A small collection of stone buildings stands tall; their walls littered with iron strips dressed in engravings.
Thick slated pillars, lacking in detail, endless columns through the halls, as if they alone were holding up the whole world, their sculptors' efforts to detail them eroded by the mourning tears of the people.
Moonlight shyly peaked through the pillars, kissing the cobbled pathways through a thin fog.
The annual cycle was coming to an end, and with it, the nights were armed with a cold sting. Winter's gift was arriving early, leaving many of the less fortunate inhabitants of the city exposed, forcing them to stick together in groups to share each other's body heats and fires to try and survive.
Those who did not even have the privilege to share that warmth, were forced to sit it out, using whatever resources they had to create a barrier between themselves and the frosty air.
One of these people was Leon. He had long accumulated plenty of worn-out rags and parchments to build thick layers of coverage. Even then, the early coming winter had its ways of sneaking through the barriers and take bites out of him.
Walking through the Memorial Center, his eyes move along the stone walls and their iron scales, gliding with his pace.
The iron scales were labels, marked with names and dates. Each one represented a person that someone wished to remember, and the dates, their time of passing.
By this hour, most if not all of the grounds had been vacated, leaving Leon to peaceful passage—And too much room for his thoughts to wander to unnecessary conclusions.
"Why's it so damn cold lately?"
Leon of course, was not educated on how the weather worked. In fact, he wasn't educated on much at all, this was the result of being forced to work from an alarmingly early age to survive.
Trying to attend school on top of the responsibilities questionably forced onto someone so young was out of the question, not to mention he wouldn't be able to afford it, with or without the government's help.
"I swear this weather is messing with me. My back constantly feels like it's being watched with all these shivers."
His careless steps through the decorated pathways were almost completely silenced by his makeshift foot-wraps. If anyone was here, they'd certainly have a hard time keeping track of him.
However, there was no one. There wasn't a single mourning soul throughout the entire Memorial Center. Except for Leon himself of course.
Over the years, Leon had found that he had a natural disposition for understanding his surroundings and the living things around him.
When shadows moved unnaturally around him, he would notice. If a pair of wandering eyes shifted their gaze onto him, he would turn to meet them. When mechanisms of machines close by acted up, he would point it out to their owners.
It even left himself a bit unsettled sometimes, often asking 'why couldn't I just be normal like everyone else.'
This seemingly sixth sense had often led to Leon being treated as somewhat creepy among the people he had associated himself with. As such, Leon learned to try to ignore the changes that screamed at him for attention.
Stopping below a sign labelled as Great Cleansing Victims, he set himself down, his focus pointing at an engraved label. It read "The Holloways".
A small lamp hung on a pillar close by, offering what little warmth it may, and plenty of light to see the shadows sharing his somber mood. Reflections of the light flickered off the iron strips of frozen memories on the wall.
The silence seemed to weigh on Leon's shoulders, each moment growing heavier and heavier. His heart seeming to crush under the pressure. His lungs feeling like they were going to explode if he didn't say something.
"Happy birthday bro."
The silence was broken, but the weights were left behind, still hanging over his shoulders, and the shivers still rolling down his back like droplets of rain racing down a pane of glass, seemingly endless in numbers and all of them in just as much of a rush as the last.
"I brought a potato."
His rags shifted around for a few moments before something escaped from them, a pale and skinny arm reaching out with a potato in its hand.
"It's raw though. Sorry, I'm sure you prefer them roasted. Like Mom used to do for us."
His head slightly shifting from his brother's label to meet with his mother's just a little to the left, a sad smile painting its way across his face, like a melancholic brush stroke, before hanging his head down.
His family was one small casualty caught in the crossfire of a one-sided war. The people of his city had started rioting in the wake of a conspiracy of abnormal, twisted fusions of human and animals.
The existence of such had left the people scared—of course it did. People were scared of things they didn't understand, and even more afraid of things that weren't as they should be, things that were different.
Leon's family however, perished in a fire started by people trying to remove whatever they thought may have been of twisted kin.
"What a joke. Human-animal hybrids. What the hell would that even look like?"
Scoffing with his head still hung, he takes a bite out of the raw potato, a dubious look finding its way onto his face.
"Salt. Needs salt."
A small gust of wind finds its way through the pillars, bringing with it another taste of the biting cold. The shadows around Leon danced like jesters as the lamp rocked side to side.
Just as he was getting comfortable, time seemed to speed up as he tried to enjoy his meal. He hadn't gotten to chow down on something especially grand, like he had originally planned to when he visited the markets, but he seemed to be content with this fact.
The world fell quieter and quieter with Leon's mood.
And then the whole world turned black.