Snow ✓

A Spoiled Game

All the unsuspecting strangers she brushed up against ignored her like one ignores the rain. For once she felt empowered to go unnoticed, like she was winning the little game they all unknowingly played.

The crowd had come to a halt, packed in like canned sardines. It was evident they all stood before some sort of stage lined with torches and a backdrop of a painted forest. A man holding a hollowed out, ivory horn stood above them, put the instrument to his lips, blew and out came that sound that beckoned them all to it. The crowd went quiet. A portly man that smelled of sweat and drink beside Snow was so enraptured that he didn't notice his mug had begun to slip, the contents spilling out onto his boots.

She pulled on Mat's pantleg and the skeleton peered down, but in a quiet enforced by so many people, her voice escaped her.

"Here," he said, "get on my shoulders," and grabbed her waist.

"Don't be a baby," he grunted as she tried to push him away, then lifted her off the ground and hoisted her up over his head.

There she saw that she wasn't the only one nor the oldest perched on another's shoulders for a better look.

A stage, it was. Performers who were unmistakably supposed to be faeries, rushed onstage and huddled around a fire made of painted wood. Dressed in tatters, they wore masks with severe underbites and low brows, their skin splotched with nondescript runes. Off stage, extras shook a thin piece of sheet metal that struck up a low rumble, and right on cue—

"What's that noise?" bellowed the largest of the three faeries who shoved a finger in his ear and wiggled it around.

"There!" hissed the woman who wore her hair in thick braids through which some many somethings were moving. She pointed to the sky. "Something wicked this way comes."

A tapestry of a big black hole was dragged across the stage and two men, one woman dressed in burlap sacks painted grey, a crude attempt to replicate armor, with wooden airships around their torsos tore through the cloth. The scene was so childish the girl laughed only to be silenced by a multitude of glares.

The faeries were quick to pick up spears and turn them on the newcomers who stepped out of their airships with dramatized poise and threw their hands up in surrender.

"We mean you no harm!" said a man with high cheekbones and a manicured beard the color of sand. "Please, we've journeyed far to escape a planet in distress—"

The burly faery with the square jaw Snow took to be the natural leader prodded the man's breastplate with his spear.

"What is this place?" the human woman with a hangdog face asked dreamily.

"Helithica," said the female faery, voice harsh and sibilant. "From where do you come?"

Squinting, Snow tried to make sense of her moving hair until a very real snake raised its head from her crown to lick at the cool night air and a collective gasp rolled over the crowd.

"Earth," said the third human with copper hair tied back in a loose plait, casting a disgruntled look at the woman's serpentine hair. "It's as Garthick says; our planet, it's torn asunder—"

"Go," the big faery with the spear said, poking Garthick in the chest. "Go back."

"Please, I beg you—there's nothing left to return to."

"Yes, we are at your mercy," Hangdog said, falling to her knees, hands clasped together in a show of invocation.

Garthick did the same with a low bow, then punched his companion with a muttered "Zackariha" in the crook of his knee when he hesitated to follow suit.