. Nothing around that could have caused the illumination from a flashlight or the like.
The glow was internal.
The dirt began to sink beneath her. Literally sink.
“What the hell?” Mel scrambled, up trying to stagger back away from the headstone. A root curled around her leg as the dirt fell deeper, like quicksand. As if the grave below was opening to swallow her whole.
The dirt beneath her fell away, and before Mel had time to process what happened, she fell.
She expected to only fall six feet, likely landing with a painful impact on the coffin of whoever was buried here.
Instead she kept falling.
And falling.
And falling.
Mel fought to look up, twisting her body enough to see the purple evening sky above grow smaller and smaller. Black dots she faintly recognized to be crows flew overhead.
Her vision was consumed by green before darkness overtook her.
The first thing Mel was aware of when she came back to awareness was an overwhelming invasion of rot.
Her face scrunched up in disgust, her body seized by coughs as the stench assaulted her senses. Her fingers curled on the ground, scrambling for a hold in the darkness. Vaguely recalling what had transpired before blacking out, she craned her neck to look up, expecting to see a small hole from the graveyard. Instead, the flicker of stars greeted her, mostly covered by hazy clouds but their light still shining through. And much more spread out than she’d expect from looking up from a grave.
The edges of gnarled trees swam in her vision, and Mel shakily forced herself to stand. It quickly became clear to her that she was in fact not in a hole in the ground but somewhere in a forest outside. But not anywhere she recognized. Let alone being unable to comprehend a forest that smelled so foul.
Mel’s eyes stung at the scent, fighting not to be sick. A thought flickered in her mind that she had to be hallucinating—clouds were rarely green like that except in severe storms, and those that obscured the stars were sparse at best. And no place she could think of smelled like this. Maybe the grave had her land on top of a corpse and the smell was so strong she passed out.
“Where the hell am I?”
Fighting against the pain from the scrapes that stung her body, Mel staggered to her feet. A mixture of dirt and stone brushed against her feet, the trees parting in a manner that gave a vague semblance of a path.
Mel tread carefully through the landscape, less a forest and more a sparse assemblage of trees. The smell of rot and musk didn’t waver, the rank of burning sulfur joining the revolting miasma. Run-down buildings became visible as her eyes started to adjust. Flickers of green from what looked like gas lamps shone ominously in the distance.
“Oh, thank God, I’m not the only one here,” Mel said, trudging forward. “Though who would live in a place like this is beyond me.”
A flash of light pierced the gloom, causing Mel to swivel toward the towering trees above.
A crow—at least, it looked like a crow—landed on a branch above, gazing down at Mel as if it knew exactly who she was and why she was there. Its eyes glowed, shining like spotlights aside from the cross-shaped pupils at the center. A halo blazed above its head.
Mel could almost see herself reflected in the being’s eye.
“Oh shit…” Mel felt her throat tighten. “Don’t tell me I’m actually in…”
She didn’t dare voice the thought, but it echoed all the same. Her, a criminal, released but not necessarily reformed, finding a grave with a strange symbol only to end up six feet under? Now encountering beings with iconography relating to the faith she had been raised in?
Yeah. She either lost her mind or was in Hell. Neither option was good.
Careful to not let her footsteps echo too loudly on the cracked ground, Mel peered at the strange bird… angel? She shook her head, dispelling the notion. Yes, birds don’t usually have halos, nor pupils shaped like crosses. But she wasn’t quite ready to entertain the idea just yet of this creature being a holy entity.
Divine beings meant eternal judgement, and that wasn’t a factor Mel was entirely sure she was ready to face. Such a sentence would not be kind to one like her. Earth’s form of justice certainly hadn’t.
Mel crept closer to the creature, watching it tilt its head at her. The cross-shaped pupil within its eye left her mesmerized. She pointed to herself. “Hey there, angel-bird-thing. I’m Melancholy. Mel for short.”
The bird’s eyes clicked, akin to a camera shutter. The winged messenger hopped to and fro on the branch, observing Mel with a critical eye. Its wings fluttered, its halo casting shadows on the withered foliage. “Mel… un… ho… ly,” it squawked.
