Chapter 5 – Every new beginning comes from some other beginnning’s end
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The artwork is by Anne-Marie Broughton (instagram: @ambroughtonart).

Edited by Trismegistus Shandy.

 

Altheda held her infant in her arms as she looked away, suddenly unwilling to meet my eyes. Unable to read the expression on her face, I found myself staring at the long shimmering locks that cascaded like a waterfall from the back of her head.

Currently, they were knotted with twigs, mud, and manure, the product of several weeks of sleeping on the streets. Although the deadly brunt of the winter had passed, the temperamental nature of the rainy season in the City of Ohm merely changed the nature of the unpleasantries experienced by the homeless. Oozing sludge that had festered for many months was now swept up by the high tide from the gush of mountainous snowmelt. Even on sunny days that were a brief respite from the repetitive downpours of spring, most slum dwellers found their gritty hair caked in dried mud. For the illustrious former Madam Altheda, this was no exception.

Once upon time, in a story from happier days, Altheda’s hair had glimmered like a blanket of twinkling stars. They rippled across the Milky Way, as if the night sky itself had chosen to take residence in her curls. The color was indescribable — probably closest to silver — but such a bland description only dealt a gross injustice to the rich complexity of hues present in those keratin fibers. Depending on the sway of her bangs or the angle of sunlight in the sky, one could catch a glimpse of a faint blue tinge, a subtle violet sheen, or any kaleidoscope of colors in between.

As soon as we had first met, the scientist inside me had rationalized an explanation. There must have been some trace ultraviolet-fluorescent component to her hair, and the wavelengths of light emitted by those organic compounds could only exist at the borderline of the visible spectrum. Frankly, it was impossible for the human eye to perceive the full brilliance of her curls.

Even in this isekai world where it was not uncommon for people to have unusual hair colors or other intriguing features, Altheda could only be considered a gem among gems. The iridescence of her hair reflected a heart that was as sharp as diamond.

However, even the hardest diamonds could fracture when struck along their weakest point.

 

The corner of Altheda’s mouth curled up in a weak smile. Even with her head turned away, I could just barely see the edge of her face behind the thick curtain of her knotted messy hair.

"Nez, do you trust me?" Her voice was soft.

The question caught me completely off guard since it came without warning.

I hesitated for a moment. Even though an instinctive reply immediately flashed through my head, I’d never expected to be asked this question so directly. It felt unnatural and awkward to receive such a blunt inquiry. The answer should have been obvious to both of us. Why was it necessary for her to ask such a thing?

"Yeah, I do. I trust you?" I said with slight confusion.

Altheda laughed out loud with a crisp yet eerie reverberating voice. Meanwhile, she leaned backwards, her wet curls dangling in the air. She looked up towards the eaves, her gaze keenly fixated on a broken crack in the slate gutter that caused a disproportionate amount of rainwater to gush from that fracture in the ceiling.

 

As the stream of fluid fell and collided with the cobblestone, it kicked up a thin mist of aerosols, gradually soaking anyone in the vicinity with tiny beads of damp perspiration. The globules of water swelled and coalesced with time, forming many thick nuclei of moisture that glistened in the reflected light.

Big fat droplets slowly trickled from Altheda's cheeks and her loose bangs of hair, stalling when they reached the end of their cliffs in a hydrostatic cling to existence. Eventually, they succumbed to gravity, dripping as they plopped to the earth.

They almost looked like tears, but I knew for a fact that they were no such thing.

Altheda was not the kind of person who was prone to sentimentality. She never cried.

 

"Nez, you far overestimate me. I'm just a normal person," she said, her tone of voice misleadingly casual. "I'm not as strong as you think."

"If you're normal, what is everyone else supposed to be?" I shook my head disbelievingly.

Altheda smiled wryly again, still looking away.

"I don't think you give yourself — and everyone else — enough credit," she said simply.

My friend shifted around and turned to face me, her emerald pupils as clear as crystal. Her serious gaze bore right into my eyes.

"Have a little more faith in yourself. While I’m flattered by what you think of me, you don’t do yourself any favors by mistaking ordinary people for heroes. Outside of fiction, there are no protagonists and antagonists. Those are imaginary narratives spun by storytellers.”

“A prostitute who manipulated the vice provost after three sessions in the doggy-style position into funding the city's largest orphanage despite its bankruptcy sounds totally ordinary to me,” I said sarcastically. “That was five hundred thousand denarii reallocated from the royal budget.”

Altheda did not even blink as she continued her train of thought without hesitation.

