On one such expedition, Zala came across a decrepit house. This house seemed to have seen better days-it had a wide porch and marble balustrades and a huge piece of ground that surrounded it. From the looks of it, it looked like a mansion that had fallen into bad hands and/or bad times. Zala traversed the unkempt ground , ascended the porch and knocked on the oak door -half eaten by termites- a couple of times. There was no stirring inside, something that was not quite unexpected.
Zala braced itself and pushed open the door. It saw a hall which was replete with the trappings of a noble’s household- a luxurious carpet, a chandelier and a wide staircase that led to another landing which seemed similarly decorated from Zala’s vantage point. But as with everything outside, the accouterments failed to pass muster when Zala analysed them again.
The carpet was moth eaten with mice scurrying beneath it, half of the chandelier seemed missing as if someone had decided to raid it in fixed installments and the stairs were too weak to hold even a single person’s weight on them, the result of neglect and a ceiling that had too many holes to count thus giving free passageway to all of nature’s many forces.Feeling slightly nauseous and wistful, Zala decided to explore what it could of the house.
It started to walk around the ground floor since the first one had been rendered unattainable by the old staircase. The floor had innumerable rooms- spacious and tastefully done-but all of them bearing the signs of abandonment. As Zala stepped inside one of the rooms to explore it, it heard a sound- the faint but unmistakable sound of a fellow creature. It seemed as if the creature was calling out to it. Zala couldn’t help itself and started to walk in the direction of the sound. It went from room to room until it reached the pantry and saw the source of the sound sprawled on the floor.
The creature as Zala looked closely, seemed to have knocked itself out-purportedly by the edge of the table it was sitting at a few moments back. As to how the creature could be so careless was soon understood when Zala approached the table. It was littered with all kinds of liquor bottles- some empty, some half full and some still waiting for a consumer.
Zala cleared the table and waited for the fellow creature to come back into the conscious realm. Soon enough, the creature sat up groaning and with a shock, Zala realized who it was-a Believer from its colony named Mallus.