Mel chuckled, shaking her head slightly. “Close, it’s Mel-an-cho-ly.”
With a jolt of the head, the crow sharply turned to face Mel, its beak shining in the halo’s light. The pair of crosses fixed Mel as if it were judging her. When it spoke again, its voice was more insistent. Damning. And clearly no mispronunciation of her name.
“Mel unholy.”
The eyes of other birds appeared on several other branches, bathing the area’s green glow in a patchy, foggy white.
“Shit.” Mel looked behind her, backing away. Seeking somewhere where the crow’s judging eyes weren’t watching her. Yet another jury.
One of the crows dove toward her, and Mel ran.
She wasn’t sure where she was running to, as the dizzying smell of rotting flesh didn’t seem to get any better no matter where she went. She could only hope to run out of here and find some way to get back home. Or at least some semblance of normalcy. At least the crows didn’t seem to be pulling a Hitchcock and swarming after her.
Stumbling past a rusty shack, startled as she thought she saw eyes glowing like coals from within, Mel was so lost in thought she didn’t see the person stepping in front of her until colliding with him. She fell to the ground, the wind knocked out of her as the general stench of the area was joined by the metallic smell of blood.
“Watch it!” growled the newcomer.
“Hey, I’m just trying to find my way…”
Mel trailed off as she beheld who had knocked her down.
A burly man towered over her, his skin tinted a blue-ish green as if he had been dead for eons while somehow not decaying to bone. Part of the skin on his left arm was torn away, leaving his muscle exposed. A blood-covered apron—at least, Mel assumed it was blood, some looked too purple to be that—adorned his body. In the dim lighting, the shine of metal reflected back at her as she realized a cleaver stuck out from the middle of the man’s head, as if someone had intended to slice his head in two yet had somehow failed.
A sharp intake of breath left Mel’s mouth. He looks like a butcher, she thought. A zombie butcher. Her feet tensed in her stance as she wrenched a branch from a tree, wishing desperately she had a better weapon to fight him with. I didn’t get out of jail to go down like this.
The man stared at her, a mixture of emotions flashing across his face. He tilted his head, as if she were as strange to him as he was to her. More like a curious cat than a vicious attacker.
Her wide eyes blinked at him in return.
“You’re human,” the butcher murmured, so quietly Mel almost didn’t hear it.
“Uh, yeah, of course I’m hu—” Mel started, only to be cut off as the man slammed a hand over her mouth. She tensed, twisting her arm around his, preparing to fight. Her past with assault and battery just might save her now.
But her conviction faded a split-second later as she peered at the butcher’s face. The gaze that weighted his entire body wasn’t one of aggression, or anger, or an intent to harm her.
He was scared.
The juxtaposition of the butcher’s imposing stature and the fearful desperation in his gaze stilled Mel’s hand. For a moment, mortal stared at immortal. Tense. Worried.
The butcher sighed, pulling his hand away. “Don’t breathe a word of that,” he growled, fixing her with a firm gaze like a parent admonishing a child. “Not if you want to keep living.”
Mel’s mind swam, wondering if the fumes of this place were getting to her and she was going to pass out any second.
The butcher glanced around, as if making sure they weren’t being followed. “I might be able to help you.”
Mel blinked, the mix of revulsion and fear in her mind clearing. “Really?”
“Yeah.” The butcher grunted in affirmation. He gestured with a large hand, beckoning Mel to follow him. “Just keep your head down, stay close to me, and don’t leave my side. Got it?”
Wringing her hands together, Mel nodded.
The butcher’s large hand grasped one of Mel’s own, not crushing it much to her surprise. He tugged her forward, heading toward the gas lamps as more buildings came into view.
“So, um,” Mel cleared her throat. “You seem to know this place, so… where am I?”
The butcher turned his gaze down to her, a flicker of fire in his red irises.
“You’re in the Gaslight District, kid.”
An ember of hope flared in Mel’s chest. “So I'm not in Hell, then?”
A rueful chuckle left the butcher’s mouth. “If you aren’t careful, you might as well be.”