He’d been doing something.

It was embarrassing, really, like walking into a room and forgetting what he came in for. His first instinct was to walk out and back in again to jog his memory. This proved impossible, however, as there were no rooms nearby.

Or rather, there was one-fourth of a room nearby, and he was standing on the side of it.

A wall. The reliable thing about walls was their top and bottom, both of which usually connected neatly to a ceiling and thus, made up the whole of a room—doors and windows notwithstanding. However, this wall appeared to be outside, which felt odd. In his experience, walls tended to make insides from outsides.

Cold air below him mixed with dry, hot air above—dross, what was his name? He scowled. This kind of forgetfulness was usually reserved for the local guards after the...something he normally did. But even in this memory-starved state, he assumed who, me? was probably not his real name.

Probably.

He—whoever he was—consciously relaxed his jaw. The ache from the tension told him it was stressful, whatever the something was. But that brought him back to his original quandary: what was the something he'd been doing?

He looked down at the airship in flames, the rope leading up to his soot-covered Grapple attached to the lip of the wall, screams and calls for help falling past him toward the coastline.

At this point, he had the slightest inkling the something he was doing was illegal.

There was a wet feeling in the back of his mind, like his head was dipping into a flood of partial information, and almost none of it helpful. Lost memories dissipated like pigeons hitting reinforced windows. Found memories settled back into their old chairs, wondering what all the dust was about.

His name splashed on him in the process: Tirion. That was a good start.

Overwhelmed with the influx, his mind snapped at him, drowning in a torrent of raw, unsorted memory.

He remembered her. A very specific her, a her whose name escaped him at the moment. His mind dove back in to try and find it, but very quickly to come back up for air.

Gravity tugged him downward, reminding him she had a more pressing claim to his present attention. Gravity wasn’t the her he remembered, though. He was thinking of a more forgiving her. The current her wasn't pulling in her usual direction, though, why was—

Oh.

He was upside-down, the Grapple's rope helpfully knotted around his foot to keep him from becoming an unsightly decoration on the dockside street.

With the helpful illumination of the airship inferno, Tirion took stock of his upended surroundings:

Nearby lanterns swung in the cool coastal breeze, rudely jostling shadows without so much as an excuse me. Moths fluttered into the glass around the lights with frantic hedonistic desire. Fishing boats thumped against the docks below, the waves lapping them like affectionate hounds. The smell of all-night food stalls wafted past him, mixing with the all-pervading odor of low tide. Adding a fresh terror to his situation, a set of softly glowing clockwork tentacles wriggled past with muffled, ethereal clanks, sending jagged, shivering shadows onto the wall.

Cinching his eyes shut, Tirion held still as they slid noisily past him. Gears and springs ground at mortar and stonework, dislodging patches of lichen and ancient barnacles, rustling and clacking joining the clanking. They sank down below and out of sight, where there was a sound like a satisfied sigh like the hiss of the tide on sand, and the clanking ceased.

When queried for an answer, Tirion's newly-restored memory just screamed hysterically.

Tirion's eyes drifted down toward the floating buildings, manors in the sky with merchant and transport dinghies shuttling between them. He looked up to the sprawling slums and bazaars—currently experiencing the nightly rain of garbage from the levcity—and a massive, throne-mandated tower to connect mere mortals to their airborne superiors.

Ah. Of course he would be in the Dump.

A place of possibilities, if the sum of your life was a corridor of choices with the illusion of free will.

A place of hope, if you only hoped for subsistence.

A place of relative peace, if only for fear of losing a limb to a recollection-hoarding eldritch being.

Didn’t that have something to do with the tentacles? Tirion’s memory, hoarse from all the screaming, was unable to speak in any kind of detail.

It was here he’d learned to pick his first pocket, his first lock, and his friends carefully.

Where she was. Home, such as it was.

“Hey, Grapple?” he called to his beroped tool, finally pulling himself upright.

An interrogatory growl rumbled through the stone. “MMMPHHH?”

“Mind lowering me down?”

