Chapter Text
The view outside of Gresit showed nothing but corpses and filth remaining inside the walls. An attack the week before had left him injured and slower than normal. It’d taken days longer than it should have to get there and now it seemed it might have been a wasted trip. Still there might be something edible left in the town and at this point it was worth checking.
He snuck in through a nasty sewer pipe, cursing all the while as he climbed past the choked bodies of humans and the occasional night creature. Trevor Belmont tried not to look at the bodies any more than he had to. The sight of those lifeless bodies, usually in multiple pieces, made him sick.
It wasn’t the blood that bothered him, nor the guts. He was used to the sight of both. Even the stench of death was so common now that it didn’t phase him. He could step past a corpse and toe his way through the blood and not blink an eye.
What bothered him more than anything about the corpses had more to do with what they said about him than anything else. Guarding humanity was a job that his family had decided to take on hundreds of years before. It was in his blood, a part of his soul that had been drilled into him practically since birth.
It had also been ripped away thirteen years later by the very humans he’d been taught to protect. The father who’d taught him that lesson had been burned alive along with his mother and sisters. Even some of the servants had been caught up in the blaze that turned his family home into so much ruin and rubble. Difficult to care about humanity after watching his family burned to ash. Even harder was trying to come to terms with the fact that he’d been hiding in the bushes while it happened. The fact that he’d been only twelve years old, and rather small for that age by his family’s standards, never seemed to matter. If he bothered to ever think about his drinking problem that was the night it had really started, though he’d not been able to have his first drink for another few weeks. Not until he got hungry enough and cold enough and tired enough to do anything to get rid of all three, even if just for a few hours.
The sight of those corpses reminded him of the duty he was neglecting, so he didn’t look. When he pushed the grate out of the way and emerged into the city, not a soul was stirring. He found a shop that used to be a butchers, now abandoned like the rest, and stole what he could find that looked edible and nonhuman.
Just past the town square he found a hut that had been burned, part of the roof caved in. A lot of corpses in blue robes were laying nearby, some half burned and some almost intact. The body of a kind looking old man gazed out from the rubble as if pleading with him, but even from a distance Trevor could tell it was too late. He walked over to make sure, and hurried away when no pulse could be found.
This town seemed filled with nothing but ghosts of what had been and what might have been. The bodies of children were more rare, but he spotted one now and again. One poor infant had been dropped onto the spire of the church. Organs that could have come from just about anyone were draped over the rooftops like bizarre decorations.
That night Trevor Belmont made camp in one of the abandoned buildings, the one with the least holes he could find. A few night creatures snuffled about, but none found where he’d hidden himself. They didn’t seem all that enthusiastic about it. Probably because they’d already eaten everything that moved in this town, he decided.
The next day he put what food he could find into a pouch and took it before climbing over the barrier at the entrance to the city. In a chamber that he’d never even realized existed below the streets, a scholar and a soldier both slumbered undisturbed.