“It’s easy to underestimate the ‘ordinary’ people around you, but that’s a mistake. Everyone has their own struggles and simple gifts, and every shallow-looking plebeian that you encounter on the streets is deeper than the ocean. Most people carry heavier burdens than they let on. We are not special.”

“I don’t care. Your story is special to me.”

“Nez, stop it. You’re being unfair. I don’t like hearing you talk about a fictitious version of myself that doesn’t exist. I’m getting too old, too jaded, and too tired for this. Frankly, if I had a chance at a quiet life secluded away in a hermitage somewhere, I would seize it in a heartbeat. You, on the other hand, are itching for something more. Sooner or later, you’ll fly away to chase a better future. You don't need a crippled old hag like me dragging you down, and frankly you’ve rapidly outgrown this place. Please don’t hesitate to cut me off when that time comes.”

I laughed insecurely.

“You're making this sound like I’m leaving you for some weird reason. What kind of horrible friend would I be if I did that? Why are we even talking about this grim topic to begin with?”

I didn't like where this conversation was going. It made me feel uneasy. Where had the Madam Altheda I had always known gone? What had happened to her bright sense of humor, her dazzling confidence, and her fiery vision for the future?

There was a long moment of silence between the two of us. Altheda had a contemplative and reflective look on her face. I shifted my feet uncomfortably as rain continued to splatter on the ground. A large puddle directly in front of my seat prevented me from setting down my legs in their most natural position. Rather than leaving my toes submerged in liquid manure, I awkwardly played a game of Twister with my bare soles, perching my feet on whatever dry spots I could reach.

 

"I guess that's true. We probably won't be able to sit like this anymore," she finally said after some time of deep thought.

My eyes widened as I looked up from my feet.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean exactly what I mean. This is a goodbye, in a sense,” she said.

"In a sense? Don’t just dump this philosophical-theoretical abstrusity on me. That’s not something to joke about. I’m going to see you again tomorrow. I'm cashing in with the Rag Merchant this week, and I'll probably have enough extra to splurge on buying a little salt and oil. We can share a meal together and fix this problem just like we’ve fixed all the others."

However, my friend shook her head. Altheda looked back at me, and her expression was apologetic.

“I’ve been considering going to one of the street gangs, The Needles. If they take me, then I won't have the casual freedom like this anymore. I wasn’t sure about my feelings before, but after seeing you today, I think I’ve finally come to a decision. I’m going to sell myself in.”

I stared at her blankly.

“No. Absolutely not.” I blurted out reflexively. “You’re the one who told me never to go that route, no matter how desperate I get.”

“Things are a little different for me.”

“You know how initiation is in the gangs. It’s brutal. There’s no guarantee you’ll get through it alive. We’ve both seen the corpses of girls who didn’t make it. With the way your foot is… you won’t be ‘jumped in’ the ordinary way. They’ll make you prove yourself the only way you can, and at that point you’ll just be… just be… a thing that not even your own gang has the slightest bit of respect for.”

“I know.”

“Then why?!”

Altheda closed her eyes as she suddenly reached out to grab my hands.

It was at that point that I realized that her hands were trembling.

 

+ + +

 

Ever since I was little, I’ve never been fond of fairy tales. I always thought they were misleading.

And they lived happily ever after,” the last page would read.

The newlywed prince and princess would ride laughing away into the sunset as the evil witch laid rotting and vanquished in some puddle elsewhere. The ending was always implied, yet never explicitly written by Walt Disney. The hero and heroine would be blessed with many children and grandchildren, and the entire realm would glow with sunny days and golden flowers ever after.

I would always read to that point and try turning the page. However, it was always blank.

There were no more pages to turn.

I would put down the book and feel a certain degree of confusion and loss as I returned to the monotony of my everyday life. To me, the “happy ending” only felt empty.

 

Before I died, I was twenty-six years old.

The typical protagonist of a fairy tale was probably a late teenager, somewhere around eighteen or nineteen years old. They would go on a literary saga, slay some dragons, rescue some princesses, become rich and famous, and marry the king’s daughter in the process. If it was a Japanese webnovel, there was the added supermarket promotion of buy-one-get-five-free, and the protagonist would inevitably end up with a harem of beautiful bishoujos.

Their overwhelming fortune aside, the story would usually end before the protagonist turned twenty-two.

The author would pull the “happily ever after” trigger, and time would suddenly stop in the universe.

Age twenty-seven, age forty-five, and age sixty-three didn't exist in the story. Any future joys, sorrows, blessings, disappointments, comedies, tragedies, and hopes were completely unwritten. There was no quarter- or middle-life crisis, no hint of divorce that is the outcome of 40% of American marriages, nor any inkling of the inevitable loss of our loved ones who played formative roles in our lives.

