I was so tired of looking over my shoulder.

In a city where I had tangled with every shape and size of good for nothing, I couldn't so much as sneeze without running into someone I hated or that hated me.

"Come on, you damn gutter rat." I said to myself, tapping my boot on the dirty cobblestones beneath it.

Almost as if I had summoned him, the damn gutter rat himself stepped into the alley. Fritz walked towards me at his usual frantic pace, hunched over and looking at the ground. "I could get in a lot of trouble doing business with you again. Leo don't like it when I help you witches out."

I ignored the insult. Sorceresses don't like being called witches, It's like calling a dragon a lizard. "It's a good thing I'll be gone before he knows then, right?"

"If you have what you promised." Fritz was hunched and thin. I meant it when I called him a rat.

I had needed a rat, however, and had needed one several times before. As nasty as he was to look at, with his ragged clothes and balding head, we had done business many times before.

Reaching my hand inside my long leather duster, I pulled a small vial filled with a lavender colored liquid, out and showed it to him. "Don’t take it all at once now, you’re likely to split yourself in two. Half before you go to bed and the other when you wake up. Got it?"

Fritz snatched it out of my hand and cradled it in his own. "This will make me be able to stand up straight? You're not just selling me some colored water?"

"I swear on my own power." I said, wishing to quicken the transaction. I would have never said it otherwise, the risk was too great, but my sisters were waiting.

Fritz snickered, still cradling the vial as if it were the most precious thing in the world.

It had taken me all of a half hour to make it and was worth far more than what I was charging the hunched man. The loss didn't bother me, I was paying for convenience.

"Alright, there it is." Fritz pointed at a dull green brick. Once my eyes found it, I wondered how I hadn't seen it before. Every other brick around it was as white as snow. It stuck out just like I did in the city.

"I could have found that on my own." I said, only slightly annoyed.

"You could have, but you didn't. I did." Fritz said, his eyes locked on the vial.

I walked toward the back wall of the alley and leaned down. "You sure this will take me where I need to go? You remember what happened last time you gave me bad information, don't you?"

Fritz had spent a very unpleasant night with his bald head under my boot and I was glad to see him flinch when I spoke of it. He had learned his lesson.

"I'm sure, I'm sure."

"Sakes alive, Fritz, if I never see you again it will be too soon." I reached down and placed my hand on the odd colored brick, three rows from the ground and three bricks in from the corner. Colors spun into the peripherals of my vision, a tightening vortex that quickly closed into a shrinking circle that washed the city I had spent most of my life in from my sight. Just before I was certain that my arm would be pulled out of my shoulder like so many wings I had pulled off of roast chickens, my feet left the ground.

"I'll miss you too." Fritz snickered, showing a crooked smile.

The man, that if it was a particularly calm night and the whiskey I would surely be drinking got a hold of me, I might admit I missed, began to disappear. Just before I lost sight of him he uncorked the vial and drained it empty. He gasped, and snapped straight up. I was glad I wasn't around to see what came next.

“Damn rat.”

Through the fold, away from the city above Zenithcidel and towards the place I hoped I would grow old and fat in, I vanished, leaving nothing but my reputation in my place.

The next instant, I found myself sliding across the ground. Digging the heels of my boots into the dirt beneath me, I threw my arms around the stump of a long fallen tree. I caught my hand in the other and locked them. The strain of slowing my momentum brought back visions of the roast chicken and wings. My heels broke free from the furrow they had dug in the ground and careened into open air, sending a cascade of dirt and rocks tumbling down from the cliff I had nearly slid off of.

The second after I had slowed to a stop, my hat blew past me and began to swing from left to right through the air as it went.

"Sakes alive, Ms. Hollilock," I said to myself, preparing to do something very ill advised. "It’s just a hat, are you really that damn thick?"

I was.

I released my hold on the stump and dropped off the cliffside, my long leather duster whipping through the air behind me as I fell.

"This is unwise." Gat spoke into my mind the second after I began my descent. My familiar didn't speak often but when he did, it was usually worth listening to.

Telling me that jumping off a cliff the moment after I had done it was not his most sagacious advice.

"I hadn’t realized. Get ready." I said, pulling Gat from the leather holster hanging off my belt. My familiar was fashioned after something called a gun, I’d never seen anything like him.

Weighing much more than my hat did, I fell much faster. If my plan didn't work, it would take a handful of minutes for it to whimsically drift down and land in the large radius of blood and guts I would burst into if I hit the ground.

Drawing my aura, I passed it through my right palm, shaping it into two purple shells that I pressed into the side by side chambers of my Gat’s upper barrels. Leaving a thin thread of my aura connecting the shells to my palm, I snapped him shut and pointed his business end directly at the ground below me. My eyes stung from the air whipping against them and I had to force my arms to stay straight. If the air caught me at the wrong moment, I would blow my leg off with my own power. There was something witty to say about that somewhere but the ground was coming too damn fast for me to try and find it.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I wrapped my finger around the two side by side triggers and fired.

Two beams of violet energy burst out of Gat's barrels and hit the ground. Through the threads I had kept attached, I pushed a steady stream of my aura, swelling the formerly thin lines to the thickness of my fingers. A swell of dirt plumed up from the ground below me as my power pummeled into it.

I slowed and then stopped altogether. As long as I could continue to draw my aura and push it through my familiar, the ground below would never meet the leather of my boots.

I looked up. Halfway down from the cliffside I had so brilliantly decided to jump off of, my hat was taking its time. "I'm gonna give you more, can you take it?"

"Do it. I don't want to be laying in a pile of what's left of you for the next thousand years, waiting for someone to come and find me." Gat answered back.

