In a summer day’s last hours of light, tradesmen found leisure in their labor knowing they were moments before dinner. The thought of family, of the baths, or of the next instalment at the local theatre slowed their hands and their minds. For others, perhaps the pleasure of scroll reading by the prismlight was more enticing. With these thoughts like warm molasses on their minds, no one noticed the emergence of a young woman from the alleyways. She would only be visible for a second. Blink, and one had missed her enter the Lily Vine Chalet.

Lisŗa wore plain clothes under her travel robe: brown overalls, a white button shirt. She had a copper ring around her right middle finger; it was in fashion for girls her age and its position told onlookers, ‘Not taken, but unavailable’. With that, she appeared no different than any tradesman.

“Well, look who it is,” Madam Licelle remarked almost immediately upon Lisŗa’s entrance. The woman’s blue dress followed the sashay of her hips as she approached, bearing all the authoritative flair of a peacock.

Lisŗa pulled off her robe and folded it in her arms.

“What do you want, Licelle?”

“You’re in a whole world of trouble, young lady. How many times have you been told?”

Lisŗa wasn’t in the mood. She started for the stairs. Madam Licelle, being mostly made of legs, had no problem keeping up beside her. The clop of her heels against the hardwood floors was enough to drive Lisŗa insane. She might have gone mad a long time ago.

“Have a little shame for once,” Licelle continued.

“Oh please, give it a rest you old hag.”

“Where have you been for the whole day? Your mother’s worried sick!”

“It’s none of your business.”

“She’ll eat you alive.”

“Oh gods I don’t want to hear those words come out of your mouth.”

Madam Licelle stopped her pursuit, but not without a final remonstration.

“You can’t keep doing this to her, Lisŗa.”

Lisŗa picked up the pace. She climbed the stairs, trying to ignore Licelle’s stare boring a hole in the back of her head. The door to the attic slammed shut behind her. She plopped on the bed, waiting for her heart to calm. Minutes passed, but the pain was still there. A voice within echoed what the Madam had said. She punched her pillow until she couldn’t hear it anymore.

She was exhausted now. The spoils she had hid in her robe seemed insignificant, a waste of emotional investment. A few Faleri halycite coins, an old silver pocket watch, and a small packet of tuskbeast bone powder. She slipped the money into the compartment hidden inside the slanted roof next to her bed. A meager sum glinted back. A hundred halycite and two silver coins. Lisŗa sighed and closed it back up.

The door to her room opened. Lisŗa’s heart stopped for a moment. She avoided turning her head to greet her guest. Another weight depressed her bed behind her.

“What are you doing, Lissy.”

The sheer softness of her mother’s voice was enough to make Lisŗa melt. It was never by loudness that Lisŗa was chastised; that was never necessary. She held herself together through sheer will.

“Just living my life, Valdren,” she said.

“We’ve had this talk before, so I’ll be brief. An officer came by earlier.”

Lisŗa whipped around, horror etched in her furrowed brow.

“What?! What did he-”

“He’s waiting for you by the Davrosine Fountain. He has agreed to keep this quiet and modify his reports accordingly.”

“…For what?”

“A discount.”

Valdren stood and left for the door, trailing essence of lily and haemadril. She stopped amidst the ray of orange-yellow sun streaming through the attic window. Her voluminous hair, living waves bound by a masterwork arrangement of pins and needles, shone a bright copper in the light. The other girls often fought over who got to fix it in the mornings. Her matching dress glinted like smooth metal.

Lisŗa turned away.

Before she left, Valdren said, “Go deal with the lawman.”

The door clicked shut. Lisŗa was alone with her thoughts and racing heart. She was hot with anger, condemned with shame. Hate and regret like a maelstrom in her mind. It was all so difficult to sort through. She couldn’t move in this state. She spent a few minutes breathing slowly, inhaling deep the scent her mother had left.

--

Jorge fell out of the sky.

He remembered the flash. He felt the house leave its foundations. The party had been at night. Then it was day. What’s more, they were wrapped in an invisible force dragging them through the air. Glass was shattering, furniture sliding, snacks and drinks spilling. A section of wall was sheared off from a stress. The same one Jorge had fallen into.

As Jorge plummeted he wondered if the wind had torn the wall or if the impact from his bulk was what had done it. Only a small part of him wondered that though. Most of his thoughts was filled with crushing vertigo. He screamed like an overfed seagull. Hot tears drew rapidly cooling streaks from his eyes.

He swallowed his own voice; all the air was suddenly knocked out of his lungs. His fall had been diverted. He went into an uncontrollable tumble before falling into yet another indiscriminate object, which turned his tumble the other way. Shades of dark was flipping past his vision. Leaves rustled, branches shattered. He was flipped several more times over the course of his fall in an inhumane game of pinball. With a final, wet slap his fall ended.

It was in the late afternoon in the worst summer he had ever experienced. His ears rang and buzzed. The ringing came from his fall. The buzzing from all around him, reminiscent of a rusty fan. Or a thousand mosquitos. But as Jorge’s vision sharpened and he slowly recovered from a groggy haze, he saw that the buzzing was coming from only one insect.

He flailed his limbs and freed himself from the soft, velvet surface he was lying on. In his panicking he slipped off, falling flat on the dirt. He sprung to his feet, saw the insect again, bent over and immediately emptied the contents of his stomach.

“Wha…what the hell?” He blurted out. His mouth was still thick with saliva and the taste of acidic punch. Hovering just a few feet before him was a mess of thoraxes and ganglia, seemingly melted together into a vaguely symmetrical segmented body. Limbs fell from its sides, long and many-jointed, reminiscent of a Portuguese man o’ war. Four clusters of compound eyes bulged in and out of their sockets. The veins in its wings, of which it had no less than eight, strobed with bluish-green color. Jorge found himself calming as he stared at the bluish-green hologram vibrating towards him. The buzzing became as loud as several powered razors held next to the ears.

Jorge was reminded of the curtains of beads Najam’s folk liked to hang from their doorways. He remembered the chilling sensation of walking through them in the summer. How refreshing it had been to feel the beads drag across his face.

When he came to his senses he realized it wasn’t quite the same as having six feet long rope-like insect legs lovingly lick the contours of his cheeks, his shoulders, ruffling through his hair like a comb.

Jorge stumbled away and hurled for a second time. His stomach had nothing to offer except pain. The creature was uninterested in him. It was headed for the bedding Jorge had fallen on. With his senses returned he began to notice the world around him. Trees more prodigious than redwoods sprouted high into the sky. He could make out leaves peeling away from the sides, each as wide as a bedroom. Those must have broken his fall. The mattress at the bottom that likely saved his life was a single, massive flower with six petals. It was pinkish-blue and oozed a sweet-smelling scent. The insect was dragging its limbs across the nectar, then drawing those up like a bunch of fishing lines into its complex mouth parts.

“This is not Earth,” he said.

He began to panic. Between the meandering maze of larger-than-possible foliage he was hearing a chorus of buzzing growing louder by the second.