I.

"Hey, lizard!"

The lizard ignored the heckling buffoon and focused on her meditation, searching for her center through the fog of annoyance he had created. She breathed slowly, trying to relax and ferry her consciousness into her memories of home. Warm sand came to mind first, followed closely by the blazing heat of a desert sun. She was walking the grounds of a palace, one of many that decorated the capital of her homeland, the Ancient Empire. She was far from royalty, but had been fortunate enough to spend her formative years there studying under a master conjurer by the name of Atha. He had been both a wise mentor and a close friend, and it was his shadow she walked within as she roamed the palace courtyard. He was lecturing her, trying to explain how a peaceful mind could never be at a loss and how meditations of home could lead one to such tranquility. To emphasize the point he had given her a bouquet of silver roses plucked from her favorite bush in the palace garden. They were as lovely as anything she had ever seen, graced with mirror-like petals that glittered in the morning sun and a sweet fragrance that reminded her of-

"Scale-Shedder! I'm talkin' to you!"

The illusion shattered and the stench of shit and mold filled her nostrils, dragging her back to the world where she was chained in a cellar thousands of miles from a home she could never go back to. Atha was dead, she was in exile and the shackles the local magisters had placed on her were as tight as they had ever been. The only comfort the red-robed mongrels had permitted her was an empty cell, though even that small luxury had been taken away in short order.

"Things are changing for the better, you'll see." The jailor had said whilst dragging her from her quiet cage, and the earnestness his words had carried made her smile in retrospect. The only thing that had changed was that her peaceful cell had been replaced with a moldy cellar populated by six other prisoners and an insufferable lout who refused to leave her alone.

She opened a piercing blue eye and surveyed the pest coldly. He resembled a bipedal ape who had taken a mud bath in pig shit. A web of scars and open wounds covered his balding head, though many of them were mostly hidden beneath a thick layer of grime. His cracked lips were spread in a leering smile, revealing two rows of rotted yellow teeth that could only be held in place through some sick act of divine providence. Flecks of bloody snot clung to his beard, and that was the all she could stomach before closing her eye and refusing to look at him further. Nothing good could come from indulging such a disgusting wreck.

She took a deep breath to calm herself and-

"Don't you ignore me you overgrown newt!"

Her eye flared open again and she glared at the ape with murderous ire, all peaceful thoughts forgotten. She turned her head slightly to meet his hateful gaze, blood boiling with indignation. She wanted to set a swarm of mosquitos on him out of spite, but knew that such a rash course of action would end badly for her. Instead she answered him as politely as her anger would allow: "My name is Laria, and I would appreciate you using it."

Ice was in her voice, but she had still addressed the ape with more courtesy than he had shown her. It was not reciprocated. Instead the heckler's grin widened into a sneer as he rubbed his hands together, rattling the chains that bound him to both her and the other prisoners as he did so. There was an unrestrained malice in his bulging eyes, but it was easily overlooked next to the rancid stench of rotting fish on his breath. "I prefer not bein' ignored. Guess we can't all get what we want, can we newt?"

She struggled not to gag and turned as far away as she could without breaking eye contact. "And what, pray tell, do you want?"

The man leaned in closer, exposing her to the full power of his sickening breath and causing her stomach to turn. He then reached out his shackled hands, and for a horrifying moment she thought he was going to stroke her arm. Instead he placed them flat on the floor, propping himself up and twisting them into seemingly unnatural angles as he did so. He opened his mouth and tried to speak in a sweet whisper, but the words that came out did so in a waspish rasp that had all the appeal of soured honey: "I was fancyin' a new pair o' boots, lizard. Wine purple, just the color of your scales you pretty thing."

Laria opened her other eye and began scanning the far side of the room as she tried to think of a way to shut the fool up. In the meantime, she raised a hand and flexed her claws in a gesture she hoped would be intimidating, but was undermined considerably by a thick layer of bandages the magisters had tied around them. "Have you never heard of a cobbler, or was that supposed to be a threat?"

The fool laughed and nodded excitedly before vigorously shaking his head from side to side, a pointless display that absolutely infuriated Laria. "What if it is? You gonna slice me open with one of them dishcloths on yer hands?"

She shrugged and flashed him an angry grin that was just wide enough to expose the tips of her razor-sharp teeth as she continued discreetly searching the room, then placed her hand back in her lap before answering: "I hear the magisters don't take kindly to violent prisoners- it's more likely they'd need a dishcloth to wipe whatever's left of you off the floor if you tried anything."

The fool laughed again and shifted back to a sitting position with the shittiest shit-eating grin she had ever seen plastered across his repulsive face. "You're dumber than you look if you think they'll be around forever. Just you wait 'til they dump us on their happy little island and I'll make you a pair o' boots fit for a king, so to speak."

Laria spotted a rusted kitchen knife lying discarded under a shelf and struggled not to smile as an idea came to mind. She didn't know what fortuitous negligence on the magisters' part had led to a knife of any sort being left in the cellar, but wasn't about to question the opportunity. She focused her attention on the blade and began slowly tracing an invisible series of tiny glyphs on her leg, only stopping to answer the buffoon once it started to hover ever so slightly above the floor: "I daresay I'd rather be a boot than have to listen to any more of your babble. Would you be kind enough to start with my ears?"