“MMMPHHHPHHMPH!”

Tirion's eyebrows rose on a wave of confusion. "What?"

"MMMMMMMPHHHH!"

A burning hunk of airship bashed into the wall next to Tirion, ripping the rock face open. Bug-eyed, he watched it flatten explosively on the cobblestone below, sending sparks onto a harbormaster's shack and catching it aflame, solving any heating troubles it might have on this cold, damp evening.

A further deluge of debris followed the initial drop. The panic above was deepening, as more and more of the airship's crew realized water wouldn't fix the issue of Gravity hauling them earthward.

"Agreed, time to go!" Tirion felt the impossible stores packed inside the Grapple roil out like silk from a legless spider’s arse.

“Any idea what we're doing here?” Tirion said, watching the ground grow closer bit by bit, much too slowly for his liking. Two circles of tiny gears on the cobblestone below showed the tentacles’ exit route, now sprinkled with ash, split barnacles and—

Tirion flattened himself against the wall, dangling with one hand. The smell of fire and charred fish shot past him, complete with a kettle whistling a keen little dirge for the stove. The airship's galley had apparently developed a bit of a hole.

THUD.

An entire pot-bellied stove landed from the 50-foot drop with the grace of an escaping thief—oh, stealing, that was the illegal something he usually did! His career securely in mind again, Tirion slid down the last few feet, resisting the urge to kiss the street in appreciation. Not knowing how many stoves the airship commanded, he coiled the Grapple as he frantically ran, expecting other kitchen implements to crush or impale him at any second.

There was an almighty crack as the airship split against the wall, screaming a farewell to its bow.

Diving under the nearest cover he could find, Tirion felt heat and splinters wash over his back in equal measure. The front half turned a death somersault, stubborn pieces breaking off and creating a wake of debris in midair. Groaning from the strain, the bow bellowed like an off-key whale before disintegrating against the street. Blocks of stone rained down around the harbor, as if the wall was repelling a siege with chunks of its own body. The impact brightened the docks to a false morning before settling into a bog-standard firestorm, quickly blending in with the unstructured and lawless environment after its bombastic introduction.

That was the way of things here, down below the levcity. The Dump embraced the chaos like a kindly orphanage headmaster, always happy to find the newest bits of entropy a place to stay until someone claimed it for their own.

Wincing, Tirion took a quick pat-pat inventory of his limbs and other extremities. Finding everything in its proper place with only mild singeing for his trouble, he breathed a sigh of relief.

"Get your arse outta my stall, chumley," said a voice like crumpling paper.

He felt a prod at his side. Following the boot up its attached leg, he saw an apron-clad woman with an overdone assortment of hair bows staring down at him. She held a forked ladle in her hands with a menace against all living things, the kind unique to food service workers. Along with much of stove next to her, she was decorated in an impressive assembly of airship debris in various states of flammability.

All things considered, she didn't seem too bothered by the whole spectacle, as was the culture down here. You saw some dross when you lived in the Dump, and you took it in stride. If you gawped at every fight, foot chase, and explosion, people might start assuming you were a tourist.

Barging through the scent of smoke and charred aloftoak, the smell of several kinds of broth bullrushed Tirion's nose. The ancient noodle corpses around him suggested his shelter was under one of the Dump's many ramen shops.

Tirion scurried to his feet, thwacking his head on the counter in the process. "Sorry."

The ramentender spat over the bar at a nearby ember and, rewarded with a sizzle, turned to stir a nearby pot. "Sorry doesn't pay rent, bub."

Her eyes told the tale of a woman whose morality leaned toward the highest bidder and whose reality warped to fit her mood. Someone whose memory might be awfully sharp when the Tidies came calling after the root cause of the split airship.

Bribery it was, then.

"Of course it doesn't." Digging into his bandolier pockets, Tirion handed over some loose undercurry. "What flavors do you have?"

