when? | october 12, FRIDAY
where? | near the CASTELVECCHIO
who? | open to ALL
Verona was bleeding, and no one was able to stanch its flow. This injury came from the heavens, pounding down in sheets that pelted his cheeks like ricochet. Blood spilled from beneath the bridge, pushing up the streets, insisting that he leave the city alone with her wounds, to let her bleed nobly while seeking a new beginning through destruction of the past.
The problem was, she refused to die alone. The precinct had been receiving increased reports of people lashing out violently due to hallucinations, and he’d been called in to help contain the unpredictable pandemonium. Some officers believed that it was a result of the rain, zealots crying out that this was a punishment, another beginning of a rain that would refuse to relent for forty days and forty nights. Some were more realistic, stating that people were simply shooting up more now that they were forced to stay indoors.
Bellamy wasn’t particularly concern with why people were falling apart alongside the city, but he did care about the chaos that might unfold. He stayed closest to the scene of the crime, up to his ankles in water that threatened to pull him under if only it were slightly stronger. His eyes scanned the streets, thankful they were largely empty but feeling oddly on edge, as if there were daggers mixed among raindrops.
Each step should have been deafening, but the wind screeched with a vengeance. It had already been days of this, yet the gods showed no signs of forgiveness, no desire to let them come up for air. His mind wandered to a night at sea three years ago. Invincible, he’d been then. He’d taken a small boat out on his own, chasing a sunset as red as his past. The waves had snuck up on him, a product of a storm with winds too indecisive to push him anywhere but in circles. He hadn’t been afraid then, because all he had to lose was an evening, maybe himself.
Tonight, he worried. There were others in danger, most likely needing a guiding light out of the maelstrom. He searched for survivors, for those newly at risk, and he found one, boldly walking down the streets as if Poseidon himself.
“Hey!” he called, jogging a couple steps to close the distance between them. “You shouldn’t be on the streets tonight.”
