The Chianotti Society

I've given this chapter a bit of a cleanup, trying to cut down on run-on sentences and such, and get rid of some thing that probably weren't necessary.

This is an unfinished story, still rough, the plot of which is an amalgamation of years worth of ideas, resulting in something so complicated it has to be epic. My goal, in terms of style, however, is to have a fantasy story that doesn't actually include most of the fantasy elements (dragon and elves and whatnot) and whose characters a reader could grow to truly care about, so that the events to comes will actually have meaning to them. That's my intent, anyway.

Part 1

Naris Marcetti

Chapter 1

A city never ends. An event catastrophic enough to keep people from the place they call home is incredibly rare, and when such a thing occurs, the city will live on. It will be a disaster's namesake, if not the urban centre it once was. Cities also have no tangible beginnings. History has shown that founding a city and civilizing it for the modern age aren't the same thing. As the predecessors to modern civilization spread out, armed with the shiniest weapons and the most rampant sense of self-righteousness, such people who shake off their vagabond roots to settle in the sorts of place people want to live are killed, displaced, assimilated, or otherwise forgotten. The powerless people of the beginning are forgotten in favour of the elite explorers. The literate absorb the primitive, one god eats away at another, until the original are forgotten and the conquerors write the history books.

On the grand scale of time, very little that humankind does actually endures. Of course, there will always be that one great culture that simply goes on, outlasting everything around it, having been the most powerful to begin with. It never stumbled backwards into a dark age simply because all other societies are too busy rebuilding themselves after their own collapses. It will grow while remaining oblivious to its second worst enemy, its own allies; and even more so towards its biggest threat: itself.

As time approaches that age we call modern, such a society will assert gravity on others. Having long since abandoned the idea of conquest, the cultural mimicry will begin. The influence of such a place will flow around the world, like a drop of ink into a glass of water, strong but small at first, but gradually spreading out into fainter tendrils. Eventually, original will be lost, but everything will be changed.

As the world draws together and there are no more mysterious horizons to explore, such influence will translate into a mad sort of power. This creates the greatest opiate and aphrodisiac for those with power; dulling the senses while inflaming the lust. War is almost inevitable. It will be called by those who fought it a War to End All Wars, but of course, it isn't, for it seems nothing short of the complete destruction of the human race would actually end all wars.

This may be a cynical view. In the case of Peregoth versus the World, Peregoth did indeed lose, but only after it had all but won. Peregoth, perched on the edge of its great victory, suffered one of those of catastrophes. Only a handful of people know how this happened. There lies the most basic, greyscale sketch of the present day world.

That war, for all its devastation, is not where the ending of something much older begins. It begins in another city that doesn't die, named by its unoriginal founders as Avé Drimmìa, but shortened, as its elegance waned, to Drim.

Drim was one of those cities that reacted to war as a person might react to heroin. Yes, it thrived for a while, in its obliviousness to the future, stuck in the very present without a thought to spare for the past of future. When it was all over, it fell from grace, to be a burnout city in a world full of burnt out cities. Poverty took hold in a place where the wealthy had reigned. There are few people who turn to savagery faster than the rich poised on the brink of poverty.

After the flight of Drim's upper class and the loss of so much legitimate indususty, the illegitimate moved in their stead. With the war over and old national boundaries obsolete, Drim became part of a new country; a union of several nations no longer able to keep themselves afloat independently. Such a thing can only occur peacefully in the aftermath of war.

This adopted child of this new country was far from the capital and forgotten in the face of the politics and paranoia that soon grew in the federal government. The crimes families, the gangs, the strange overseas-financed syndicates that held power in Drim were of little interest to the majority of Namedi's voting public, and so of little interest to its officials.

Life in Drim was, briefly, intolerable, until some unknown force seemed to reign in the anarchy and render it palatable, in a relative sort of way. Oppressive, maybe; poverty stricken, absolutely, but still the honest could live, if not live well. This was the Drim of Naris Marcetti.

