Snippet #1684104

"The Diamond Dust of Heaven"
Mora Town

Madame Ursa was meeting with some of the children, giving them each their new parchment and quills. They were speaking well, now they were to be writing. They were not so happy to see her, as they said the elders were worrying. Already Ursa was used to the death and smell of decay. Something had changed within her in contact with these people.

When she finally heard the problem, that their leader, the one Dendapim amongst them, had been taken away by guards, her heart nearly stopped. She told the children to pack up all their food. They would be learning about food today. Those were always their favorite days. She told them to carefully pack away as much food as they could into a cart and roll it out of their homes. She tried to convince the elders to join them, saying it would be best if they prepared to leave, her attempts at subtlety were failing. The Mora were not keen to leave, or let their children leave, without knowing what had happened to Yorina. The guards had left, even the most bitter towards the Dendapim were not keen to leave their new homes so quickly.

Without anyone's permission, she began making large demands.

"You, go buy some salted fish for soup. The markets in the north must be closed, take your whole family, best not to get lost." she tossed them a bundle of gold plates bound with string, an immense amount of money for a simple trip for soup.
"You, go buy us new knives, all new knives, I don't care if you feel weak, go!" and she tossed another ring of gold.

The children had readied the cart, and she explained that they would have a picnic, and to head to floating forest. They would not be allowed, they were to wait in one of the many pavilions where men loaded supplies for the richer people above.

“Temper gets you into trouble. Pride keeps you there.”
Trinity Palace

The Avatar looked at Yorina with hungering eyes, watching her chant from the book. He examined everything, listened desperately to her clicks and whistles. It was language, but ghastly, using every possible extent of human ability to speak from wheazes from the depths of the lungs to humming through the nose, odd placement of the tongue for clicks and something like consonants, a strange humming power throughout.

This was dark stuff she dealt in.

The young alchemist held onto the table on which the young girl sat, staring at her, waiting for her eyes to open.

The convulsions, to the aging Ayden Spiro, hulking against his throne, were enough. But the next moments happened to quickly for him. As the girl's eye fluttered open, her body ceasing to twitch, he began to cough up something.

"Well, she's back."

In a moment the old Ayden Spiro tried to pull himself up, hacking up something awful. The young Avatar rose and screamed

"Get the book!"

But, despite the sound of crashing as the door behind Yorina swung open, the young alchemist visibly distressed and looking as though he was about to vomit, quietly slit the throat of the newly awakened girl and twisted the knife upward suddenly, severing the brain stem. With the same smoothness he gripped onto the flower and leaped over the table towards Yorina, as though to grab her, only to ram the Near Guard who were coming through the door, tossing them back with incredible strength for his small form.

"Yorina, hurry, get out!" He screamed, picking up one of the dragon guns from the unconscious guards, who looked frozen unnaturally. He pointed not the gun end, but the ornate dragon head of the gun back towards the two men. The avatar was shaking as he opened a small wooden cabinet, revealing a window with two hawks, trying to tie a message to one of them. The old Ayden Spiro was crouching, clutching his stomach, hacking up something.

With the same look of utter disgust and horror, the young alchemist pulled the dragon's wing mechanism, and a jet of flames buffeted out clumsily from the mouth of the dragon. It sputtered and immediately caught the body of the girl, now rapidly drying out into some sort of mummy, and caught the elaborate draperies of the thrones on fire.

He turned shouting, "Go! Get out!" to the walking corpse that Yorina had become. He still looked as though he was fighting back something awful in his throat.

"This is a place of love, its empathy overpowers..."
Nonya Graveyard

"Anora, there's nothing frightening about a graveyard. It's beautiful, don't you think? There's not as much grass anywhere in the city."
"The flowers are nice, but don't you just imagine all those bodies... all the same level, just... sitting there? R-rotting?"
"That's the part for the dead, the rest of a graveyard is for the living. There are monuments and fountains and trees."
"Flowers..."
"Plenty! Come on."

The young man pulled the girl, walking backwards, more interested in her than flowers. There was no place more abandoned than a graveyard. It really wasn't a place for the living. One paid for someone to keep the flowers blooming, and visited only when another person died. It had gained a reputation now as a place for illegal rituals and adolescents meeting against the will of their parents. Those children who felt a "mutually beneficial" marriage between two business partners seemed a silly thing, far off, from their lives.