She began tracing glyphs in earnest, paying only enough attention to the heckler to hear what he was saying as the knife began to slowly creep across the floor. The next words to reach her ears were spoken in an angry hiss that she found rather amusing: "I'll start wherever I please, and I'll talk as much as I want. I'm an artist y'see, quite infamous back home."

"Yes, I can't imagine sleeping in a barrel of fish is good for one's reputation." The knife passed within ten paces of the fool's back and she couldn't help but smile at the thought of what she was about to do.

Silence followed and was immediately broken by a question dripping with incredulity: "What?"

Laria rolled her eyes with a sigh as the knife continued to inch closer. "You reek of dead fish you insufferable simpleton."

"They called me the skinner." The man snapped back in a cold whisper. "I've flayed more lizards than you could count, and you're next on my list."

Laria chuckled. "Sure you have, though I'm not sure which surprises me more; that you actually know how to write a list, or that you've evaded capture so long by being stupid enough to boast about murder in front of witnesses." She waved vaguely at the other prisoners, not noticing that most of them either weren't paying attention or didn't care.

"What, them?" The man chortled as the knife came within arm's reach of his back. "Whadya think they're gonna do, hm?"

Laria finished tracing a final glyph and the knife came to a quivering halt, poised in the air like a snake ready to strike. She smiled at the fool and beckoned with her free hand for him to lean in closer. To her surprise he actually did, and she immediately regretted the decision as his noxious breath began assaulting her nostrils. The sheer foulness of it was awe inspiring, and she wanted to gag as he spoke: "You gonna make it up to me darling?"

She shook her head and leaned in close enough to whisper in his ear, but did so in the tongue of the Ancient Empire. The words came in a rapid series of hissing and spitting sounds she knew he was too uneducated to understand: "Greet the warden for me, will you?"

The man raised a confused eyebrow and Laria gave the glyph on her leg a sharp tap, causing the knife to fly through the air and embed itself into a loose fold of the man's trousers. Before he could realize what was happening she jerked away in a panic, pulling both him and a few of the other prisoners to the ground as she screamed in hysteria: "GUARDS! HELP! HE HAS A KNIFE!"

The man grunted in pain as he propped himself up and immediately received a kick in the face from Laria as she continued scrambling to get away. He did not have time to process what was happening before shouting came from the other side of the cellar door and it burst open, revealing the towering red-robed frames of the jailor and two other magisters.

"Don't let him hurt me!" Laria cried as she continued straining against her chains. "Don't let-"

"SHUT UP!" The jailor roared as he stormed over to the still dazed heckler, easily spotting the knife's handle poking out of his trousers as he did so.

"HOLD HIM!" He barked at the two other magisters and they quickly pinned the prisoner to the ground. The Jailor seized the knife and struck him fiercely across the back of the head before unlocking his shackles and motioning for his fellows to grab the prisoner by the arms. "Take him upstairs!"

The magisters seized the prisoner and the jailor watched as they dragged him out of the room, leaving no one to notice Laria wink at her adversary before the door slammed shut. It was a bit early to properly celebrate her triumph however, as the jailor quickly rounded on her with a furious expression on his face: "What happened?!"

She shrunk away quivering as she stammered out her reply: "I-I don't know sir! He-he started staring at me all creepy-like and talking about b-b-boots and and… and the next thing I knew he… he had a knife and-"

"That's enough! Are you hurt?" There was nothing in in the jailor's voice to suggest that he would actually care if she was.

She shook her head timidly and the jailor crossed his arms as he looked at the other prisoners. "What about you lot? Got anything to add?"

"Just what she said sir."

"No sir."

"They were talking and she got all panicked sir, can't say I blame her given what happened."

The jailor shook his head, clearly dissatisfied with the answers he had received. He then raised his voice and slowly addressed the remaining prisoners: "Any more funny business and the one responsible won't be seeing the light of day again. Do I make myself clear?"

The room echoed with a series of yes sirs and the jailor turned to leave, muttering under his breath as he did so. Laria couldn't make out most of what he was saying as he walked to the door but perfectly understood the last words he growled as it slammed shut: "Damned sourcerers."

The door's key turned in the lock and she sat up, looking quite pleased with herself in the wake of what had transpired. She then took a moment to look around and, upon seeing some of her fellow prisoners staring back at her, smiled faintly: "What?"

Nobody answered and within a few minutes the cellar was as quiet as if the incident had never occurred. That made her happy so she closed her eyes to resume her meditation but quickly figured out that she was unable to do so. Despite her victory over the heckler she still couldn't focus; something else had wormed its way into her head.

The jailor's last words before closing the door were as accurate a summation of why she was in prison as any she had heard, and they were all she could think about. She hadn't been imprisoned for anything she had done; not the friends she'd hurt, nor the people she'd gotten killed nor even the treason she'd committed. No, she'd been locked away because of something she'd only learned about herself as she was being arrested: that she was a sourcerer.

A gods-damned sourcerer.

Nothing else about her had mattered that day, and the jailor's words had reminded her that to most people nothing else ever would. She was destined to live out the rest of her days perceived by most as nothing more than a dangerous thing, and she had no idea how to process that. She didn't want to think about it but was powerless to stop herself. It destroyed her ability to meditate and in the end she was forced to give up completely, letting her thoughts run wild in contemplation of the future she didn't have. She eventually opened her eyes in an attempt to escape the maelstrom of wayward thoughts, but simply found herself staring vacantly at the cellar door as it raged on regardless.

She wanted the heckler back.