“DARK TIMES – THE SECOND HAND” by RatRace

At first glance he looked like a big black insect, thin and wiry, with his little black vest and skinny dark leggings. Crouched down as he was, he seemed all jutting knees and elbows. Eerily spider-like, the ragged tailcoats of his black jacket flapping in the wind like extra legs or splayed wings. Spider-like, with bulging electric-green eyes and spiky lime-green hair.

But in all actuality he was a leprechaun, spawn of the dark elves, lover of the darkness.

The City Clock pealed three times, three morbid rumbles of thunder. The Clock towered twenty times higher than the highest cathedral, a looming masterpiece wrought of gold and ebony. Carvings on the four steep walls of the clock were said to portray the history of that structure, stories of humans and elves and leprechauns and giants, but no one–except for the forefathers of the City, it was rumored–could bear look at all of it without going mad. Those who had born following the carvings up one-tenth of the Clock’s surface recognized that it had once been an insane asylum for the legendary giants, before all the patients mysteriously died.

But there were those who seemed indifferent to the haunting rumors and histories, and turned a deaf ear to gossip and carvings alike. On the very hands of the goliath cloth, a speck of black against the massive sun of the Clock’s face, crouched the leprechaun. His fangs chattered with the wild vibration resulting from the three chimes. Shaking himself, he withdrew two bobs of cloud dough from his ears. Still, they rang.

“Angreek87″