It was known that Lerida was not welcome in many places in town. Too much trouble they said, only one trusted her implicitly, Kireth, and the rest of the town was a crisp bite into an apple she rarely tried. There was Kacilla, but Lerida had the feeling she was more a distraction than a friend.

It was what she made good at.


She'd left the carnival fleet and hit the road again. It showed. Like the sand had buried itself in her pores, dried her out to a bone-white diagram of herself, caricature, large eyes, thin nose, thin, pouty mouth, swan neck, trim waist, she had a cleavage for the first time in her life and it just so happened appearances mattered not to the woman once wild.

She was detached.


From the bridge she watches the cars and water and fog roll underfoot. There was a certain vantage she had in being so disconsolate, so alone. Eyes took all in. She felt light.

But levitation and its meek effort lasted only so long. She was harder to please now.

The breeze that kept at her, only her thick trench coat a buffer, had come to annoy her rather than excite, and she stayed indoors, preferring all the corners she could see. Paranoid.

Dancing with the tables of a dreary court, her reflection stared back at her in air and she sighed, turning her face from the imagination of her broken mind and began a slither-walk into town, to catch a cab and then a coach from the town of Lorne' to Rhy'Din.

She was tired, but curious. Something propelled her back.

Crossing intersections of thought and tar most of the day had lost its charm early in the afternoon. Sitting amongst rubble in a back street of WestEnd, peeling a mandarin and staring at the sky, she got the feeling she wasn't cut out for this whole walking gig. Traveling was not what it was once to her. She once delighted in the road; the music, the men, the sunset all her own. And now there was the tired endlessness of it, and just the thought of leaving town again once she was bored her circumstance deemed her unwelcome again, fatigued her.

The buildings surrounding her, she noted, were of curious architecture. Broad, stucco, with no windows all the way down the row. Across the street, blaring in the sun, was the open garage of a den of some sort, and a few doors down from that, a small blue door that looked like the council entrance to a sewer or underground chamber of some intent.


Glancing left and right, she forced herself up, tossing the peel in the refuse behind her heels. It was time to walk, to see, to smell, to remember.


In the back of her mind was a slight girl-woman in chasing colours of a patchwork skirt. Aquamarine eyes, small petal pink lips, and a streak in her blood that conjured up lyrical.

"'Cos anyone knows you can conjure anything by the dark of the moon"

She smiled, oddly relieved at the thought, that there was place here for her to find.

"Call me evil call me tide is on your side, anything that you want..."

She hummed her way down to town, a stalk of a woman, like some desert crow, hovering along the perimeters, old and not, a shivering beauty to her, tested by time. She was gaunt in the face, her neck stretched high as she surveyed, her wrists and ankles tiny. It was the fat about her middle and breasts that stood out on her, hidden under plain, starched blouses. She was getting on.