The world would stay frozen in pure naive teenage happiness for the rest of eternity.

 

I think about this sometimes, because frankly it is too easy to take the small happinesses of life for granted. It is human nature to think that things will never change, and as obsessed as we always are with complaining about our misfortunes, we forget to appreciate the blessings we possessed all along. All of a sudden, it is too late.

When framed and cut by the right film director, it is never too difficult to represent a piece of real biographic narrative as a poetic fairy tale.

Madam Altheda’s story was a fitting example that could have made itself into a tear-jerking epic trilogy of heat-warming proportions, so long as the motion picture recording was paused before she completed her third decade.

Despite her misfortunate origins, Altheda’s youth was blessed by encounters with fairy godmothers, Prince Charmings, and transformative glass slippers. She had dozens of romantic escapades and moonlight sonatas where she played the Capulet to another dashing Montague. There were one thousand and one nights when she was the Scheherazade who captivated King Shahryar with dangling cliffhangers and dramatic prose. I’m almost convinced she could have become the princess of an exotic foreign country if she had played her cards just a tiny bit differently.

In this isekai world, it was not easy for one dirty girl in the streets to be noticed amidst an enormous sea of millions. All of us started mediocre and worthless, and this was an era where nobody even bothered to stop the cart when a wagon wheel belonging to a rich merchant casually crushed the leg of a misplaced beggar.

Even a career in prostitution was not something that just any girl could obtain if they wanted it.

Actually, in this universe, it was normal for many starving street girls to gaze upon the red light district with open envy. Unlike aristocratic maidens who spent their childhood fantasizing about becoming princesses, the rest of us dreamt of the enormous fat tips and the fawning lifestyle that came with being a celebrity entertainer like Madam Altheda.

Prostitution houses existed on tiers in the City of Ohm.

The finest ones were impossible for ordinary people from the streets to gain entry into, and women who worked there lived lavish opulent lives as elegant concubines for the wealthy.

There was an entire spectrum of classier whorehouses and more economical ones, and the clientele varied appropriately according to the price and quality of services offered by the young women who contracted themselves there.

Sex existed in a free market in this isekai city, and supply far outstripped demand. It was common to hear bachelors brag in the city taverns that a casual roll in the hay was cheaper than a pint of ale, depending on exactly where you went. Blowjobs were considered complimentary at some establishments, and intense competition drove prices to the floor.

Eventually, there was a point where the burdens of sex weren’t worth the price for those who placed their bodies on sale, and most poor women had very little interest selling themselves in the trashiest whorehouses where each round went for pennies. At that point, it was hard labor just like all the other career options available to the poor.

However, the dark stories did not just end there.

Exploitative business practices were rampant in the underground world, and there always seemed to be a voracious demand for hardcore, deviant, and twisted sexual practices from hungry men that no sane woman would willingly consent to. Disturbingly, some of those establishments were among the most popular, and consequently they were a source of much of the cautious paranoia that any slightly attractive street girl harbored while walking alone in the night.

This was just a component to the everyday routine of the urban poor, and we were accustomed to this unpleasant fact of life just as Americans are desensitized to deadly 5-car pileup motor vehicle accidents on evening CNN news. However, this wasn’t something that we could ignore just because we thought it was slightly unpleasant. After all, the victim could have easily been one of us if we had drawn a slightly shorter straw.

Just as I chose a life rummaging through trash and sewage, others chose livelihoods in other unsavory aspects of the world. The experience was difficult for all of us, and the chance of winning the lottery was miniscule. In this sense, Madam Altheda possessed an incredible story for rising from the bottom of the barrel to the very top.

 

After achieving her own ‘happily ever after’, Altheda had become so successful that she’d considered retiring from the nightlife. With the abundant fortune that smiled upon her, Altheda had the time to reconsider the things that she wanted most in life. Although none of her dozens of romantic exploits had ever yielded fruit from the perspective of permanent companionship, she gradually realized as the years increasingly passed by that she was painfully empty.

There was no hope and concept for a further purpose.

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Altheda had reached the top of the mountain feeling nothing.

She never obtained the self-actualization that she’d always desired despite her many tribulations.

Later on, she confessed to me that she’d always wanted to have a family, and she didn’t realize it until very late in her journey. However by that point, the traditional rites of matrimony and fidelity — for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health — were out of the question due to her status as a scarlet woman. Nonetheless, she decided that she wanted to have a child with her aging body before the window of opportunity passed forever.

In her head, Altheda mentally calculated the finances and her savings, and consequently stopped using contraception when the numbers seemed to line up. She thought that she had more than enough to live a quiet life of obscurity in a foreign country with her newborn child.