Tirion was only a few streets removed from the wreckage when he felt a miniature winter growing on his chest. Grunting in surprise, he pulled off his bandolier, then watched helplessly as an icy plume of fog centered around his wallet. Opening his money pouch, he found the entirety of the wallet locked into a small glacier.

Frozen assets. He prodded it gingerly, but some experience told him chipping away at the ice would cause a fiscally shattering event.

Dross.

That meant three things: someone authoritative was likely searching for him, whoever was after him had access to his money, and he was officially broke. He needed to find her, hope her wasn't the one after him, and buy some time to figure this all out.

Not that he could buy anything right now. His last possession in the world—lukewarm, ill-seasoned, and teetering a murky line between edible and potable—was this stupid ramen box. The unkempt ramentender compared him to three different ex-husbands while she prepped his food. He desperately hoped it hadn't inspired any untoward additions to the broth.

With a sigh, he put his freezing cold bandolier back on and trudged forward, wisps from his frigid currency floating behind him like an anti-campfire.

He squinted, trying to get his bearings in the dim light of the blazing charcoal giants a few hundred feet above him. The night coals were the city's way of giving the absolute minimum of legally required lambency in the slums. Supposedly, it was to deter ne'er-do-wells from practicing their art. However, crime and the Dump were on a first-name basis. The scant light of the night coals bothered neither. Even if murder was out of the question for most, the Dump wasn't exactly a haven for tourists. Not tonight, anyway.

Popping into a nearby alleyway between an ancient airship wreck and an abandoned tavern, Tirion scooted past a couple armless beggars, leaning against the alley wall. He extracted the wispy cube with end of his sleeve, squinting as he turned it over. The frozen wallet chock-full of the Highflight’s tender didn’t look familiar. Trapped under the ice, the bright overcurry contrasted harshly with the tattered wisps of the Dump’s undercurry.

The sleeve holding it wasn’t one he recognized either, a stark white, flowing material, complete with hood. A few flecks of blood decorated one of the cuffs, running unbroken onto his fist. He was reasonably sure it wasn’t his. Wiping it away with the other sleeve, he found a tattoo on his right wrist.

That was certainly new, not only new, but lacking the classic marks of inebriation-inspired tattoos such as former lovers or maternal affection. It looked like an arrow sporting two heads with squares at regular intervals in-between them. The faintest of glows was visible dead center, a tiny dot of luminescence. It didn't sting like a fresh tattoo, but logic dictated it was less than a day old. Then again, logic was slurring like a drunkard today, so Tirion wasn't quite sure what to think.

Narrowly avoiding a semi-fresh spatter of vomit, Tirion rested the back of his head on the stone wall of the alley and wracked his brain. Why couldn’t he remember?

His eyebrows conferred above his nose to work through the usual suspects.

Hangover? No headache or vomit stains.

Head wound? See hangover.

Epiphifaerial knockout? That would have left him limper than a double-jointed ragdoll, not a forgetful acrobat halfway up—or halfway down, depending on your disposition—a wall.

Auld? The Hoarder seemed to be involved in spats of forgetfulness like this. In Tirion's experience, though, that was usually more forgetting why you walked in a room rather than forgetting how he may or may not have started a clear-cut case of airborne arson.

“Ya lost, stretcher?” The voice twanged like basso lute strings, echoing around the alley. “Nobody wanders around the Dump at night unless they've got a poorwish.” Tirion could practically hear the speaker's eyes narrowing. "Or worse, they're a tourist."

A second voice, deeper and more cultured than the first, spoke into the murky half-light. “Tong, be kind to the poor soul. Judging from the purse plumes, he’s run afoul of someone on high. Enemy of my enemy, as they say?”

Framed by the backdrop of the night coals floating in the distance, Tirion saw the outline of a seven-foot wall with horns. He pushed himself up, fists by his temples, ready to—

…fight?

This didn’t feel like him at all. It felt tense, strange, and uncomfortably warm.

Wait. Nope, he'd just accidentally crushed the box of ramen, the squashed noodles spilling out over his foot.

Still tense and strange, though.

