MagiStream

So this is something I wrote back in November. Since then, it's spent a long time sitting around collecting dust. I revisited it, and now the world/characters/plot/everything is completely different (literally not even on the same planet anymore) and these first few chapters don't fit in at all. That being said, I want to do something with them. So, I figured, I have major writer's block with everything and typing something old up will be a good "break", while the minor editing might get the juices flowing again. Also, I'm new here, and what better way of introducing myself than with my writing? It's been years since I even let anyone other than my favourite English teacher read my work, let alone post it online. Be warned, though, this is really rough draft one kind of stuff. The only form of editing it saw was slight (and admittedly lazy) changes while being typed up just now. There's probably also lots of typos. Ahhhhhh. Far from my best work, but meh. Nobody's ever happy even with their best work. And if you are happy with your work, I hate you. Why can't I be you? How dare you be a writer and be happy, you don't get to have both.
Anyways. Here goes. Hope it entertains you. It's a kind of dystopian/post-dystopian (is that an actual term?) focused on zombies but with some other supernatural stuff thrown in. I only have three chapters, though, so it doesn't really get into much of the zombie stuff, mainly just introducing characters and a bit of foreshadowing events that are no longer even going to happen in the new version.
I've only typed up chapter one for now.
For this chapter, bit of a warning for minor implied drug use.


Chapter One
Despite being across the street from it, the warm scent of the bread took over me. It smelled like a home, like hearths and freshly sewn clothes, like a small taste of what those with money fail to appreciate. Most importantly, the bread smelled like it was that night's dinner, though no coins jingled in my pocket. In my line of work, coins were optional. You would go to the market empty handed and return with something to give you and yours life for another day.

I glanced over at a young girl who was sitting in silence on a bench several feet away. She caught my eye, blinked large blue eyes, and then jumped to her feet. Her skin was dirt and her brown hair was in a messy bun. That combined with her ragged clothes, too big in some places and too small in others, made her stand out, yet at the same time become invisible in the crowd of well dressed shoppers.

Likely any Guard on the street had an eye on me. Similar to the young girl, I was also a ragged poor kid. Since I was older and openly drooling at the stall selling baked goods, I was the suspicious one.

The young girl located and bounced up to the only Guard I could see and struck up a conversation with him. Quite conveniently, she stood to his side so that he'd have to face away from me, and began speaking animatedly. A grin was plastered on her dirty face and she waved her brown gloved hands in the air. She was likely telling some fantastical story. I used his momentary distraction to dart across the street and up to the bakery stall. It was almost as though the girl and I had planned this.

The bread bearing stall was being kept by a harried looking woman in a plain blue dress. Her pale face had lines of stress, despite her voice and eyes seeming young. She probably had a lot of children at home. I had learned, over time, through signs of needle pricks on fingers and the ever present faint smell of toddler vomit, that every non-descript bakery owner had a big, hungry family at home. I had a big, hungry family at home as well, and so I justified that if she could afford the beautiful chestnut wood the stall was made of, then she could afford to give away a few loaves of bread. While the woman spoke with a customer, I quickly shoved three of the largest loaves into my bag. With such a thick crowd, at least one person had to have noticed, but my location was specifically chosen. They would not call out in this area of the city, if their brains had not been devoured. I may have looked young and homeless and even harmless, but they didn't know who I was stealing for. So unless they were looking for trouble with a gang or worse, small crimes went unreported in that part of Skaya.

As soon as the bread was in my bag, I melted into the crowd, strolling in the opposite direction of the Guard, but with no real purpose. The first time I stole something on my own, I had done everything perfectly up until the getaway, where I had a burst of fear and ran. Running draws attention. Attention draws Guards. Thankfully, the only thing they had found on me back then was an apple, and I'd gotten away with a bruise on my face, a hissed warning in my ears, and a golden necklace stashed in my underwear.

It didn't take long for the girl to catch up to me. Her small form slipped through the crowd like a salmon through rapids. When she got to me, she grabbed my hand and smiled huge.

"So, what'd ya get?" she asked, shoving her head towards my crossbody bag. "Cake?"

