Chapter Text
THE GOD OF FEAR AND HUNGER REQUESTS YOUR PRESENCE
Burried empty lungs tremble for the first time in centuries, creaking under the weight of dirt which your cracking fingernails and bleeding bones have been trying to scramble and scratch against since before you were even aware you were awake enough to try breaking free from the earth's hold. Doing so is much harder than breaking free of the shroud of your nonexsistence.
But break free you do. You regain your senses as your ancient lungs regain air, it is dark all around you, the air is dry and smells of death.
There is no danger that comes for Cahara as he heaves in one breath after the other, kneeling on a grave that he cannot see is unmarked. He wouldn't care either, he needs time, precious minutes, to come to his senses, to process his unfortunate rebirth.
He's still in the dungeons, that much he knows by the time he finally gets back to his feet. He knows this by the feel of the stones in the wall, by the dark feeling in his chest, by the tremble in his hands.
There is no knowing how long of groping around in the dark it takes him to escape. Maybe he never escapes at all, maybe some part of him, the piece that died ages ago, will forever be down there in the dungeon. The sun on his skin is too warm, it burns his eyes.
The next few weeks pass in a blur, you go wherever your feet carry you, sleep on the side of the road in a ditch once they stop, until slowly you retread into the folds of civilization. You are almost ashamed to say you spend most your days reading, instead of honest thieving, instead of taking care of yourself. The dungeons really have changed you.
You read about them, the dungeons, the gods, even the history of the world around you once you can no longer bear the ways the familiar has changed in your absence, it doesn't help you navigate the new world, but it helps you cope.
Once you find a familiar name, inscribed in a dusty skin bible in an even dustier library. You take it with you when nobody is watching.
You get Skin bible – Rher.
If the person credited on the book is not long dead, then you can't find any concrete traces of him.
So, for a while, Cahara gets to waste his days away like that, he doesn't hear from the god of fear and hunger again, whatever she wants him to do, she isn't going to spell it out for him
But, eventually, even that gets old, the husk of a man, going still by the same name as always, gets desperate. Desperate for what, the husk doesn't know himself.
And like always, stupid people do stupid things when desperate.
It starts with whispered secrets, overheard in one of the few bars he hasn't been kicked out of yet, people say someone is in the area. Maybe there is one person still alive from that hellish trip, one person Cahara can convince himself is someone he's looking for, maybe if he gets lucky there's even still a person in there.
Word says the Kaiser is in the area, and word says he's coming to a town named Prehevil.
You take the next train there.