The chapel bell tolls in the distance once, twice, and then a last time to signal the end of the work day for the dock workers hauling cargo from ship to wagons then back again to bigger ships sailing down the Mir. The cobblestone streets, obstructed by huddled masses of starved vagrants, soon began to flood with tired laborers. They went about their way home as if the vagrants were only illusions, looking the other way at every turn. Similarly, the vagrants were too focused on their endless struggle of keeping warm in the eternal winter of the harsh north to care.
They all looked lost, save for a little shivering girl who scanned the flowing crowd for prey. *Him? No to strong,* She thought to herself.
The pair of honey colored eyes peeked through her matted chestnut hair and glanced from the burly dock worker to an older, better dressed gentleman. *I mean, he’s rich enough to afford those fancy shoes. No, too much confidence, too much weird jewelry, likely a magic user, next.* She still had the scars from the last time she made that risk. The girl began to scan the crowd more frantically. The agreement was one hour after the bell, and she was running out of time.
In her haste, the girl then spotted short, rounder man who looked at the vagrants with disdain. She shifted herself away from the huddled mass to get a better look, and spotted a merchant’s guild emblem hanging from a necklace around his thick neck, perfect. *Wealthy, check. Out of shape, check. Arrogant, double check*
The girl flashed the man a twisted toothy grin, but ducked and covered her mouth before he noticed. This was bad, she was getting too excited that she lost control of her bad habit for a second, but it wasn’t everyday that such a perfect target comes by.
While she was crouched and facing away from the merchant, the girl pulled back the sleeves of her oversized coat to ruffle through the many makeshift pocket sewn onto the inside. She pulled out small sack, wet from the concoction of mud and feces it held. Without hesitation, she untied the bag and gave a thick smear of the vile substance to her arms and face.
The girl started jogging to catch, and even quickened her pace to get ahead of the merchant without being spotted. Normally, moving quick and quiet through the packed crowd would be difficult, but the crowd parted to avoid her which made it easier. Guessed being filthy all the time does pay off. Finally she was a few paces in front of the merchant, hiding her filth smeared hands and face with her coat. She stopped, twirled around, and jumped right in front of the merchant.
There was a slight burning pain when the merchant’s belly smacked her face first, but she took the initiative and locked the man into as big of a hug as her tiny arms could manage. She rubbed her sore face against the man to get the filth nice and settled in before jumping back and spitting on his shoe for good measure.
“That should do it” she said.
“Do what, hmmm….” The merchant ground his teeth and his face turned a seething red. Crap, she was too focused on pissing this guy off that she forgot the most important part, running. She ducked back, barely avoiding the grasp of his meaty hands.
“Stop that brat!” the man began shouting, but gave chase himself upon realizing the crowd’s preference of watching rather than taking action. The girl took the opportunity of the bystanders parting to run to the side of the street, only stopping for a second to be certain the merchant could keep up.
She lead the man through a narrow side path and into the back streets of Heimsfell. The light of the midday sun couldn’t reach the impenetrable darkness of this city’s twisted labyrinth of nooks and alleyways. Yet, the girl felt safe in its familiar embrace. It was, after all, her playing grounds, her turf, her everything. Her barefoot pattering echoed forward and the reckless slamming of his heavy boots followed not far behind.
Her honey yellow eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and she could see they were one more right turn from the destination. They turned, right into a deserted dead end. Stuffing her fingers into her mouth, she whistled. Nothing, the man approached her with clenched fists. Again, but louder this time. No response, she was breathing fast now. She tried to yell, but instead found herself sprawled on the ground, face pulsing with hurt. “Nowhere to run now huh,” the merchant barked.
*Grk* His heavy boot collided with her side. She gasped for air, eye rolling back.
The merchant grabbed the girl by the collar to lift her small body to eye level. “Yellow eyed freak, these garments cost more than your life.” He drew back his fist to ready another blow, but hesitated when he saw her quivering to tears. “As long as you’ve learned your lesson kid,”
The merchant then gently set her down. “Go, on your way now. Not like I can make your life more miserable than it already is.” He watched the girl round the corner, then focused on wiping as much of the filth from his shirt. “Damn, I just bought these too,” he said to himself.
