Magic and Gold

11: Blood Copy

I had always wondered if she used magic to make herself that beautiful, but she never had the surreal glow that Face Swappers had. She was pure beauty and had a personality to match.

"Alix," Guin said from where she was lying on her bed. She looked up at me, her eyelashes fluttering. Her eyes were the a clear blue, and it was hard not to get lost in them. Her cheek was pressed into her down comforter, right next to her flashing white teeth. "You're my best friend, did you know that?" she asked with a smile.

"You may have mentioned it before, Princess." I let a small smile slip through my guard face. I was usually good at keeping a straight face, but she was so good at making me smile. "And you're everything to me," I said quietly.

I remembered what everyone said about Guin's mother, Queen Corliss.

Beautiful, kind, and dead before her time.

I ran faster.

But where was I going? What was my plan now? I ran up the stairs and emerged on the ground level. I started walking briskly through the roads towards my home, trying to formulate a plan. Rain started coming down from the clouds in torrents. It was rainy season here in Alaceon. I suddenly had the urge to take out my sword and slice through each and every drop. The weather would feel my rage if no one else would.

In the rain, most of the street markets shut down. Set up under weak cloth tents, the sellers who stayed were cold and soaked. These brave ones, or desperate ones, stayed and tried to sell to the hurrying people in the streets. Everything from copper plates to pepper shakers and duck down pillows, hundreds of things offered to me every day as I walked down the long central streets to my house. Merchants and shopkeepers had storefronts, which is where everyone would shop today if they truly needed something.

Soon, I got into the residential part of the city. The section where the poor lived, stacked up like ducklings stuck rows, but vertical. I grabbed the first metal rung that looked like a former pipe of a sort. It was slick with rain, and I was thankful for my supple leather gloves. A gift from thievery at the Magia.

I climbed rung after rung until I was high in the sky, passing several houses. When I got up to my room, I held onto the rung with one hand, swinging my body out so that I could see the view. Tall, worn buildings older than me characterized this area, while the towers in the market areas were colorfully painted, with shopkeepers and their whole families living above their stores.

I finally went into my house, shutting the floating door behind me. If you walked straight out of that door, you would fall thirty feet to the ground. Every time I left, I was careful to quickly grab the ladder. Others less nimble than me had fallen from much higher heights. When you fell from high enough, no one survives. That was the only reason my house was cheap enough for me to afford on my one man salary. My job got a fair amount of money, but a lot of it went to paying for the house and food. After that, I barely ever had any money left.

I wiped my feet on the mat, letting my bag fall off my shoulder next to the door. "Codie?" I called out softly, looking around for my sister. The room was extremely small, even with just the two of us. It was made up of a bedroom and a kitchen, with a bathroom smaller than the average broom closet. The bedroom had two tiny twin beds pushed up against opposite walls with a small wardrobe in between them. A wooden chair with a miniature table was pushed up against the other wall. We had a small kitchen in a small side room so tiny I banged my elbow on the cabinets all the time.