Chapter Text
On a cloudy day, one might venture past the city’s walls and find a heap of disturbed dirt a half mile away. Scattered are pieces of charred tarp, remnants of a burned-down encampment all around. It surely couldn’t be the legendary Bandito’s camp, much too small, but the site has seemingly not aged much. Many things are immortalized by the cold in Trench.
If one were to disturb that dirt once more and dig into it, they might find a journal, stuffed with torn parchment and pressed yellow flowers, alongside the torn fabric of a glove. The ink inside would be smudged, but the neat serifed handwriting would be somewhat legible despite. The finder would be able to make out much of what was written inside, including a passage— the longest entry of the entire book:
He is trapped. Stuck in a cycle that is generational. A cycle that I’ve been warned against time and time again. I hope that this will be the last time. I hope he goes farther than anyone before. That would be enough. I see how hard he’s trying.
Dema. A circular cement city in the southern half of a wild and unpredictable continent known as Trench. I was a citizen of Dema. So was my predecessor, and his. All of us were. We escaped, through torturously long trials and often, bloodshed. The archbishop of Dema has always kept a watchful eye through the vultures that pick off Trench to survive. He and the other Bishops are the reason we exist at all— we, the Banditos.
The Bishops govern Dema with an iron fist, using an inhuman ability known as seizing to do so. Their religion, Vialism, feeds it. Vialism shackles Dema’s people— makes them want to surrender their lives to something bigger. We Banditos see how absurd it all is from the outside, but we’ve also all seen firsthand how easy it is to fall into.
The Banditos aren’t allowed within the city’s walls, and often we all abide by those rules, but not always. Sometimes we need supplies, or people need help freeing themselves. Very rarely, though, there comes a single known person worth risking it all for.
████, who knows the city inside out. ████, who knows how to fight their control, who has experienced the debilitating way of seizing and came out alive. He trusts us... He trusts me.
He is our best shot at breaking the cycle. Despite what my predecessor has told me, I believe in him. We’re teaching him our colors. We’re going to try.
I am Torchbearer, and I would follow him anywhere.
Without knowing who had written it, the finder of this book might place it back onto the ground to wither, or perhaps tuck it into their bag on their quest to find something better beyond the walls. It would be much too cold to waste time fussing over every page.
The finder would have no idea that the writer is a dead man walking at the time of writing that entry, a traitor. All at once that writer is very loyal. This writer— a living contradiction— is named Keons.