He’d been a cutpurse most of his life, a non-confrontational flight risk who won most of his fights by three streets. Now all of a sudden, he was sizing up a minotaur in the middle of the Dump. That's not how one tended to see another lanternrise.

“Rose, you seein’ this?” Lute String said, his voice intrigued and baffled. “This stretcher’s got a backbone.”

“He’s not our usual mark, Tong. For all you know, he's the Leveler," insisted Cultured and Placatory, fear flavoring his voice like overapplied spice.

"We ain't big enough game for the Leveler," Lute String said. "Not that we ain't big in our own way, just not Leveler-needs-to-level-us big," he added hurriedly, seemingly more to himself than Tirion.

"We might not have to scrape by with wallet-gathering if a certain someone hadn't scuppered our beautiful little airship on a dare."

A hand popped out of the silhouette, giving the minotaur a dismissive third horn. "Hush."

“Look, no one has to get hurt,” Tirion said, his stance indicating the exact opposite. He tried to drop his hands, but they kept springing back up with the force of a loaded crossbow, ironically, making it look as if he was taunting his accosters.

“Ahhh, 'No One Has To Get Hurt,'” A much smaller, much-bearded shadow emerged from the larger one: a gnome sloughing off of the minotaur like a violent polyp. "The battle hymn of the passive-aggressive."

"A song you know all too well," Cultured and Placatory was now Exasperated and Out of Patience.

“I ain't denyin' it, it's been a night. Three hours in with no scrap of overcurry and or undercurry, dross, no scraps at all. Allforgin', I don’t even want his wallet at this point, I just wanna punch him.” The gnome motioned toward Tirion like a barker at a sideshow. “Lookit him, standin' there with his big punchable face and spittin' his punchable words.”

The minotaur verbally mulled the thought over, “Well, if you’re keen to go through all the effort, you may as well grab the wallet when you’re done. Gwen’ll be able to get something out of it, if nothing else.”

“Your lips to Dwellheim’s ears, biggun.” Two points of light opened up on the gnome’s fists, illuminated by a steady mist rolling off a set of brash knuckles. Etched into the top in a gorgeous, flowing script, Tirion could make out the words FISTICUFFIN’ STUDMUFFIN spread across both hands.

The voice named Rose gave a long-suffering sigh. “We’ve been over this, Tong: you don’t call me biggun, I don’t call you projectile.”

“Fiiiine,” Tong strangled the word, forcing an ahhh into the middle. He looked at Tirion with a whattaya-gonna-do shrug, brash knuckles lighting the alleyway arena. “Co-workers. Look, ya win, ya get to keep your frozen overcurry, deal?”

A sarcastic response wasn't halfway out of Tirion's mouth before the gnome was in midair. Tirion deflected the blow, feeling the graze of both fist and beard going past his left cheek. He’d barely turned before Tong kicked off the wall, redirecting himself toward Tirion’s solar plexus. He shifted his hips into a hook, catching the gnome in the gut and sending him spinning to the trash-covered ground. There was a thin crunch as Tong impacted against the cobblestones, eliciting a groan from the prostrated gnome.

“Are you winning, Tong?” Rose called from the sidelines, sounding genuinely unsure.

“Sure as the Chasm spits out the rich, Rose, but my lanternshades are busted.” Tong said, tossing the offended item over to the minotaur before hopping back to his feet. “I’ll let ya know if I need a hand.”

Tong and Tirion exchanged blows whilst Tong and Rose exchanged barbs.

"Why were you even wearing them at night?"

Kick, catch, dodge.

"Because they look good on me no matter what time it is!"

A punch to the back of Tirion's leg.

"It's ridiculous, Tong, why would you— oh, that was a good one!"

Solid blows thudded into Tirion's back, almost hitting his kidneys.

"Thanks, bigguuhhhhhrose!"

"I heard that!"

Tirion rolled and moved gracefully, too gracefully. Defense was never a big part of a thief's overall skillset. Defense meant you got caught. And yet, here he was, shifting, parrying, sliding, swinging like a violent ballerina.