Naris was an amalgamation of sort-ofs. She had been a sort-of journalist who started a sort-of revolution that panned out into nothing in particular. She had sort-of red hair and sort-of green eyes and such features that could be described as sort-of beautiful. A poverty stricken child turned prostitute's doorman turned runaway street kid turned academic turned journalist turned revolutionary turned waitress. No one can do that much turning in such a young life without getting a bit dizzy. Her stumbling steps in the present had translated into a degree of cynicism that terrified people without them understanding why.

She worked at a bar called the Beacon, named in a fit of romanticism by its owner, Alexander Hesse. The ending of a saga that had been playing, relatively unnoticed, all across history began with her receiving devastating news. It was on that night when everyone truly seems to look forward to a better tomorrow: New Year's Eve.

To be a bar waitress on New Year's Eve was a trial in endurance to anyone, let alone at the Beacon. Its core clientele were close to the bottom as they could be while still being able to afford to go out and buy drinks in a legitimate establishment. Part of this allure came from Alexander's reputation among this class, being a decent businessman who cared for his patrons and did whatever was in his power to improve the lot of those whom no one looked out for, and for being an outsider with some money who actually decided to move to Drim. Another part of it came from Alexander's micro brewery, where he made a beer (a sort-of beer, to fit well with Naris's life), of mind-reeling strength he simply called the Homebrew. Another was because the Beacon was located just outside of Drim's downtown core, in an otherwise purely residential neighbourhood. Drim's criminal elite could be trusted not to enter and remind them of why their lives were in such a state to drive them to drink Alexander's hideous Homebrew night after night.

Naris looked at the world too pragmatically to put much stock in the changing of the years. It was an arbitrary point in the planet's orbit established as an end and beginning by some Emperor who was long since dead. That didn't seem to stop the clients of the Beacon from raising their glasses to clean slates, fresh starts, and forgotten yesterdays. She knew that they would all end up waking to a world unchanged save a different digit at the end of the date. Resolutions drowned in hangovers, they would follow the status quo for another three hundred and sixty-five days, until the hope for change and ultimate disappointment repeated itself.

She was not, however, so jaded that she couldn't take some vicarious hope in their hopes. She took tray after tray of drinks to tables, listening to increasingly slurred conversations about Possibility. It was ten o'clock, and the band was due to begin, so she ducked into the kitchen to rest her feet while people were distracted.

She sat on a box of carrots and stretched out her limbs luxuriously while the chef, Kan Liang, watched her with undisguised amusement.

"Busy?" he asked. Kan had spoken very little of the common language when he immigrated from Eastern Baladia. Alexander had hired anyway due to his skills with food and a feeling that anyone who looks at Drim as a move for the better must have had it pretty rough. His speech had drastically improved in the years since, but he seemed to be completely unconcerned with using articles and pluralization in his sentences. He also had a habit of laughing at completely unfunny things which Naris found slightly endearing and mostly annoying.

"Little bit," she sighed, still in mid-stretch.

"No one order food," Kan said in faux-sadness. "I do nothing for two hour."

"These are people who want as much room in their stomachs for liquor as possible. They need to drink enough to forget an entire year of their lives and then drink enough on top of that to forget the entire year that's about to happen."

Kan smirked at her, an expression which, with his flat features and slanted Baladian eyes, made him look particularly devious. "You don't believe tomorrow different? That all this somehow change?" He wagged his finger slightly as he spoke, then pressed it to his lips as if asking her to keep a secret.

Naris looked around at the greasy kitchen, at the boxes of vegetables and reasonably fresh meats Alexander insisted on having shipped in to him so he could provide his customers with decent food they wouldn't normally find in their price range. She glanced at the stained and cracked ceiling tiles and the equally stained and cracked floor tiles that looked as if they were reflecting each other. She looked out the door, where she could see Alexander, curly hair even more frazzled then usual, as he worked the taps with the sort of reckless abandonment that suggested he was getting just as drunk as most of his customers.

"You know I don't just as much as I know you don't," she replied.

