Engrossed in marveling at the glorious silence, I almost jumped out of my skin when Guardswoman Elira placed a hand on my shoulder. Once again, my guard slipped. Pissed, yet having no one but myself to blame, I touched the earrings again as the blue-eyed city guard had gestured me to do and winced. The noise of the street assaulted my eardrums with a ferocity far worse than when I came out of the gatehouse.
This time, though, I was ready - sort of.
“Y-yes?” I asked, biting my lower lip in an effort to endure the noise.
“Great, they seem to work on you, too. I wasn’t sure. You adjust the dampening strength by turning the bulbs.”
“I say a waste of coins,” Guardswoman Vara growled as I tested the function of the earrings.
“As you can clearly see, it’s not.”
“Sure, not useless for the half-Terr. But tell me, Elira, how many times have you used it? Just admit it, you got duped. Just like the time you bought that shiny . . . ”
“ALL RIGHT! Yes, I got . . . a bit carried away. Happy?”
“I will be once we finally get going,” she grunted back with a grin and glanced at me. “Hey, half-Terr, can we go, or do we have to get you some boots first, too? And I’m telling you upfront; you’re not getting mine.”
Finally getting the street noise down to a bearable level, I looked down at my bare feet and then at theirs comfortably snug in leather over-knee boots. A mistake as a pang of envy bit into my heart. I couldn’t even remember what it was like to wear one of those - footwear in general.
“N-no, I am fine.”
A blatant lie, but the Guardswoman Vara couldn’t care less.
“Great, then let’s go.”
Taking one last look at the now wagon-less gate, the Wilds spreading out behind the backs of the two gate guards; I took a deep breath and headed out into the hustle and bustle of the city, flanked by the two uniformed city guards.
The main street was simply unbelievable. The straightness of it aside, the vibrancy, the amount of people and shops with all sorts of goods lining it, was breathtaking. Some of the places I recognized, such as a greengrocer’s or a stationer’s shop, others I could only guess what they had for sale. For one, we passed by a shop with a runic emblem that even [Eleaden Standard Language] couldn’t translate - if it meant anything at all - and a number of similar rune-covered scripts displayed behind the window. Or there was this stone building decorated with carved wood paneling at the corner of the main street and one of the many side ones, having burgundy curtains behind the windows blocking the view inside I had no idea what to make of. The building did not seem to be abandoned; on the contrary, it gave the impression of a renowned restaurant, which I was sure it wasn’t. No smells of food, no menu boards outside.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Not where I’d advise you to work,” Guardswoman Vara remarked with a smirk when she noticed where I was looking. “Sure, it doesn’t take a genius to work as a ‘companion’; I bet even you know how to spread your legs - and it pays well if you have the looks, but . . . speaking of, what’s up with your looks?”
“I have to admit I’m a little curious myself,” the blue-eyed city guard chimed in, now slightly red in the cheeks as we passed what apparently was a legal whore house. “You don’t look like any half-Terr I’ve seen around.”
“I d-don’t?”
Not the answer they wanted to hear, but I didn’t really have one. After all, I was half-human, half-beast, not one of those half-Terr’dens moving down the street and giving me strange looks.
Though I could see why they mistook me for one. The resemblance between them and me was startling. Seriously, when my eyes fell on the first one walking casually towards us down the street, a man with the ears and antlers of a stag, the panic that I had in fact found myself in the city where that deranged asshole was conducting his twisted experiments gripped my guts. But then I saw a full Terr’den, a woman covered in white fur from head to toe, with a snout instead of a nose and mouth, cat-like eyes, and the ears of some leopard-like animal she resembled. She looked more beast-like than I did, and no one batted an eye.
The unease that everyone would look at me like a freak melted away the further into the city we walked. At least as far as the humans were concerned. Oddly enough, it was the Terr’dens, whether fulls or halfs, whose gazes gave me this strange feeling at the back of my neck. Somehow, they knew I wasn’t one of them.
Or at least that was the fear eating away at me.
“No, you sure don’t. You look like a mix-blood of several,” Guardswoman Vara remarked bluntly and gestured to the street to the left of the main one. “This way.”
Immediately, unease gripped my guts once more. It wasn’t exactly the typical dark side alley; on the contrary, it was no less wide than the main street, but I couldn’t shake the weird notion that they were going to drag me into one of those and . . .
‘Shit! Get a grip, Korra! If they wanted to put a collar around your neck and sell you as a whore, they would have done it by now!’
* 111th glyph engraved on Indomitable Will (⦿⦿⦿⦿)
“W-what’s there? Why not stay on . . . ” I asked after mustering up the courage and, with a shaky hand, pointed ahead on the straight street, cutting through the city.
“Because we’re taking you to the barracks, not on a tour of the Labyrinth Square.”
“What Vara means is that’s where the 3rd Main Street leads to, the Labyrinth Square,” Guardwoman Elira added to explain as if that was supposed to tell me something, but I remained as lost as before.
“I mean - this is a labyrinth city; where else should the main street lead? Just like all the rest, right to the center of the city, its beating heart, the pearl of West Sahal, or a pain in the ass, as our captain likes to call it. A place best avoided unless you have a business there, which we don’t, or two hundred runes engraved on your arrays, which neither of us does either. So . . . ” Guardswoman Vara said, leaning towards me. “ . . . Are you going to tell me who your mother hooked up with to make you, or is that a secret?”
“Well . . . with my father.”
I know, pretty daring, and I regretted making that remark as soon as it left my lips, but at that moment, I just couldn’t help myself. After all, I couldn’t just tell her I was made by a deranged asshole in a shitty lab.
“Ah, fuck me, another smartass,” the auburn-haired city guard snorted while the blue-eyed one chuckled. “You might as well jump into bed with Elira.”