The subtle sounds of his jostling pack wracked the night, much like the roar and clatter of the machinery that conveyed the Doomed about their sun-tinged perdition by day cluttered one’s True sight.

He must be on his sharpest guard.

The swing of the sorceress-spun sack across his lower back sounded like cloth tearing of old.

He felt the chill reminder of a headsman’s hood wrapped over his head many years gone.

The flap-flap-flap of the sorcerer-crafted zipper tabs sounded like the patter of tiny, long-dead feet across a cold floor—a floor he dearly longed to forget.

He stepped more lightly, mindful of his gait.

The clatter of demon-forged buckles and the ring on his like-topped vessel of the same alchemical metal tittered in the night, like the sound of clamoring bones coming to life.

How the dread stole into his soul, at that clattering reminder, served to put him at the peak of readiness. He felt like a stalking cat dressed with bells to warn his quarry.

Where a cowl should have been, a devil’s cap—made entirely of the melting use-stuff of a blasphemous society, whose white-coated warlocks sought to conquer the cosmos by carving their greatness in the sea foam that floats witlessly ahead of the tempest—rode, cocked sardonically, after the manner of the Devils, on his shaven pate.

Despite the absurd banality of his attire and provisions, in this devil-spawning land, only a few things set him apart from the faded norm: his once hooked and now broken nose, his pallid complexion and the device he held to hand. In his left hand, rocking along in his ancient, talonious paw, was a crook-ended vine of the dark fibrous creeper that once hung from the Mother of All Trees, in the steaming grove of True life, where his ancient kind had first padded forth into the world, on calloused feet that tread so very lightly across the face of the world, now replaced by the soft thud of his boot heels. Twisted in unseen hands, hardened in shimmering moonfire, the relic of his lurking line set him apart from those Doomed dolts who normally wore such pallid pelts.

Through the moonless night—absent that venerable body sacred to his withering kind—he trod down the lamp-lit trail, their idiot hum mesmerizing, as the Thief’s Hour gave way to the Wolf’s Hour. Verily, the maimed trees gave back, after ages of retreat, from the form-stone road, the sluggishly worried prey hopping slowly out of his way.

To his right, properly roofed with weeping trees, were the grave markers of the Servile Doomed, interred over the centuries in their walled abode. A Winged Sentinel awoke in the branches of an unseen tree and squawked its warning, reminding him that this ancient ridgeline led down into the very Pit of Deviltry, where the prey did not hop on padded feet but bounded along on clawed hands, where the Servile Doomed slept behind barred gates as the Virile Damned spawned behind the plank-windows of their lairs and skulked forth into the narrow ways—like him—a hunter by night.

The Crossroads of Sin, where the Doomed and the Damned reveled until the Witching Hour, were dominated by the Glaring Sentinels, hanging from their compass gallows, whose great eyes now blinked uncertainly. From their nooses they swung, normally judging the passage of revelers where the four Evils of Perdition danced in gaudy tryst. But, upon the rise of the Wolf’s Hour, they let him pass—seemingly unobserved, certainly un-judged.

As the road darkened, the Glaring Sentinels started blindly behind him, jostling heavily in the breeze. A Winged Sentinel of the kind variety whistled to him of hope, fortitude and fanatic resolve. By far—as a hunter by night—he found solicitude in her song, over the Thief Squawker behind, and the Dawn Greeting Mourner ahead, who would sing her song as the yellow-tinged gray of Dawn’s jaundiced hand swept aside the Wolf’s Tail and serenaded the descending Damned as their blood ran into Eternity from the sink where their vile taint was whisked from his night-sure hands.

The lamp-lit pit spread out below as he emerged from the maimed trees that lined the Streets of the Doomed, gazing fixedly out upon the warren of shadowed ways that sprawled beneath the indicting lamps, which hummed and whined ever so monotonously from atop the alchemical wonders that were their soaring posts. Unseen, in the near distance, wolfed a Fanged Sentinel, taking heed of his passage, while the Doomed and Damned alike ignored their loyal guardian, ignored the three throaty barks that declared to those too dull to listen that Punishment now stalked among them, duty in his soul, distance in his eyes, deliverance in his hand.

So stole the Passerby into the sinking night.