When the Mouse woke up, it was pitch black. He had a splitting headache. He couldn't quite remember what had gone on before this point but he remembered vaguely that it involved something very sad. "Uhrrrrr," he groaned.
"Shh, I think he's waking up." he heard a voice say.
He now noticed that light was encroaching on his vision, and realized that his eyes were shut tight. Slowly he opened them only to see someone leaning over him. He thought she was a girl. His headache worsened.
"Here, drink some of this." she said, and offered him a bowl of some sort of liquid. He noticed that he was lying on his back, his head supported by what felt like a pile of gravel. Grateful for the attention, he bent his head forward and drank some of the liquid, as he did so he felt it course through his body, sharpening his senses and filling him with an unexplainable energy.
"What is it?"
"I'm not sure."
"Oh." This didn't sound very encouraging, but whatever it was it seemed to help things generally. He laid his head back against the stones again and thought about things. Where was he? Who was this girl? Why was she being nice to him? He decided that it was probably better to not think about things anymore. Instead he tried to see what she looked like. His vision, which was blurry when he first awakened, was clearing up and he could see things much better then he remembered being able to see them before....before whatever. His mind and memory remained blurred. The girl, if that's what she was, had short, stringy black hair and a deathly pale face. She seemed far too thin for her own good, almost frail, but there seemed to be some strange sort of strength present in her body that only hinted of itself visually. Her eyes were grey, the color of dry ashes.
Suddenly, a giant rat jumped on Mouse's chest, startling him out of his wits. "The universe will all come crashing down soon! I will exterminate life as you know it!" yelled the rat, its mouth distorting the words slightly giving them an odd raspy lisp. Mouse gave a yell, completely unsure of how to respond.
"Oh Harold, shut up," the girl said, picking the rat up and throwing him to the side. He skittered along the ground, caught himself and then ran off. "Don't mind him, he always says stuff like that. He doesn't have any powers these days, he's just a big ugly rat," Somewhere off a ways he heard an angry response, but he couldn't make out what it said. "Harold used to be a big elder-demon or something like that, but then something happened. He doesn't like to talk about it."
"Ah...um. Okay, then, I'll uh, keep that in mind." the mouse said. His head fell back. He rested for a moment, but felt the sudden urge to get up, perhaps some primal instinct to scope out the situation, or maybe just mundane curiosity. He struggled slowly to his feet, the girl seemed to have wandered off somewhere, puttering over something of immense importance to her at the moment. Harold had come back and was sitting watching the Mouse from a distance while gnawing on a piece of meat or bone that he had found somewhere.
Mouse wanted to figure out what had happened, where was he? How had he come here? Why did he feel so bad? He tried to remember but…no, nothing. It was gone; there was a curtain pulled across the past. Did he even know his name? He thought hard…yes, it was…it….it was ‘mouse.’ Yes, that was it, Mouse. Such a strange name, he wondered if that thought had ever occurred to him before. So where had he ended up? He looked around; the world seemed dim somehow, not just dim as though seen through dull or half-shut eyes, nor even as though seen in bad light, but dull despite a bright sky. Dull as if all things were absorbing all the light they could, retaining all that was within their grasp, allowing only a fraction to bounce back to his eyes, and not even actually allowing. There was the definite sense that were it not beyond the world’s power to do so, it would absorb all the light so that everything would be absolutely black. It was a grim cityscape that greeted the Mouse’s questing eyes; the three of them were alone in a back alleyway, dark and concealed from prying eyes, but affording him a view of the largest city that he had ever seen. The alley connected to a small street that ran adjacent to a large body of water, which seemed to go on forever, yet far out in the water was the most magnificent city that Mouse could ever have imagined. Great spires rose up into the sky, further than he could see, and enormous bridges connected the city to the land, but most impressive of all were the lights. The lights were the most beautiful things he had ever seen, millions of tiny twinkling lights, some half obscured in the fog, but dazzling nevertheless. He was unable to decide if it were night or day. The sky was so bright and yet the lights were so numerous, it must be day, he thought, a dark day.
“So, what’s your name?”
The Mouse snapped out of his reverie, the girl had addressed him “Uh, ah, I’m sorry, what?”
“Is it mouse? I mean, ah,” the girl looked down embarrassedly and pushed a strand of hair from her face back behind her ear, “I thought, that is, well Harold and I placed bets.”
Mouse smiled, “ Actually it is mouse…how did you…”
“Ha! See Harold, I told you so,” she leaned closer to the Mouse, almost as if in confidence, “Harold thought you were named Sheila.” She laughed a pretty little laugh, and stuck her tongue out at Harold, who hissed in response. “You talked in your sleep, well, just a little anyway.”
“But, but Sheila is a girl’s name, not a boy’s name at all, that couldn’t have been my name.”
“That’s what I said, but Harold didn’t believe me, he said he thought you looked like a Sheila,” she cast a glance over to the darkened corner, “isn’t that right Harold?” she said, still gloating over her victory. The rat growled something in that strangely deep voice of his, and went back to gnawing at his bit of meat or whatever it was.
Mouse sat down on the gravel again, he wasn’t sure how much he could
take, it was all so…weird. But then he really wasn’t sure why.
Did he know any talking rats before….before whatever it was? It seemed
really extraordinary, but then, he didn’t actually have anything to base
that on, it was just an assumption really. A basic belief in what
was normal and what wasn’t. Mouse was pretty sure that it wasn’t
‘normal ‘ to have talking rats that claimed to be fallen demons, or whatever
she’d said it was, but he couldn’t remember why.