"Ah," Kan said, smirk widening to a full yellow tooth grin. "I don't ask if you know this change. I ask if you believe it. Those people? Those people who drink their terrible, terrible beer? They all, deep inside, they know things won't change. But tonight, just tonight, they believe it." He started to laugh his unique laugh, a sound that could be mimicked musically by meth freaks playing badly tuned instruments.

"So what, you're going to tell me to humour them, let them have their moment, and all that bullshit? Because I'm painfully aware of that, Kan. Painfully."

He shook his head. "No, no, no. I going to tell you to not be bitch, and remember that tomorrow better for you because tomorrow not New Year Eve. But you already know that too, hmm?"

Naris couldn't help but smile at that. Kan was clever in the way that only a man with no real education could be. A sudden burst of feedback followed by a cry of protest from the multiplying crowd signalled to Naris that her moment of respite had ended, and she had to return to the floor.

"Enjoy your nothing," she said to Kan as she walked out. He waved his hand as if trying to brush her aside from ten feet away.

In less than five minutes it seemed the crowd had doubled. The Beacon was not a large space. Alexander had it painted all in the richest colours he could find, in an attempt to contrast the greyness of the city outside. The tables were all stained in mahogany (the actual wood being far too expensive), the walls deep navy. The floor carpeted in a blue, red and green pattern that she'd once heard Alexander describe as what a river running through a forest at twilight must look like to a man going blind. The bar was coated in the same stain as the tables, as were the shelves behind it, filled with bottles that were mostly for show. As hard as Alexander tried to keep prices reasonable, most of the imported spirits were still too expensive for the average Beacon patron.

To one side was the stage, which consisted of a platform raised about a foot from the rest of the bar, with speaker stacks on either side. Alexander had sworn he purchased these from the least illegal purveyor of quality used electronics that could be found in Drim. He had become known as something of a patron of the arts among the down and out local musicians and painters. The walls were covered in paintings he had commissioned from various artists before Naris had met him, showing water in styles running from the most bizarre abstract to photographic realism. Rivers and oceans, lakes, ponds, streams, Alexander said he didn't care, as long he could look around his bar and see water free from urban surroundings and pollution.

He also tried his best to get live music whenever he could. He couldn't afford to pay very much, but he could at least give the band free Homebrew and let them sleep in the closed bar for a few nights if they had nowhere else to go.

Though busier than average night, one thing never changed, one thing Naris always took some silent amusement in. When the music started, the generations split. The older, blue collar workers remained huddled at their tables while the younger people, those who would be the academics of the city had the University of Drim not finally shut its doors five years before, rushed to the space in front of the stage. With their ears almost pressed right against the speakers, they revelled in the freedom of becoming lost in something they didn't have to drink, smoke, or otherwise imbibe into their bodies. It was like oil to the edge of a glass of water.

Naris always stopped what she was doing to watch this drift. She allowed herself a few seconds before her attention was drawn to someone with one finger slightly raised. This gesture would be about as effective as spitting in the ocean were it not for the fact that everyone who came to the Beacon knew that, and so this person was immediately labelled as an outsider.

Naris walked towards him, old instincts brushing aside mental cobwebs as they sprang back to life. She sized him up, listed possibilities of who he could be, what he could want, and what danger he might pose. He had managed to procure his own table, which seemed strange, and had no glasses in front of him, which seemed more strange. He was sitting in the corner with the worst view of the stage and the most distance to the bar, which told Naris that he wasn't interested in the music or the drink, and that he didn't like anyone having a clear view of his back. Paranoid, maybe, but a little paranoia in the face of the unknown in Drim was as a life-preserver is to a drowning man.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

He looked at her with an expression of purely benign serenity that seemed so out of context to his surroundings that for a second Naris almost burst out laughing. When he spoke, however, the amusement vanished. He turned away from her when he began to talk, as if he were addressing some soliloquy to an invisible audience.

