A Place To Bloom

And Other Outcasts

Carthia.

The rules were different here.

Girls at Carthia walked around practically naked like it was nothing. The local outfit was a belt with a flap of cloth front and back leaving hips, legs, tummies, breasts, and bare feet exposed. Every delicious curve of the female body was available to my covetous eyes.

And they were everywhere. Native girls with that dark-green skin, white hair and yellow eyes, Goloagi girls, alabaster-colored Tobori girls, many with slave numbers branded into their arms, Herali girls, Saeni girls, mixed girls, and girls of some ethnicity I'd never seen before. I saw one girl with colors like Sarina—deep yellow skin and black eyes with bronze hair that kinked into a puffy mass.

She saw me staring and glowered back.

Because talk to the wrong girl, one of those lizard creatures will rip your liver out and eat it.

Taganu had told me where to find the Daenma church. He'd said to follow a narrow street that followed the north side of the outer wall, a curtain of gray and yellow stone that backdropped a row of buildings three stories high on the right.

On my right was a recessed area between buildings. Stones and timbers had crumbled into piles crawling over with vines. In the center were six of those girls standing in a circle around a man on his knees. He was blindfolded, covered in scrapes and bruises with crusts of dried blood all over his skin, and his hands were tied behind his back. One of the girls clutched his hair in a fist and held a large knife in her other hand. Another faced him with paper unrolled in both hands. The rest glared at him with their arms crossed.

They all looked up at me.

At first, my eyes danced from one to another admiring their bodies, but they stared. As one, they fixed their stone faces at me with ice in their eyes. I probably should have looked away.

A sharp hiss cut my trance.

Another one of those lizard-riding girls blocked my path. My heart raced. Images of the beast knocking me down to rip out my liver flashed through my mind. The creature bared its jagged, serrated teeth and maneuvered its head to block my view of whatever was going on in those ruins.

The rider was as the others, short with powerful muscles bulging beneath dark-green skin. The flap of cloth she wore was a rich blue silk with a crest embroidered in gold and silver thread. Unlike the others, she also wore blue silk arm bands with the same crest. About her belt was an array of weapons - knives, nets, ropes, hooks, things I had no name for, with even more hanging from her saddle. Her bare chest was crisscrossed with a strap that held a sword on one side, and a bow-and-arrows on the other. She locked her jaw, aimed those yellow eyes at me, and pointed down the street. "Go!"

I froze.

Something pressed into my back; the lizard had snaked its neck around to usher me along with its snout. Images of those huge talons tearing my flesh from my bones ripped through my mind, and I kept the fuck walking.

I looked behind me, and the reptile watched me through one eye with a black vertical slit while the girl looked off in another direction.

As for the church, I almost walked past it. Several overgrown bushes choked with weeds took up a small courtyard, including a small tree that almost blocked the entrance.

Inside, cracks broke through mortar leaving trails of green algae to seep down the walls with pools of water scattered about the floor. I wasn't expecting the Grand Cathedral in the Imperial capital, but at least something that wasn't so... a vine crept through an open window overhead—one of its tendrils clung to a chunk of mortar that had broken off and hung there. On a rotted wooden shelf, black mold spots crept over a book of Scripture.