Arc-Mage: Grayfire

Lucius

   The day Ari and he had left the city was also the day Grey lost his last piece of his parents.

   It started out bad. Though Grey was used to bad. He and Ari had to scrounge the back alleys for scraps most day. Looking for bilvi leather, wood planks, loose nails, tiles, screws or - Ari's favorite - tossed spellbooks or pieces of them. Anything to help keep up their shelter or improve their magical abilities. Living in the Antimite City without prestige, or a family with prestige, meant living in poverty.

   The City doesn't have a currency system like other parts of Regeira, or other worlds. Any transaction occuring in the City was either a trade of goods or magical knowledge. You are expected to provide for yourself and teach your children to do the same. Unless you make a name for yourself. The child of a council member for instance, would be taught by their parent but in the case of the parents death, the child would be adopted by another family of the Council. This only happens because whatever member does the adopting is holding out for a magical prodigy, a powerhouse like their parent. Any orphan not of a significant name is tossed to the side and forgotten, expected to survive on their own. A flawed and broken system if you ask anyone not born in the Antimite City, or clamoring to join it.

   On this particular day he and Ari were stealing bilvi leather from the stash of a clothes vendor on the edge of the slums of the Antimite City. Ari had just recently learned to levitate items, so while Grey was keeping the vendor distracted - by making small animal shapes and magical beasts with his gray flames - Ari was floating leather over to himself and stuffing it in his makeshift pack. Everytime Ari would bump the leather into something or make a noise while stuffing it into his pack, Grey would reshape his creation. First a bilvi, then a sea serpent, next a dragon, a meruape ( a nasty regeirian-eating aqua-reptilian ). Grey thought he was doing a fine job keeping the vendor occupied. Everything was going smoothly, that was until Ari lost his focus on the spell and dropped a clump of leather onto the ground with a resounding wumph. The vendor turned and saw Ari, with his stuffed pack of leather and a guilty look on his face. The vendor looked as if he'd just been hit with a stun attack. He turned slowly back to face Grey.
 
   Grey who, in one quick motion, had turned his flaming image of a meruape into a life-sized flaming image of a direwolf. An animal he knew well. When the vendor had finished turning back toward Grey, instead of a kid playing with some weird fire he saw the snarling face of a hungry flaming wolf, two inches inches from his nose.

   "Wrath of the East! What the fuck?!" The vendor stumbled back into his merchandise. He may have fallen over but Ari and Grey hadn't watched to find out. They ran back into the slums, very aware of the vendor yelling for the nearest Council guards.

   Running as fast as they could, Ari and Grey turned down and alley and headed toward the middle of the neighborhood. If you could call it that, a bunch of broken down huts composed of anything the residents of the area could use as building material. Small alleys piled high with baskets of garbage and some pots filled with urine and excrement. Other regions have cities with sewage systems, but not the Antimite City, nooo the antimite citizens are expected to burn or disintegrate their bowel movements. Ridiculous. The slums always smelled of piss and shit. The huts and sheds the residents in this area of the city lived in were all multicolored do the the mismatched building materials. No tall, glamarous buildings like deep in the City, just large enough to fit the occupant and their family, if they had one. There were vendors on every other corner.

   The Regeirians living in the slums of the Antimite City all had the same story, or along the same lines. Everyone was either orphaned during the Eastern Invasion, moved to the City and failed to impress or were simply born into families with a weak connection to the Arcs. The politics in the City were biased and poisonous, the spell libraries and magical academies were being gate-kept by those with  pre-established power. The Council being made up of fifteen members, all with large families and other powerful friends, if you didn't blow everyone away when you debut, then you were doomed. It was still possible to become a prominent figure, but nearly impossible.