“I don’t think this is the right moment to worry about your shirt so much mister.” Startled, the merchant turned to face the voice. A trio of thuggish looking newcomers that now blocked the mouth of the alley. His legs went numb at the sight of the honey eyed girl who hid behind the largest of the thugs, her twisted toothy smile. Soon, screams and beating could be heard from the nearby alleyways for a solid hour.
“Please *cough* mercy” The merchants purple and swollen face now oozed tears as he knelt before his three attackers. In response Hugo, the largest of the thugs, brought down his club upon the merchants battered head. Blood spilled from the merchants mouth and onto the cold street.
“God he won’t shut up, why can’t we gut him already” Hugo, complained.
“Not yet ye bald oaf, he might fetch a good price” Said the smallest thug, a ragged youngster with a well cut features and light pubescent facial hair they called Snips.
“We shoulds at leasts plays with em, ju’s a bit.” Asked the thin boiled covered thug and bulbous nose they called Grub, who nervously played with the tip of his knife by giving himself small cuts at the tip of his fingers.
“Fine,” Snips rolled his eyes, and then looked down at the small girl at his feet glaring daggers at him. “Jesus Bird, he sure did a number on your face there.”
“Where were you,” The girl stomped a barefoot on the ground, but it sounded more like a pat.
“Sorry Bird. Hugo fell asleep, I was taking off taking a piss, and Grub was off doing whatever he does.” Snips motioned to Grub, who tossed him a small brown bag. He dumped out the contents. He then counted out the copper and silver coins in his hands, divided them, and held out a share to the girl.
The girl raised a furrowed eyebrow. Snips hesitated, before forking over a few more coppers. The girl snatched the coins from him and counted them before slipping then into one of her many coat pockets. “Stop calling me Bird by the way, my name is Amber.”
“Then why does everyone call you Bird?”
“I’ll slit your throat while you sleep” growled Amber.
“Amber it is then,” Snips looked back at the merchant who was now silently praying on the ground. “Well bouts time we got back to work.” He gave the merchant a wink.
As the Hugo and Grub each grabbed an arm the merchant lifted a weary head. “W-wait please, I have a family. Please, I don't want to- ,” Hugo bashed a meaty fist over the head, which fell limp.
Meanwhile, Amber ran up to the unconscious merchant to take the guild emblem from his neck before silently strolling away.
[https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/XVHllYa2SDlfOfY_2sqHeSImxacogYXNCp4riudUVjWNmE2J_UxtorjFj8tvSof6ccUpJm9VhjoccCPqFOSCkng4oNTQiS5ksUbXafKAP9zXRLM-T6PdDffNgmBljA66dNbGwS_Z]
When she was out of sight, Amber breathed a sigh of relief. Her face still hurt like hell and she could barely keep it hidden. She rubbed her sore nose. It was bleeding slightly, but as far as she knew wasn’t broken.
1 silver and 12 copper pieces was today’s earnings. 12 copper could be considered quite a splendid haul in itself, but Amber never expected to obtain her first silver price today. How much was a silver anyways? She always saw adults use gold and silver pieces, but never had the time to figure out how much they were actually worth. However, that would have to come after she checked the traps for the day.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Amber slipped the coins back into the security of her favorite pocket as she reached an area where the jumble alleyways suddenly opens to river, like someone had had parted the slums vertically to insert a vast river. Here, there was an intimidating 15 feet of vertical of rough cobblestone to the slow moving water below.
Inching along a narrow passage along the edge, Amber made it to a sewer tunnel that dumped waste into the river. This was her special hiding spot she found by chance trying to escape stray dogs a few months back. An adult stood no chance of reaching her here, the ledge to the tunnel was too narrow and the itself tunnel was only 3 feet in height, so even she had to hunch a bit to fit. If it wasn’t for the steady stream of excrement flowing out she would have made this her some. Thus, she only kept a box with the supplies for her most recent venture here, though it only contained scraps of wood, random lengths of frayed twine, and the discard peels of fruits and vegetables she used as bait. She stuffed a handful of peels into a pocket and continued into the tunnel.