"A man named Alexander Hesse moves to a city called Drim," he began. "A strange move that surely must have some ulterior motive. It turns out he is, not willingly, but simply by birth, a member of an old society, very old, older by far than you, or I, or this city of Drim, or the country of Namedi. Such things may be a surprise to most, but not to one Naris Marcetti, a diminutive, red haired young woman to whom Mr. Hesse has disclosed this information." Even upon saying her name, he didn't look at her. An old mindset she'd hoped wouldn't bare its fangs again began to snarl within Naris, and her hand drifted down into her pocket, where she kept a small switchblade knife, a keepsake from the bad old days and a safety line for the new ones. Her journalistic sense however, instructed her to not interrupt, no matter how much she wanted to, and let the stranger talk.

"This old society," the man said, "is very elite. In fact, it only consists of such a number as can be counted upon one hand. They are also in great danger, a danger which stems, not without irony, from the very city Mr. Hesse decided to move to. Five members." He raised his hand in front of his face, and Naris's hand tightened in her pocket, the chaos of the bar and the pulsing of the music fading away as she stared at the stranger's fingers.

"Five," he said, before folding his thumb into his palm. "Four." He bent his little finger down to join it. "Three." Ring finger down as well. "Two." With his index and pointer fingers still extended in front of his face, he finally looked over at Naris, before folding the index down with the others.

"One."

Naris pulled out the knife, flicked it open and pointed in directly towards the man's face, blade positioned right beside his one remaining erect finger. He seemed perfectly unfazed by this, only slightly resigned, as if it was a hassle that had to be dealt with eventually. No one else in the bar seemed to notice the exchange, the amount of Possibility, Revelry, and most predominantly: Alcohol, hindering the casual observation skills of the masses.

"You mind telling me just who in the fuck you are, and what..."

The man lowered his hand in an oddly swift motion, as if he'd suddenly decided to hide something from her. "Do you honestly think I don't see a lot of various deadly things shoved in my face in my line of work?" he asked. "Do you expect me to go all cross-eyed with fear, staring at the shiny thing pointing at my nose, and confess all my secrets? Trust me my dear, I've had blades under my nose that smelled of blood far more than that one. They didn't know the same thing you don't. I have no secrets. All you have to do is ask."

"I did ask," Naris pointed out.

"Too true my dear, but you didn't ask politely." The man's face, against all odds, lit up into a bright, genuine smile. "Now I'm not the sort to get all uptight because someone doesn't say please. Too pedantic, that. However, I am just old fashioned enough that I still believe a knife to the face constitutes bad manners in everyday conversation."

Naris slowly lowered the knife. The band began another song. Alexander pulled another tap. A dozen people took another swig. The world kept on turning.

"Okay," she said. She had long since learned to project a certain iciness that sent shivers down a lot of spines. This man's spine, and his smile, seemed immune.

"Well, Miss Marcetti, isn't that a more generous way to approach things? My name is El."

"The letter?"

"No, no. E-L. It is a symbol with various meanings in various Baladian languages. 'Happy', 'Luck', 'Dragon', as well as a type of reed that grows in a river that runs through the city of Tel Shi..."

"Will you just tell me how you know..."

"Don't interrupt me, because the favour will be returned. You know my name, and as for my profession, I am a Bearer of Ill Tidings."

For all her instinct Naris wasn't prepared for that. Some dignity was lost as she stammered, "You're... what?"

"A Bearer of Ill Tidings," he said, reaching smoothly into his jacket and pulling out a card. Naris took it slowly, incredulously, and read it. 'El. Bearer of Ill Tidings. Not Particularly Incorporated. (For Obvious Reasons)'.

With her temper deflating, anger flared up to repair it. "This is fucking ridiculous!" she snapped. Oddly, that outburst managed to attract fleeting attention from those at nearby tables better than the knife had. "How in the hell do you know about..."

"Derrek Ferr is dead." El said bluntly. "He was captured, like the others, and was subsequently killed. This means that Mr. Hesse is the last. I suggest you pass the message on to him."

Naris took a step back, letting the business card slip from her fingers onto the floor. She still held the knife in the other hand. Before she could say anything, the man stood up, bid her a polite goodnight, and turned to leave.

