The more she walked, the more Zyra’s mind spun like a frantic windmill. Her plan of a quiet, quick, dignified retreat was crumbling by the second. She had already decided that she could not stay in Myrtle town for a day longer.
Not even for another night. The gossip mill in this place traveled faster than a lightning wolf. The news that the great Soul maiden of the Ophira clan had failed to awaken her bloodline was already spreading to every street corner, grain shop, and alleyway. Her safety was risk.
Whatever her mother had hidden, maybe she would not find it too. Life came first.
As she navigated the crowded streets, the atmosphere was suffocating. The very same citizens who used to bow to her were now throwing cruel glances and piercing glares her way.
A rotten tomato hit her back.
"Even her shadow is bad luck. Instead of making the Ophira clan the strongest in the world, she has made us a laughing stock."
More voices rose in anger. Zyra was now public enemy number one in this town. She looked around cautiously, reminding herself for the hundredth time that she needed to get out of this city as soon as humanly possible before a literal angry mob formed.
PTU!
Zyra stopped dead in her tracks.
Instinctively, she squeezed her eyes shut as a warm, wet glob of spit landed squarely on her brow and began to roll slowly down her nose. Her stomach churned with pure disgust.
She opened her eyes, wiping her face with her sleeve, to see a man standing right in front of her. He was dressed in filthy, torn rags, holding a dented tin plate that he usually used to beg for scraps.
"Useless soul maiden!" the beggar shouted, his face contorted in a sneer. He spat on the ground near her feet for good measure. "You are nothing but a curse to our town! A bitch! A parasite! Even a beggar like me is better than you."
Zyra’s eyes narrowed. A bitter, ironic smirk played on her lips. She recognized this man. His name was Aaron, and for the past two years, whenever she passed this square, she had personally tossed low-grade energy stones into his plate so he wouldn’t starve. Now, the moment she fell from grace, he was the first to spit in her face.
What a beautiful display of human nature, she thought sarcastically. Then again, in a world where the strong ruled over the weak, was this a surprise? She had been strong, and now she was weak. The tables had turned, and they were following the natural order of things.
Around them, a crowd was slowly gathering. People paused their shopping, murmuring and watching the spectacle with eager, nasty eyes. Zyra’s right hand twitched. She had an overwhelming, burning urge to slap this ungrateful man into the next calendar year.
But she forced her fingers to loosen. She couldn’t do it. Not only would it be a waste of her time, but it would just enrage the crowd and get her locked up. Nobody would be too eager to let her out. If things escalated, she could even be pushed into the path of a car. She was the one at a disadvantage.
Biting her tongue until she tasted copper, Zyra actually lowered her head. She bowed slightly to the beggar, putting on a perfectly submissive, apologetic face. "I am sorry for disappointing everyone," she said softly.
Instead of sympathy, her apology was met with a loud splat!
A rotten egg exploded right against her shoulder, yellow yolk dripping down her expensive silk robes.
"Get out of here, curse!" an old woman yelled from the crowd. "It’s because of useless Soul maidens like you that people look down on small town folk like us. The Ophira clan deceived us all. We should demand for answers from them."
People shoved each other, some forward others back.
"Don’t let her touch my child, I don’t want her being infected by a corrupt soul." A woman shouted.
"Yeah! Stop pushing and let this bitch go away." A man chimed in, tossing a small stone that clipped her ankle.
Someone splashed a cup of water on her face! More screamed accusations. The commotion started causing some traffic on the narrow road.
This charming greeting proved one thing to Zyra, that staying here was a death sentence. It was too dangerous. But moving to another civilized city within The Jersey Republic wasn’t an option either. The network of soul maidens was tightly connected, no clan head would welcome a ’broken, soul-corrupted’ Soul maiden into their territory. They would view her as a waste of space and a political liability.
That left only one place on the entire map. A place where the law of the cities didn’t reach.
The Wild Lands.
Just the thought of that name made a cold shiver run straight down Zyra’s spine.
As the crowd continued to jeer, calling her a "helpless, pathetic maiden," Zyra pushed through and walked away. Well, she mused darkly, at least ’helpless maiden’ is slightly better than them calling me a ’false maiden’ and burning me at the pyre.
She tried to hail a passing taxi, waving her hand, but the driver took one look at her egg-stained, slightly damp clothes and the distinctive red mark peeking out from her hairline. "You are that Scorpion Soul maiden that failed to awaken. I don’t want you in my car, you are bad luck." He slammed on the gas, leaving her in a cloud of dust.
"Unbelievable," Zyra muttered.
Sighing, she pulled a deep hood over her head, shadows obscuring her face, and simply continued to walk on foot. But as her boots clicked against the pavement, a heavy anxiety settled deep in her chest. How on earth was she going to survive in the Wild Lands?
In school, the teachers practically painted the Wild Lands as hell on earth. They were the vast, chaotic territories of the world that humans had never managed to fully occupy....and for very good reason. The only humans who lived there were criminals, exiles, and outcasts who had been brutally banished from their respective countries. And from what Zyra had gathered from textbooks, most of those banished people didn’t even survive their first week.
The Wild Lands were a nightmare landscape. Terrifying, dangerous beasts that had completely lost their minds to strange alien radiation lurked behind every twisted tree. The environment itself was actively hostile; the water was toxic, the soil was barren, and the weather was violently unpredictable, shifting from freezing blizzards to scorching heat waves in a matter of hours.
Living in the Wild lands, was like living in the apocalypse all over again.