The darkness in this tunnel was even worse than the backstreets. While you could at least kind of see well in the backstreets, the sewer tunnels harbored a darkness that even your average slum dweller would find trouble dealing with. However, Amber wasn’t your average slum dweller, she was warped. Just like how a direwolf can be birthed from two regular wolf or a ghoul from a corpse, Amber was one of those unfortunate enough to be given a warp, an alteration of seemingly random chance. Given the propensity of warps to produce monsters, warped individuals are treated as such. Thus, Amber considered her warp as nothing more than a curse, but at least in this case it meant that her eyes adjusted fine to the darkness of the sewers. At her will, her honey yellow iris thinned to near nothing as her pupil expanded to encompass most of of her eyes. She doesn’t do this often because the process stings quite a bit, but it granted her the vision needed to traverse the tunnels.
Trudging deeper into the tunnel she found the thick cast iron grate meant to not only keep intruders out of sewers, but to also keep the residents inside. Yet despite the fact, a large warp in the bars ment that Amber could quite easily squeeze her way through. And soon she was making her way through the sewer system to the area where it was dry enough for the rats to make their nests in the side channels.
She knew she had reached her destination when miniature hoards of sticks and trash started appearing clogging the side channels. The rats built these to keep their nests and passageways from flooding, but to Amber it was the perfect spot for a few simple snares since these hoards marked paths the rats often took when scavenging or traveling between nests. The rats were smart though as the first few snares were untouched and missing the bait. She replaced the bait and moved on.
After the 7th empty snare, she got a hit. A careless rat had triggered the loop and now hung from a twig by its neck. It was a runt though so Amber decided to continue checking the traps deeper in the sewer system.
The city Heimsfell was ancient, so nobody knows exactly how deep the sewer goes or what exactly lurks down here. All Amber knew that what distinguished the deep sewer from the rest of it were the strange claw marks along the wall that were too large to be from any rat and an uncomfortable silence that echoed through the place. Even the shin deep water had a sort of stillness to it that was disturbed when Amber waded through. In the past she would have avoided this place like the plague, but slim pickings meant that more traps had to be placed deeper. After all, a girl's gotta eat.
Amber slowed her progress to a crawl to quiet her movements. The deadend air was maddening, but she couldn’t risk attracting attention when she had no way of defending herself. She managed to check 5 snares to get 3 large rats before a screech shattered an uneasy silence.
Immediately Amber crouched against the side of the tunnel, both hands palming the stone. The screech sounds like it came from around the corner just ahead, where she had set up another snare. Hopefully it was only rat that just fell for the trap, but her intuition told her that it was too deep of a screech to be from a dying rat.
She edged her way to the corner, trying her best to avoid making ripples in the shin deep water. Peeking out with one eye she saw it, an enormous hairless rat ravaging the carcass of a normal rat that hung from one of her snare.
It was warped like her, obvious by the fact it was the size of a dog and had a eyeless second head growing from its neck. The second head kept sniffing around, and must have caught her scent because it stopped and began hissing. This prompted the center head to cease snacking and hiss in her direction.
By the time the giant rat begun slowing moving towards her she was already sprinting away as fast as she could. When she turned her head to look back, her heart bumped up to her throat as the giant rat rounded the corner at frightening speeds. Even though Amber had a head start, the shin deep water made it hard to move at full speed. On the other hand, the rat was use to hunting in the sewers, and was thus quickly closing the gap between them by moving in great leaps.
Amber had originally planned on making to the grate where she might have had a chance of holding it off, but she could already hear its snarls not far behind her. Her thoughts were blocked out by static and her legs were taken by a numb tingle. In a desperate move, her hands moved by themselves to drop the biggest rat carcass from the four hanging from her waist. This seemed to work for moment as the snarls turned to noises of it tearing the dead rat’s flesh apart, but it seemed to have finished its meal rather quickly because Amber could already hear it approaching again..
The diversion didn’t drive it off as Amber had hoped, but it did buy her enough time to gather her thoughts and make it out of the deep sewers where the water was more shallow and easier to run through. This extra speed helped, but still didn’t change the fact that the giant rat was still sounded like it gaining on her. Amber cursed in her head; she cursed the pagan gods and the virtue gods, she cursed fate, she cursed her parents, and most of all she cursed herself.