"No cakes, Jinq," I replied, herding her away from the cloth bag. Once, it had been black, but years of wear and sun had turned it a light brown. "There's no nutrition in cake, and besides, they always guard it too closely."

Ignoring my efforts, Jinq let go of my hand, opened the bag, stuck her face in, and inhaled deeply. A sigh escaped her chapped lips, tinged with mixed bliss and heartbreaking excitement. Her voice came muffled from within my bag. "This bread has honey in it!"

"Get out of there, people are staring," I snapped. Not one to be discouraged, Jinq pulled out and bounced ahead of me like a puppy.

The crowd had started to thin as we left the market. The road turned from "Barely Managed Cobblestone" to "Does This Even Count As A Road Anymore". The buildings to our sides were sagging, dark, and missing chunks from their walls. Not a single unbroken window could be found, the glass stolen to be sold, or broken and turned into weapons and tools. In the shadows of the destroyed neighbourhood, people who looked even more suspicious than us clustered around barrel fires or simply lay passed out in a collection of empty bottles and needles. Had I been some rich noble or even a Guard, I might have been intimidated, but this was my home. I knew these people, and I knew many of their struggles. Skaya was not a kind city, and not everyone could thrive in it.

But it was better than the alternative.

A woman sitting at the side of the road was sorting bags of white powder on an overturned luggage trunk that had seen better days. She waved at us as we approached, with a smile that was missing teeth.

"Steal anything good, Amethyst?" she asked me, her voice raspy and deep from decades of cigarettes. Her white hair hung around her in a mess of frizzy curls.

"Not really," I lied. I might have known the people in this part of Skaya, but that didn't mean I whole heartedly trusted them. Many of them were thieves just like me, and I knew myself that if I overheard a girl say she had a few thirteen dollar loaves of bread on her, I would be making sure they didn't make it home with her. "Meredith, you are just looking to get mugged, doing that out here."

Meredith shrugged, laughed like a crow, and kept weighing out her drugs. Legend had it, she was so old that she was a young girl when the zombies first appeared. "Maybe Meredith is, eh? Maybes she's just lookin' for a fight, though, eh? No 'tings are better to do."

We left her, her crow's laugh echoing off the decrepit houses, and Jinq couldn't hold back her giggles.

"She's an odd old lady," Jinq remarked, swinging my arm as we walked. "Her accent is like nothing I've ever heard."

"Aiden says she speaks like a khajiit. I don't understand the reference, but he said it's a mixture of a Arabian and cat, whatever that means," I sighed. "I agree, though, she is odd. Most of the people around here are. Just don't let them hear you say it."

"We're different from them, though, right? We don't do no drugs. We gots a future," Jinq stopped swinging my arm, her little-girl voice oddly serious.

"We don't do any drugs and we have a future," I replied. "You won't get anywhere sounding like a hooligan who barely knows the common tongue."

"I'll talk fancy-like when I'm rich," Jinq promised with a giggle.

I sighed in defeat and decided to change the subject. "Hey, Jinq. Let's have horses someday," I said wistfully.

Jinq nodded, as if this had been apparent all along. "We'll have a horse for each of us and we'll have a huge field for them to live on. A big field, so big that if ya stand at one fence, you can't see the other side," she described. "That's how they'll be happy, otherwise you have them trapped."

"They'd still technically be trapped," I bantered. "Doesn't matter how big the field is. If there's a fence around it, they're prisoners."

Jinq was quiet at that. I started to feel bad, I didn't want to crush the eleven year old's dreams or anything. I hadn't even put thought into what I'd said. Right when I was about to apologize or make a joke or do something to cheer her up, Jinq started talking again.

"Yee... but horses ain't so smart. They'd look and wherever they were they'd never see all four sides of the fence. So they'd think there was no fence and they'd think they was free."

I decided not to tell her that horses were probably a bit smarter than that. A pseudo freedom was better than no freedom, so I let her think her horses would be happy. As long as they had Jinq caring for them, they would be.