"Wait!" she finally called, hauling his voice back into operation when the man was a few steps closer to the door. "Who sent you?"

He smile again, an smile that seemed designed to warm the heart and aggravate the brain. "When you get there, you'll know."

He was gone. The noise of the crowd suddenly upped in volume in Naris's ears, and she stood stunned, watching the people as if they were inanimate objects, only moving because she was standing in her own dream.

Alexander was leaning across the bar, all vacant grins and stooped posture, whispering grand ideas to his self-proclaimed Braintrust. These were four people, none of whom knew who Derrek Ferr was, who Alexander really was, and why his world had just received a mortal wound. Naris knew all of them, looked at them with varying degrees of silent contempt, a cross-section of Drim's battered down class, those who never lacked the ethics or gained the wits the truly rise among Drim's high society.

She couldn't hear what Alexander was saying, knowing only that they spoke generally of the woes of their unique brands of urban life, arguing over solutions that could never happen. Alexander had had enough to drink that he was losing himself to their conversation, and the lines at the bar were beginning to get irritated. With a painful sigh, she knew she would have to do his job, to move through the motions until the masses drifted homeward, and then she could tell him what had happened. She had no idea how she could do it: her forte in bad-news-delivery was to speak in anger for the sake of justice, not to speak in sadness for the sake of empathy.

Before she could take a step towards the bar, someone tapped her on the shoulder. Forgetting her present role, she assumed her best ice-queen expression, and turned with deliberate slowness to face the man who dared interrupt her reverie.

Her immediate impression was that of a smile's death. The man before her took a step back and raised an eyebrow, with barely restrained irony written all over his face.

"You know," he began, slowly, "Where I come from, waitresses generally make it a point not to terrify their customers. Bad for tips."

Naris glowered up at him. Very few people can get away with glowering upwards, but Naris had never been one to let her deficiency in height hinder her ability to intimidate. "Look around," she said coldly. "These people aren't tippers. If you work at a place that this, in a city like this, and expect people to support you with tip money that know full well they could just save and spend on more things to make them forget where they are, then you're setting yourself up for a disappointment."

"Ah!" the man cried, raising a finger as if he'd just made some profound scientific breakthrough. "Never set yourself up for disappointment. Life..." he paused, reaching into his jacket to pull out a cigarette and light it. He took a long, slow drag before continuing. "Life doesn't need help in that aspect. Life can kick our asses in terms of setting us up for disappointment. Am I right?"

Naris raised a hand to pinch the bridge of her nose. "You can't smoke in here."

"Can't I? That's a shame." He made no move to put out the cigarette. "Who owns this fine little establishment?"

Too much knowledge in life can breed a special kind of suspicion when people ask the wrong questions. This stranger's well-tailored clothing, sloppily worn though it was, was enough to tell her that he did not belong at the Beacon. Naris had long since known too much: about Alexander, about Drim, and about the people who actually ran things. With rage feeding her brain and increasing adrenaline feeding her body, she squeezed one hand into a white-knuckled fist and began tapping her chin with it.

"Why?" she snarled. The man's face lit back into that wide smile she'd just killed a moment ago, and he opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.

"If you say anything to me, right now, involving the words wild, fire, or cat, I will rip your balls off."

He laughed and shook his head. "Well there's a point taken and a point proven, I think."

"You're still smoking."

"Yeah. So, I asked you a question."

Naris steeled herself even further. Breathe in though the nose, out through the mouth. "I know way more about you than you think I do."

"Really?" the man said, with a look akin to a children receiving a birthday present. "Well, do tell me about me. I love a good story, and I've been told I'm pretty self-absorbed."

"You're not going to get him."

"Okay! If you were talking about a beautiful woman, I might be upset by that, but you said 'him', so I suppose I'll have to cut my losses and move on..."

Naris grabbed the cigarette from his mouth and threw it to the floor, crushing it beneath her heel as if it was the embodiment of his infuriating ego.