My hands aching from the recoil, I let my aura spill out of me. It surrounded my body in a wash of violet energy and I pushed it through the swollen threads. The destruction I caused the ground beneath me grew in volume and size as I slowly started rising. Gaining speed, I released my left hand that had been bracing the right and grabbed my hat in my hand just before it passed out of my reach. Unable to hold my aim steady with only one hand, the recoiling force of my beams turned me at an angle that I couldn't correct.

I crashed into the rocky cliff side.

I reached my limit, cutting the threads and letting my aura gutter out just as I began to drop again. The tail of my long leather coat caught on the rocky edge and I was left dangling like a rabbit in a wire trap. Facing away from the cliffside, there was nothing I could use to pull myself up. My arms began to slide out of the sleeves of my duster, inch by inch, and hunks of rock broke under my kicking heels. I saw pieces of rock breaking under my hung weight falling to the ruined ground beneath me.

It’d only be a matter of time before I fell. I was spent and would need a good meal and a long bath before I could so much as cast a charm.

All because of my hat.

I'd rather die on my own damn terms anyway.

"Uuuuhhh." Gat groaned. He always got sick after I used him.

"When you are found, Tell them to take you to my sisters. You can tell them how I died." I said, dropping another inch suddenly.

If Gat could have vomited, the sound he made would have been an indication that he had. Instead of his lunch, he upchucked a sudden burst of my residual aura. It flashed out of him and I felt myself be thrown up and back onto the cliffside, where I landed on my ass, hat in hand.

I let out a weak laugh and laid back, having never loved the ground as much as I did then.

"Don't laugh. This is horrible." Gat groaned.

"Sakes alive, I've never been glad someone had a weak stomach but I sure am happy you do." I said, catching my breath. If I had been anywhere else at any other time in my life, exhausting my aura like I just had would have been a death sentence. That had been the life I left behind. No six armed slicks were gonna be jumping out of shipping crates at me anymore. No sir, nothing but sand and the ocean and time with my sisters was ahead of me.

I stood up and holstered my familiar. I wouldn't hear from him again for quite some time. Dusting myself off and placing my hat on my head just the way I liked it, I straightened the wide brim between two fingers and took my first opportunity to look over the land I would someday die in. Hopefully very old and very fat.

The cliff I stood on dropped to, other than the section I had destroyed, a lush green forest. They thinned as they went and gave way to bald rolling hills. In the distance, the small city I had brought property in and I would call my home acted as the marker for the blue waters beyond. My sisters were undoubtedly already there and arguing about who would get what room. They could argue all they wanted, I had the bill of sale and my gems had paid for the whole damn house.

I got whatever room I wanted.

"Look there, Gat. Merrowcrest." I said aloud, getting ready to continue my journey. Before I could, a sudden and deafening ring sounded in my ears.

The cloudless sky in front of me split down the middle and shook the ground underneath my boots. A high pitched ringing filled my ears but I could feel the world around me quaking. The split widened, splintering off into black cracks that spread across the sky. They doubled back and reconnected with each other. Then, like someone had taken a hammer to a broken mirror, the pieces of the blue sky fell, crumbling to dust before they hit the ground and the land before me vanished.

"Was that what I think it was?" Gat asked, his voice still tinged with the sound of his sickness.

I sighed, ignoring my sudden desire to lay down and die. "It was."

Gat made a coughing noise, which was strange considering he had no lungs or throat. "It's been a hundred years since a Shift has been recorded."

"Sakes alive, I know that," I snapped at him. "I was knee high to my momma's familiar the last time one happened. And of course, the first one in a hundred years has to happen when I'm within stripping distance of the beach."

"What are you going to do?"

The blue sky that had been above me was gone and had been replaced by a starless night sky. A massive moon, the color of blush on a pale girl's cheeks, hung in the sky three quarters full. Where I had been elevated atop a rise moments before, my boots were planted on dry, dusty, ground. Every direction I looked, with the exception of tall rocky plateaus jutting out of the ground in the distance, nothing but flat cracked land surrounded me. I had been warm in my duster only moments before, nearly warm enough to want to take it off, but in that sudden desert, I had to pull it shut and clasp it to keep the cold out..

"I'm gonna get the fuck out of this place as soon as I figure out where I am." I answered, simply choosing to walk in the direction I was facing with no other point of interest to guide me.

It made no sense to me that a desert, that brought thoughts of dried and baking corpses, could get so cold. Wind, violent and ceaseless, I could reconcile. With everything being flat, there was nothing to break its speed as it swept clouds of dust into me from every side. The size of the pink moon made it difficult to tell how long, but I had been walking long enough for my feet to hurt when I saw a light in the distance. I broke towards it as fast as my tired bones could move, hoping I wasn't wandering into another perilous situation.

A man dressed in a robe the same color of the moon held a long pool with a glass lantern hung from its tip. I stopped several steps in front of him, breathing heavily. Every inch of him was covered in the pale pink fabric, leaving only his face exposed. "Sakes alive," I panted. "Am I glad to see you."

I could have spit in his face and he wouldn't have looked as disgusted as he did.

"Madam, your excitement insults me. Under the light of his moon, you openly break one of Neuters Edicts? I pray your offense is made in ignorance.” He gasped, turning his nose up at me.

"What the hell is Neuter?" I asked, still winded.

"Blasphemy," The man shouted, and then covered his face in the crook of his elbow. "How dare you curse the sinless god. How dare you make me speak in anger."

The man was working into a froth and I didn't even know what I had done. "Look, mister, I'm lost. I'm just looking for a place to get my bearings."

A savage roar echoed out from somewhere in the distance. The man turned from me and started walking fast away from me. "Very well, The Beast is about. Despite my better judgment I shan't leave you to its fangs and claws. I will take you to the pontificate."

I didn't like the way that sounded but I didn't like the way The Beast had sounded even more.

With no other options except the cold desert around me, I followed him.