Polarized

Firestarter

TW: blood, violence

"Oh my. This is terrible." Hyacinth shook her head at the sight before her. At the center of the market square stood a crumbling statue of a winged woman, charred with soot and ash. "The Shrine Scorcher is at it again. Blanche will never answer our prayers to restore aura magic when some of us are being this disrespectful!"

"How many times are we going to have to clean this Shrine Scorcher's messes?" Orion asked nobody in particular as he picked up a chunk of statue from the ground. The lanky, blue-eyed, raven-haired man tossed the piece into the wheelbarrow before continuing to scour the ground for more rubble. "Ruining the environment, denying people of their connection to Blanche... what an asshole."

Hyacinth sat at the foot of the shrine's remains. "Come to think of it, it's only Blanche's shrines that I've seen burnt like this," the healer noted. "I don't think we've had defacing incidents involving shrines of other entities before."

"Actually we did," Orion reminded her. "Remember when Andromeda's statue exploded?"

"That was Juliana, not the Shrine Scorcher," Hyacinth corrected Orion. "And she did make amends for the damage afterwards. She even offered to rebuild Andromeda on her own. But this guy..." Hyacinth trailed off as she took a hand brush and swept off a layer of ash from the end of Blanche's robe. "He doesn't seem to be sorry at all."

For the next few hours, Hyacinth and Orion brushed and scrubbed and dusted at the statue in an attempt to restore it to its former glory. But no matter how hard the two mages tried, they couldn't fix its misshapen shape, nor could they remove the messy writing from Blanche's wings. On the deity's left wing, Hyacinth caught sight of an ominous message, scrawled in a frightening shade of red:

Tyranny will fall.

"W-wait what?" Hyacinth sputtered. "What tyranny?"

"Hey, you should check this out," Orion said, gesturing to the statue's right wing. "Look what's written here."

Hyacinth descended from the top of her ladder and walked over to Orion's side. She noticed that the next message said something just as confusing:

Justice for Polaris.

"Justice for Polaris?" Hyacinth read out loud. "What's the meaning of all this?"

***

Skye dug a sketchbook and pencil out of her school bag, which was seated next to her on the bus seat. To her left was a window, and outside it lay a three-lane road divided by two lines of white dashes. The road carried all sorts of vehicles, mainly small passenger cars, but every now and then a truck would roll past the window or a person on a motorbike would zoom by the bus. A thicket of trees grew on the opposite side of the road, and rising above the trees were a series of tall metal towers, connected by a line of telephone wires that seemed to follow the bus wherever it went. Fluffy white clouds chased each other across the endless blue sky, as if they were a herd of sheep running from a mad dog.

Skye flipped her book open to the next empty page so she could draw, and she momentarily panicked after noticing some strange writing on the page before it. The writing was a childish scrawl that almost resembled Ivan's handwriting except something was off about it and Skye didn't know what it was. Perhaps Ivan had one too many cups of coffee or energy drinks; that could explain why his note looked so messy. Meet me at the greenhouse, 3:30 pm. Nice art by the way, the note read.

Skye glanced at the page suspiciously. "Nice art by the way?" Her brother would never say or write something like that— not without making fun of it first! And it was at that moment when Skye remembered: this was the notebook she left in the cafe, the one Noi returned to her. So maybe it wasn't Ivan inviting her to the greenhouse after all. Perhaps it was Noi. It could explain why his note looked so strange— having claws for hands must make writing difficult for him.