He threw up his hands in mock surrender. "Fine!" He cried. "Fine. I'll start the stories. My name is Reese Lu-Nyt. My father was Baladian, as you can probably tell, and my mother is from Daven. Which is, consequently, where I'm from. I'm a pilot a lot of the time, a father all the time, and I'm presently..." he paused, and looked up at the ceiling, as if the gods themselves would provide him with the eloquence he needed to continue. "Confused. I came here for reasons you won't believe because I don't believe them either. And I want to know who runs this goddamn bar, so I can know just what in the hell I'm doing here."

The night, it seemed, was going to be full of unexpected reactions from eccentric strangers.

"Uh..." Naris began. She was starting to sympathize with people who die from drowning. The feeling of water closing over one's head and the knowledge that escape was impossible was something she was related to as she seldom had before. "It's him," she finally said, nodding over towards the bar, where, as if nothing was changing, Alexander seemed to be mediating some pointless argument, occasionally pouring a beer to keep a riot from breaking out.

"I have to go over there now," she said, turning away from the man and quickly walking towards the bar like it was salvation from a world gone mad. There are a lot of people, of course, who see a bar as salvation from a world gone mad, but rarely in the way that Naris did. The Beacon was full of them, and they were getting restless. They were, as was anything else safe and familiar, completely oblivious to the unfolding personal drama of Naris Marcetti. That was nothing now to her. Her life had been full of people who were unaware of her dramas. That fact, sadly, was the most safe and familiar thing of all.

Reese followed her to the bar, where he lit another cigarette and squeezed through the crowd like a man with a lot of practice at getting through bar lines. Alexander threw his arm around Naris's shoulder as soon as she was behind the bar.

"There she is!" he exclaimed. "Taking a break from telling us all how dire things really are out there?"

Naris shrugged him off coldly. A sudden anger towards him welled up inside her: unbidden, unwelcome, but still present. How dare he look at her with that goofy grin, chatting about vague nothings disguised as relevant? How dare he leave her alone in the face of Derrek Ferr's passing? Derrek was, after all, Alexander's friend, not hers.

"Are you the owner of this place, then?" Reese asked, maintaining an odd sort of poise and smiling dignity while being buffeting about by those clamouring for more booze before the year ended.

Alexander's face hardened. It was an expression seldom seen by Beacon customers, even by his hangers-on sitting there in front of him.

"You can't smoke in here," Alexander said, after sizing the stranger up. He saw just what Naris had seen when Reese had first approached her, a man whose clothes were too expensive, whose posture was too upright, and whose mannerisms were too easy and relaxed to belong among Drim's poor.

"So I'm told," Reese said lightly.

Although her senses were firmly fixed on this exchange, Naris noticed that the bar suddenly seemed quieter. The band had stopped playing, and individual voices were beginning to become audible.

"Hey Hesse!" someone cried. "Get us some damn beers 'fore we all croak of thirst over here!"

There was a chorus of agreement.

"He's arguing with some stiff. Who the fuck's that guy think he is?"

Reese ignored this, and leaned in across the bar, frowning slightly as someone jabbed an elbow into his ear.

"Something bad's happened," he said, in an obvious stage whisper, that being the only sort of whisper that could be heard in that environment.

Alexander looked around. "Really," he said. It was not a question.

"You know, from the way everyone around here seems to act in civilized conversation, I'd swear you were all hiding something from me," Reese pointed out.

Alexander gave Naris a fleeting but too-significant look that simply made her angrier with him. She thought that he had just proved Reese's point by doing that, and wasn't doing himself any favours by doing so. She had to tell him what she knew. Was it possible that this newcomer knew the same thing? There wasn't anything about him that seemed intrinsically evil, but the better evil people never did.

A sudden sense of panic began to well up inside Naris's chest, kicking her heart into highspeed, clenching her stomach into painful knots, freezing her lungs into unyielding stones. She couldn't do it. She couldn't just see another life destroyed, another good person brought down by an nasty world. She couldn't play the messenger and walk away with a clear conscience. As her mind began firing at random, she felt a deep suspicion that El had somehow known this about her, had somehow known everything, and that he why he had chosen her to receive the message. He was just playing a game. So was this Reese character. All playing, smiling, manipulating her world, tainting a place that had almost become home.

