Last of the Gods
Prologue
It was a mild evening. Mildly cold, but crisp. The locals waited it out in their cotton shirts, most muddy from a hard day's farming.
A young woman pushed her way against the wind. She was a foreigner, made obvious by the way she clutched her heavy cloak around her shoulders. It was well-made, and embroidered.
Nobility, maybe? Thought one of the men who watched her pass. But alone…
He motioned to his friends, who pushed themselves off the wall and began a quiet, deliberate pursuit.
She knew she was being followed, probably by roughs. Hopefully by roughs, given the alternative. She didn't change her pace, not a bit. She might miss her turn. Besides, they'd catch up.
Relax, she told herself, just another minute.
The man almost laughed when she eventually turned into an alleyway, a dead end. If she was stupid enough to do that, she'd probably be too stupid to fight back. The nobility always expected someone to be watching their asses.
Just not him.
He rounded the corner, friends in tow. She had stopped entirely, and seemed to be waiting for something. In fact, she was ignoring him completely. For a few indecisive seconds, he took in her appearance: pale, with curls of dark hair falling over her cloak collar and obscuring the right side of her face. He twitched; was she mocking him somehow, with her carelessness? Challenging him?
"Hey there!" He called out to her, betraying as little as possible in his tone. She turned to face him, then looked away.
Bitch. He changed tacks.
"That's okay, you don't have to talk." He grinned and approached her. When she turned her head the other way, he'd had it.
Grabbing her arm, through her cloak, he yanked her towards him. "Hey-!"
Then he stopped. The sudden movement had swung her head abruptly, and her hair flew out of her face.
Her eye…it was grotesque. Almost twice as large as the left one, it dug downwards into her cheek. The iris was enormous, and there was no visible pupil. It was perfectly, completely round, and completely white.
He'd only ever heard stories, and all of sudden, like a nightmare, his worst childhood fears had come true. He yelled.
"She's a wit--!"
A hand, gloved in leather, large and firm, clamped itself over his mouth. He couldn't turn his head an inch. Petrified, he strained his eyes to see the figure that had suddenly materialised behind him, between himself and his friends. It spoke.
"That's…not a very nice thing to say."
He ran. He was sure, at any moment, that his heart would stop, that he would be cursed, fall into Hell, but he ran anyways, out of the alleyway, catching only the briefest glimpse of black and a shock of red.
Marisol watched him run, out of sight, before tugging her chilled hands out of her cloak and rearranging her hair.
"You know," she began with a small smile, "you really scare people when you do that. It's a little mean, don't you think?"
Her companion remained expressionless. "Would you rather I had waited five more minutes?"
Marisol shook her head. "Oh, Horatio, don't be like that. That's not what I meant."
Horatio looked rather pained. "Why didn't you wait for me? I was coming to get you."
"It was unbearably stuffy in there. Besides," she added, looking him in the face with a smile, "I know you're always watching anyways."
He said nothing. She changed the subject. "Did you find us a room?"
"I did, in the opposite direction," he gestured briefly away from where the intrusive man had run minutes earlier. "With any luck, we won't be found out."
"I hope so!" Marisol gathered her cloak around her in a huff. "At least one night a week, I'd like to sleep on a real bed!" Mimicking the pained expression of her guardian a moment earlier, she added, "Is that too much to ask?"