However, things had turned out disastrously in less than a blink of an eye.

At that point, it was too late for any regrets.

 

+ + +

 

“I’ve sacrificed too much to just give up now,” she whispered with a wry smile.

“You don’t have to do this. You shouldn’t have to do this,” I repeated.

Altheda shook her head as she pulled her hands away.

“I’ve been thinking about this possibility ever since the beginning. I’ve actually been incredibly fortunate that the Hibiscus Loft didn’t silence me from the start. With all of the nobility that I’ve shared a bed with, I’m more of a liability to the aristocracy alive than dead. Sooner or later, someone will notice the oversight, and the dagger will come after my throat. I’ve been living on borrowed time ever since I’ve been cast to the streets.”

“But…”

“Nez, it’s more than just me. You’ve seen how Imar is. He isn’t going to make it at this rate.”

She waited for me look down at her lap, where her newborn son lay wrapped in woolen blankets. Hesitantly, she started lifting the fabric that shielded him from the elements.

A lump developed at the back of my throat when I saw with my own eyes what the blankets concealed, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

Altheda had not been exaggerating.

 

Contrary to what a lay person might expect, malnutrition in infants and children does not always lead to thin sticks and bones. My knowledge from professional school told me that child malnourishment could certainly result in edema in the limbs. Bilateral swelling in the lower legs was one of the early signs for severe malnourishment. In fact, extreme cases of Kwashiorkor’s are characterized by ascites and bloating of the abdomen.

The lack of protein intake causes a reduction of albumin content in the bloodstream, which is the primary osmotic force that prevents fluid from escaping into the extravascular space. Compensatory demand for albumin synthesis stresses the liver and results in hepatomegaly. Particularly in infants, malnourishment is a dangerous spiral. As they grow too weak to feed, the starvation compounds on itself and the infant can decompensate in just a few weeks.

In the Western medical lexicon, this was termed “failure to thrive.”

 

I looked back up at Altheda, concern deeply set in my eyes.

She averted her eyes as she spoke again.

“It’s not him. It’s me. My milk production is falling. I don’t think it’s enough for him.”

“How long has it been now?” I asked.

“Maybe for the past week? I don’t know why it’s happening, though. I’m not eating any less than I was a month ago, and I’ve been trying my hardest to fill my stomach as much as I can. My savings are vanishing like smoke, but this isn’t something I would try to cut corners on. I’ve been prioritizing food over shelter or warmth or anything else right now, so I can’t imagine that insufficient food would be the cause for my milk to run dry.”

“Is it okay if I hold him?”

Altheda nodded and hesitantly passed her infant into my arms.

The first thing I did was obtain a feel for his temperature and his brachial pulse. My hands wandered to check his conjunctiva, inside his mouth, as well as his primitive reflexes. The rooting reflex and the sucking reflex are critical for breastfeeding and is present in infants since birth, and I wanted to be sure my friend wasn’t mistaken that it was only her milk production at fault.

It was unusual for milk production to be the primary issue. While it was common for mothers to subjectively claim this was the case, the measured caloric content and volume of milk produced does not correlate well with the dietary quality of the mother.1Please don't take anything you read in this story as medical advice! >.< While this appeared to be the case for calories when I did my research for this chapter, there are many additional vitamins, nutrients, and other components that are present in breast milk that may be affected by maternal diet. In fact, there is strong evidence that starvation experienced by the parents does affect growth in the offspring through epigenetic factors. Even impoverished mothers in third world countries usually have no issue lactating, and the female body will still break down fat reserves to produce milk in the absence of a consistent diet.

In this sense, primary lactation failure was rare, except in cases of extreme starvation.

Secondary causes were more common. For instance, simply not breastfeeding enough can cause lactation to cease naturally. Suckling stimulates the release of prolactin, which is necessary for the production of milk in humans. As a result, a busy mother who forgets to breastfeed in favor of bottled formula milk will naturally experience a decrease in milk production, and such scenarios were far more common among first-time mothers.

Another very possible scenario could be that the baby doesn't cry when it needs to eat. In this case, the mother wouldn’t be woken up to breastfeed or know when was the right time to feed again. Babies with cerebral palsy or developmental disorders might not latch during feeding sessions on for as long as they should. All of these could be considered problems with the infant rather than the mother.

However, from my brief exam, I did not notice any obvious abnormalities apart from general lethargy. But then again, I wasn’t a licensed practitioner, and I had already learned the hard way not to trust any knowledge I carried with me from my previous life.

I looked back up to my friend.

“How long is he feeding for? And how many times a day?”

“Ten minutes maybe, each time? He doesn’t cry as much as he used to, but I try to encourage him to suckle every one or two hours.”

