The end of the road.
A man was one thing. You could fight a man. Trade punches. Take some hits. Grit your teeth and keep going. A man was a man. A beast? Yeah, that was one thing too. Claw and fang. Fur and muscles. Venom? A tail? Bad Breath? Take some cuts. Grit your teeth and keep going.
Gods. Gods were something else entirely. You grit your teeth. You kept going. Kept fighting. You screamed at the top of your lungs against the storm as it washed you away. Utterly. Perhaps your memory would matter. Most likely, that got washed away too. In Myrken, it was even worse than that. Here gods twisted you. A man tried. He wasn't a GOOD man, because who was really? He tried though. He tried and he failed, and then, after the bottom dropped out, after it all fell apart, the Gods twisted what was left.
Sympathy, then? No, to try was to reach too high. To extend yourself. Do that and you leave yourself up to the fall. You could live without trying, without caring. It just involved putting one foot after the next, after the next. You would FIND life that way. Try to care? Get too close? Embrace life in Myrken and it would smother you. He died once. The man he had been had loved, had cared. The man who remained was empty. He filled his hole with senseless danger and constant libation. And when came to care just a little once more, when he tried to make those endless steps have some meaning, one after the next, after the next.. it was taken away from him again.
He had no sympathy for himself. He had no sympathy for his prey. Victims, the young, the foolish, those who didn't know better. No sympathy, but he'd drink to them, to McCoy, to the Constables who were cut down and the innocents who deserved it even less. His sentiment was in liquid form. Drink to a memory. Piss on a grave. Spit at those Gods from a distance.
All well and good, until now. He cried wolf for three years and now the wolf's arrived. No one listened until the bodies appeared, until it all went sour and bloody. Now it was too late. A man you could fight. A beast you could survive. Gods? Nine gods? You needed help.
You needed to find someone who could fight gods. Sometimes Myrken provided. The file had been practically shoved into Kurt Lentham's hand. Two Inquisitory scholars had pushed the grizzled and ragged Detective Constable off in the right direction. It was raining. He didn't care. Physical shelter would do the rest of him no good. So as stormy night fell, Darkenhold's gates would receive dark company.