"We're gonna have chickens, too," Jinq stated. "And cows and pigs and sheeps and doggies. And we're gonna eat 'em, but not the doggies. But we won't kill them badly, just do it while they're sleeping or hide the knife from them. I read about that in one of the books. It's called ha... hal... halsomething-or-other and it's nicer."

"Halal?" I suggested.

"Yeah, that. Halal," she repeated, pronouncing it like hay-lol. "And a big house, so big we can all have our rooms. You and me will be across the hall from each other so's we can have sleepovers and suches. Abby can have the room by the kitchen and she'll have a whole crew to help her cook so she can't yell at me that I never help or nothing."

"It's true, though. You never help her cook," I deadpanned.

"I burn my hands!" Jinq whined. "When I'm rich, I'm never gonna cook. I'mma hire people to do it for me."

"All that reading you do, you'd think you'd learn proper grammar with it," I joked, but Jinq ignored me and continued talking about her house.

"Barra will have her own room with lotsa clothes and even some makeup and chocolate, and a crib for a baby. And Calen's room will always have music playing, the old stuff he likes that makes you thinks of dragons and mountains and quests," her voice then changed to the slyness that only a child can possess. "And don't worry, Aiden's room'll be as far from yours as it can get."

"Why is that?" I asked, amused.

"'Cos he liiiiiiikes you," Jinq said as if this was one of the most well known facts of life. "But you don't like him."

I blushed, but only because she was right. I hadn't expected an eleven year old to pick up on it. Aiden was the only person in our home the same age as me, and as such he had developed a very badly hidden crush on me. Unfortunately for him, I felt nothing of that sort towards him. We weren't related by blood or anything, but Abby and Calen had raised us together. To have romantic feelings for him just wasn't possible for me. It was... weird.

"Don't worry about separating us," I assured Jinq. "Eventually he's going to find a girl that he really loves-or guy, who knows-and then he'll get over me."

"I wouldn't be so sure," Jinq cackled ominously. "What if he loves you forever and ever and proposes to you on a daily basis and never leaves you alone? And eventually you feel so bad so's you marry him but you don't love him so you're unhappy forever, and ever, and ever. What then?"

"That won't happen," I giggled. "A guy can only take being turned down so many times, and I'm not one to give in."

"Promise, kay? Promise you'll only marry someone if you love them."

Confused, I nodded anyways. "I promise, but why the sudden serious-talk, kiddo?"

Jinq exhaled. "Amy, I think you're real pretty. Others think it too. Lately when we been goin' out, boys are staring at you," she explained. "And I heard about a girl who lived in our parts. She was real pretty, too, 'nd some rich guy comes and takes her off into the center-city. She didn't even knows him, but she wanted to be rich so's she's married him. And when I heard that, I gots to thinking. You might do the same. Not 'cos you're no-good greedy, but for us. You'd go marry some snooty guy you don't like and you'd be sad with him but you'd do it so we could have money and things."

I looked at her. Jinq was my inspiration, though I'd never let her big ego know it. She was only eleven years old, but forced to live in such depressing conditions. Yet she still held hope, wise words that I didn't have, a certainty that one day she'd get off these streets, no matter how impossible that was. I found her when she was just a tot wandering around, playing with trash. We had no idea who her birth parents were, but they were probably just like mine; drug addicts, who abandoned their kids because they didn't have the expenses to take care of them. Their next fix was far more important to those kind of people than raising their accidents.

"I wouldn't do that. We can get rich on our own," I stopped and kneeled in front of her, made her look at me. Her big, blue eyes were full of sadness and that hurt me. "Jinq. I'm not going anywhere. We're going to get rich by ourselves, we'll find some huge gem or something one day and we'll steal it, and sell it. We don't need to worry about marrying snooty rich guys."

Some of the hope began to filter back into her eyes. "We'll make us rich."

"We can take care of ourselves. Girl power," I promised, then ruffled her hair and continued walking towards home. After a few moments of staring at the ground, Jinq took off after me, filling the cool autumn air with her light singing.

Raneth wrote:As this is original fiction, I've moved it to the Parlor.

Agh, sorry. Bit of a late night for me and I guess I didn't read closely enough. Won't happen again ><