"Whaaa? Nooo, I've always called ya Big Rose!"

"That's even worse than biggun!"

"Ya say the damnedest things, Big Rose, ya really do."

“Am I special, or do you dance like this all of your marks?” Tirion interrupted a jab, sending Tong skipping out of the way.

“Truth be told, stretcher, it usually doesn’t last this long,” Tong huffed. “Nice to meet someone who makes me earn their keep. Almost feels like workin'.” He tapped his fists together, their light increasing. “If ya wanna throw the wallet down, I’m happy as a billwalker in a muddy stream to leave you be. Ya keep this up, though, and Evy’s gonna have to save ya from the drubbin’ ya deserve.”

“What in the Chasm is a billwalker?” Tirion dropped into an exaggerated crouch to get a better angle. “I've never heard of a…wait, who's Evy?”

In answer, Tong’s right hand swung at Tirion’s face, close enough to catch a whiff of stale raspberry. A tiny sprite, feet planted on Tong’s third and fourth knuckle, provided a rapid-fire set of obscene gestures on her way by.

Distracted, Tirion didn’t see the left uppercut coming.

There was a distinct grind as fist greeted jaw, jaw greeted teeth, and teeth greeted each other, singing in chorus of Tirion’s need for an apothecary.

Spitting out one of the off-key choir members, Tirion wiped blood from his lip. A flurry of kicks flowed out of him in response, forcing the gnome back against the wall. Tong caught the third one triumphantly only to find a fourth one sending him kettle over arse like a runaway windmill. Tirion leaped, dropping a knee onto Tong's chest before he could recover, fists seeking the gnome’s face, his throat, a way to end—

End?

A rude little thought—one Tirion recognized as his conscience—informed him he was indeed about to kill this cutpurse for a chunk of glacier curry.

Tong gamely deflected, absorbed, and dodged blows as they rained down. “If I die, tell Note I wanted a raise!”

Tirion’s fist locked behind his right ear. He stopped short, eyes wide, sweat and blood dripping onto the thoroughly disgusted gnome beneath him.

That was her.

"Tong?" Rose called worriedly from the sidelines, taking a tentative step forward.

Her-her. Not Gravity-her.

"I'm fine, he’s—bleuhhhuuuhuhhh! Dwell-damn it, Rose, he got sweat in my slaggin' eyeball!"

The her he needed to find.

"Tong!"

“Nah, nah, don't, Rose! I've got him— “

The minotaur grabbed onto Tong and yanked with an almighty heave. Tirion felt Gravity release her embrace, momentarily—angrily. Rose and Tong stared agog at his flight, watching him slam into the opposite wall, his fledgling scruff leaving pinpricks in the mortar. The world around Tirion slid away tandem with his boneless descent of the alley wall.

"Oh, dear," Rose’s voice rumbled through the porridge of Tirion's senses. "Oh, dear, dear me."

Tong's curse rode out on a sigh.

"...drooooss. Come on, then, pick him up so we can get him to Note. Don't want ya to lose an arm over a Dwell-damned wallet." Tirion felt himself rising, and wondered for a moment if he was floating above his perished body. His pain receptors didn’t believe in ghosts and told him so as he flopped onto Rose's shoulder.

The gnome remained righteously indignant, running five strides for each of the minotaur's one. "You saw him, though, right? Comin' after me like that, it was self-defense, if it ever did exist."

"Sorry, Tong," Rose's voice vibrated through Tirion's surrendering consciousness. "I'm afraid you don't have the moral high ground on this one."

"Y'know, that came pretty close to fighting someone, Rose. Good on you."

"I wasn't fighting, Tong. I was rescuing your Siltian arse."

"Rescuing would indicate I was in trouble."

Mercifully, the ringing void took Tirion's hearing, cutting off the rest of the gnome's response.

Pilfer! First Chapter
by Aaron Waite

Kickstarter live on March 3rd!

artwork by Ami Hagget