A rapid prickling flared up on her leg as the giant rat bit down just below her left calf. Amber let loose a wail before gritting her teeth. She toppled over and in doing so swung the giant rat over her body. The sudden shock caused the rat to yield its clamp, but not without taking a few chunks of flesh with it.
Amber resisted the urge to faint. She struggled to get on all fours just barely in time to block the rat’s lunge with her forearm. The razor sharp teeth tore straight through the flimsy fabric of her sleeve and into skin. It felt like a dozen fishing hooks embed themselves into her arm and started pulling.
She shrieked and using her other arm to hammer the rat’s snout. She also started instinctively kicking around which threw the two into an erratic tumble. Amongst the fierce splashing Amber switched from hammering to helplessly grabbing onto the rats head. As her vision blurred into a whirlwind her thumb touched something soft. Unable to think of anything else to do, she bag digging her thumb into this soft spot. This seemed to work as the rat’s hold on her forearm seemed to loosen with each jab deeper.
The rat snapped its jaw open and skittered away. This allowed for Amber to kick herself back as well while she cradled her bleeding arm. When her vision stabilized again, she saw that one of the rat’s eyes had become a red pulp with a thick stream of blood flowing out.
Seeing that its prey had just gouged one of its eyes out, the rat hesitated to re-engage.
“Go away! Sod off!” Amber shouted, she was curled up against the side of the tunnel. She clenched her fists in preparation for another round, but the rat seemed to notice this. The rat turned tail and limped off, deciding that she was not a meal worth the effort.
Silence descended once more as Amber laid back against the side of the tunnel. The wounds on her forearm arm were shallow, but the rat had essentially shredded off a good portion of her skin. There was also her leg to worry about.
Amber tore off a sleeve of her coat into strips and began wrapping her wounds tightly. The wrappings quickly tinted red, but they held up fine. Mustering her strength, she hefted her self onto both feet. One step at a time she shuffled her way to the great and strained her way through it. At this point her head was numb and her arms pale white and clammy. Yet, the daylight at the sewer mouth promised her escape which carried her buckling knees.
When she finally reached fresh air the relief was so shocking that it sent her dropping to her knees. Her vision began to fade to a faint blur and she completely collapsed backwards. Her blended in on itself. She found herself in bank focus on the vague blueness of the sky and the cold sweat damping her clothes and matted hair.
She struggled for a while to lift herself, but only managed to flip herself over. The wrappings were bled through and falling apart. It was over. Amber relaxed her muscles so she could feel more of the cold wet cobblestone against her skin. She was panting now. A nice warm fuzzy feeling took over. It probably meant that she was dying. She had expected to feel pain, but instead there was only exhaustion.
It was as if she had wanted this for the longest time, but why then was she crying. There was nothing for her here in this cruel world that treated her like trash, but why were her tears so unbearably warm. Was she afraid? Was she sad? She couldn’t tell. However something from somewhere deep inside her screamed out. *Not yet* it shouted, *there has to be more* it pleaded. Its silent yet powerful scream filled her lungs with air once more and barked her mind out of the pit.
Her body had moved on its own and was inching its way across the narrow ledge and back to the slums. By the time she snapped herself from this trance, she was able to just catch herself from losing balance and plummeting into the river below. Soon, she made back to the slums, and all she had to do was get help.
She hobbled to the nearest door and pounded against the door with he shoulder. No response, so she moved to the next one only to be met with with the same result. This was strange, it was near sundown so people should have returned home already. At the next one she tried shouting.
“P...please, I need help!” Shouting had blew what wind was left in her and she could barely keep conscious with shallow breaths. Her knees buckled causing her to slide down against the door. With her ear pressed against it, she heard shuffling and hushing on the other side.
Down the street she saw the door open and a child her age run out. Blood dripped from her fingertip as Amber started hobbling forwards, drawn to the welcoming light of a fireplace she could see through the opened door. Yet, an old women emerged from the door and barked something at the child. Amber couldn’t make out what it was she said since everything sounded muffled, but when the child pointed at her the old woman grabbed it by the arm and dragged it back into the house with a slam.
Amber stood still, a wave of silent shock. Her mouth formed a twisted smile. She had stopped crying, but the river of tears remained on her face. Her eyelids grew heavy as did the crushing weight on her heart that eventually brought her to her knees. Cold, it was so unbearably cold.