The voices faded into white noise, the high static of arguments, and the low fidelity of distant cries for drink. With shaking hands and blurring vision she grabbed a napkin from the bar, pulled out a pen and scribbled down her message. Had she been paying attention, she would have seen both Alexander and Reese staring at her with some measure of concern, along with half the people surrounding her. She would have heard Alexander asking her what was wrong. But she didn't. She thrust the balled up napkin at him and shoved her way to the other side of the bar, forcing herself through the crowd and out to the street.. There was less than an hour left in the year. She hadn't turned to see Alexander reading the message.

She stumbled down the cracked concrete steps that led into the bar, looking for all the world like just another drunk who couldn't even make the year's final countdown. The streets were strangely empty. Everyone wanted to be holed up indoors, with their friends, their liquor, their hopes all secure until the morning. Just faceless people scurrying away like rats in the distance, graffiti proclaiming people's self-given nicknames, and a homeless man curled up against the side of the steps, wrapped in a dirty blanket despite the warm night.

"Any change miss?" he asked.

"Everything's changing," Naris muttered to herself, and began walking down the street with no destination; not turning back, not looking forward.

"God bless anyway!" the man called after her. She vaguely heard him ask the question again, and give the same response when he was rejected. This, however, was followed by a thin laugh, the sort that could drift on the wind and send mysterious shivers down the spines of a nation.

Naris turned. She couldn't help it. There was a blonde woman standing there, dressed in a long coat that must have once been white, but was covered stains and patches of every conceivable hue. Her hair was thick and matted. For a second Naris was reminded of a wildcat ready to pounce, even though wildcats were not something she'd ever seen in her life in Drim.

"What do you want?" she called out, waiting for the next piece of madness, the final blow to end this phase of her life. "Why is this happening!?" she demanded in a cracked voice, as if this woman was somehow at fault, simply for being there and for looking like she shouldn't be.

The woman shook her head, as if she was disappointed with what she saw, and turned to walk away.

"Wait!" Naris cried. The woman turned and glared, and for a split second Naris met her eye, the sort of deep blue that made the ocean look shallow and the sky seem low. Naris's own eyes teared up as if she had just accidentally stared into the sun. A grief wave of dizziness overcome her as every mistake she'd made, every person she'd been a disappointment to, paraded through her memory, followed by every person she'd cared about whom she'd lost over the years, family, friend, or lover. A lifetime's worth of nightmares seized her, if only for a moment, and she sank down to her knees in the middle of the empty street.

The woman was gone. Naris stood up and began to run, from everything that she couldn't escape. She couldn't let Alexander be the next on her list of tragedies. She had to protect him. He had taken her in, shown her trust and friendship when the dream that had sustained her through her miserable childhood had collapsed in flames.

A name came to her mind, a figure she'd heard of in her days of delving into Drim's enormous unsavoury side. She had never even considered approaching someone like this for help before, not even when her own life was in danger. Why she would do so now, she couldn't explain. It was a decision that came attached to panic, like the decision to leap from the building or to throw the next person off. Drim had always played dirty. So could she.

Her lungs were screaming at her, her heart was dropping like lead and her mind was rising like a balloon. She felt as if the parts of her body were separating from each other. She stopped running. She didn't know how many blocks she was from the Beacon. Somewhere different that looked exactly the same, the way all of Drim seemed to look outside of the city's centre, like an old man hardened with age, skin gone grey, covered with tattoos whose meaning was long forgotten. Graffiti and concrete made for a poor jungle.

Gasping for air, Naris leaned against an anonymous building and slid to the ground, chest heaving, hands shaking. She looked from side to side and saw no one, as if the city had been abandoned in the face of the coming year.

Secure in her solitude, she lowered her face into her hands and began to cry.