No normal tale

Pity thief

Simon sauntered through the city as he yawned. Not too deep though, since the smell of Garath was unbearable, and during days like these, when the city was packed with people, the air became thick and humid enough to taste the stench. The reason it was so packed? A festival, it attracted people from all over the place, and they brought their bad breath and sweat with them. Simon hated this time of the year, but also loved it. It was the time of the year that his crops were at their ripest and their quantity at their highest. Why? Well, Simon wasn't just a regular farmer, no, he harvested the money of the stupid and the rich. Ah yes... festival time was both a time of good business and misery.

Simons second hand, well, stolen, boots, made prints in the soil which covered the cobblestones of the busy street. As a child Simon had always wondered what the unknown dirt contained, but now, as a young man, he had his suspicions, and had decided it was better not to find out and just roll with it.

The buildings on both sides of the street were mostly shops, some less trustworthy than others, and as Simon provided products for a handful of them, he knew his way around the 'merchants'. In his opinion the people he provided for weren't any less of a thief than he was.

But the ones that were trustworthy he avoided. Throughout his years on the streets he had made his face a clear warning for the shop owners to ring up guards. A pity, as Simon could use some good quality clothing, but there wasn't much he could do about it. Once he had tried when he had been older, but had soon realised that no matter how old he was and how much he had changed, his appearance was too easy to spot in a crowd. A nasty trait for a thief to have... Also a reason he refused to wash his hair, the white blond would seem brown as it was too dirty to seem its own colour. That and the scar which went from his right hairline to his eye, splitting his eyebrow practically in two, was a clear trademark. Simon didn't know where he had gotten it from, the scar, it had just always been there. For that reason, he wore a hood almost all of the time, his face down and his clothes as ragged and filthy as the average beggar. And beggars enough to disappear into the crowd.

Garath was a rich city, many cultures and a lot of treasures. But as the rich lived in great comfort, the poor were taken advantage of. Poverty made the morals of the unprivileged clouded. They fought one another rather than the rich. Something Simon never used to understand. Why go after meatless prey when there were enough pigs to go hunt after in the richer parts of the city. Those selfish bastards took and took without even caring one bit.

Soon after though, Simon had found out why others were hesitant to take from the rich. There the guards had a lot more units, patrolling all day long, a significant difference compared to the slums, where our thief lived. Few guards were stationed there, only patrolling when someone from higher up dropped by to check, which rarely happened. They simply didn't care for the poor.

In the richer parts the guards were always busy trying to maintain as much order as possible. And so it was bound to happen that Simon got caught at some point. Refusing to give his name, they had beaten him until he had lost consciousness and had left him to die on the streets.

He was a good-for-nothing scum after all...

The only reason he hadn't frozen to death that heartless winter night, had been because of a drunkard thinking it was funny to piss over a 'corpse'.

It had been both an unlucky and a lucky encounter. This hadn't stopped Simon though, if not he was even more stubborn, determined to make the guards lives hell. Because for every successful pickpocket he did, it meant a scolding for the guards, followed by them needing to apologise to our thief his victim. It always pleased Simon to see those bastards look like they had just stuffed their arses with pepper as they had to go down on their knees for some spoiled noble. Even the guards didn't like the rich.