Ivory

Part I | Chapter I

Part I | Azure

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Chapter I 

In which there is stone

and a crooked smile.

I was walking through the sprawling network of back alleys of Farres, past the collapsed buildings and the abandoned houses when I found it - a tattered old newspaper, decaying and falling to pieces, lying in the shadows of the street.

No normal person would go and pick up the dirty sheets of thin, grey paper, but then again, I never was what you would call 'normal'. Newspapers didn't mean much to people who could barely read like me, so I still don't know what possessed me to pick up that battered roll of words, words and more words - but without it, I would never have come across that article.

THE BLACK REBELLION.

Printed across the front page of the soggy newspaper in bold, capital words, I remember squinting, trying to decipher the blurry letters with my limited vocabulary.

I had heard phrases like this across the town sometimes. I never ventured out of the dark, lonely back alleys, not wanting to suffer from the accusing glares and harsh whispers of the regular townspeople. But I still listened in on conversations in Brune's bar, while the drunk customers rambled on and on about the goings in the outside world.

The Dark Arts.

Black Magic.

The Hooded Ones.

Whenever I heard those words, I could never hold back my curiosity. I kept on listening and listening, but the scraps of conversation I had managed to garner was never enough. 

Silently, I crept along the dirty cobblestone alleyway until I reached a grimy door, the newspaper tucked underneath my arm. There was a creak as I twisted the knob and pushed it open, my eyes quickly adjusting to the darkness of the dank, smelly room.

"Cintha?"  His voice was softer than usual, so quiet I could barely hear it as I darted across to his side and felt his forehead. It was burning up as usual, the piercing heat practically scalding my hand. My eyes widened; it was worse today. Much, much worse. At this rate...

"Silas... how do you feel?" I felt him shift his head until his cheek was pressing up against the cool, weathered stone wall. 

When I had found Silas a few weeks ago, he had appeared to me as any young orphan, barely seventeen and doing whatever odd jobs he could find to earn money to survive. He had the looks of a typical Farren civilian - the black-brown hair, cropped short; the white, milky skin; the smattering of freckles lightly dotted on his nose. 

I had met him trying to hold his own against a gang of older boys, their shoulders rippling with muscles from working in the fields in contrast to his thin, wiry arms. They had wanted to take his belongings; he had refused. They had beaten him up.

I had watched until they finally walked away, dragging with them Silas' canvas rucksack filled with his possessions. Planning to run away, it was his voice that had stopped me.

"It's hard, eh?"

Soft brown met hard blue-grey and I had suddenly known that I would do my best to help this stranger, this bruised, beaten-up boy with chocolate eyes and a crooked smile.