“If it were me, I’d make sure he absolutely doesn’t go four hours without feeding, especially overnight. Ten minutes sounds a little short to me, but there is very little you can do if he doesn’t seem hungry.2Do not take Nez's words as medical advice! >.< In fact, she missed a few things and is partially wrong about certain statements, so go see a real doctor if there's ever something that concerns you! He may be getting tired in the middle of each nursing session, so try to offer it to him more frequently if you can.”

“Quella the Midwife also said ten minutes sounded short when I spoke with her, but thank you for your advice too.” Altheda nodded as she took her infant back into her arms. “Besides, I think my main problem is that I’m not producing enough milk.”

 

At that point, I paused.

The words that Altheda had spoken earlier continued to echo and bounce about in my head. Worry and concern for my friend compounded like a crystalizing fractal matrix, and it was becoming increasingly clear that there were multiple factors at play in this complex picture. Mentally, I struggled to assemble the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle. 

“The Needles…” I murmured subconsciously.

“Imar needs a wet-nurse,” Altheda said simply as she rocked her baby in her arms.

I blinked a few times as I looked up at my friend.

“Ordinarily, only the rich can afford a wet-nurse. Otherwise, it is a death sentence for the baby if the mother is unable to feed her child. Even before that, on this continent, the mortality rate for all children surviving to adulthood is close to 50%. I’m not oblivious to the statistics. I’ve slept around with enough scholars from the Royal Institute to know a little bit about numbers.”

“So you think joining a gang will give you access to one?” I completed her train of thought.

Altheda nodded.

“The initiation aside, the street gangs treat their own like family and they’re fiercely territorial. Even if I end up used like a dirty rag at the bottom of the pecking order, I need people I can count on, and this is something that Imar needs right now.”

I couldn’t find any words to say in response. Instead, I only played with my fingers absentmindedly as I bit my lip.

“With the way things are headed, nothing good is coming for the lone wolves,” she continued. “I’ve been watching the ripples move in the pond that we reside in, and the way that I’m living right now isn’t sustainable. It will only continue to get worse in the future.”

“You really think this gamble is the right choice?” I finally forced myself to speak. “You don’t exactly have a lot to offer to a gang, especially the way your leg is, and they might not even accept you. If you’ve bet wrong and miscalculated evenly slightly, they’ll kill you just for the fun of it.”

“I know. And that’s also why I’m not going empty handed.”

“What do you even have that will interest them?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“That’s easy,” she said, staring emotionlessly straight into my eyes. “It’s you.”

 

+ + +

 

I shot straight up, my feet splashing straight into the puddle I had gingerly been avoiding this entire time.

For a moment, I only stared at Altheda.

“You’re selling me out?!” My delayed reaction was filled with incredulous disbelief.

“Evidently.”

Altheda had a painful weak smile on her face as she finally revealed her full hand of cards.

“You’re Diseased,” she said slowly. “But even more interestingly, you’re clearly an Otherworlder. With your name, Nezumi, were you born in a country called ‘日本 (Ni-hon)’? We have a few of those Japanese-Galican encyclopedias in the library at the Royal Institute. They’re a niche part of the collection since most Otherworlders seem to come from other places, but anyone sufficiently resourced would be curious enough to research the origins of your strange name.”

I felt like I was being punched with a sledgehammer straight to my gut.

I couldn’t believe this. My world had suddenly been inverted and turned upside down. After seven straight months of toiling away in subhuman conditions, now I was suddenly informed that there were other reincarnators in this shoddy world as well? Wasn’t this slightly too cruel, even if it was just for a joke?

“I’m not sure how familiar you are with international politics, but Otherworlders play a curious role in the global theater. I mean, most of them are quite useless and clueless when it comes to practical things, so you’d be an idiot ruler if you actually gave them any real responsibility or power, but it’s fashionable these days for kings and emperors gather them like collectibles and parade them around all prettied up in gilded cages. If their identity can be verified, I think your people are some of the highest-selling exotic commodities on the black market.”

“Hold on a minute!”

My incredulous eyes were filled with hurt and disappointment.

“You’re really going to do this to me?” I asked, feeling blank and betrayed on the inside.

 

My friend(?) looked down at her hands, her expression mixed and complex.

She brushed the hair of her newborn infant, her actions tender and soft.

“Yeah, I’m doing this,” she said. “Are you going to strike me down before I go to the Needles? Do you have the guts to stop me and kick me while I’m gasping helplessly on the ground? I have a dagger concealed on my left leg, so if you can reach it, you might as well slit my throat too. It’s important to properly finish your work and not leave any dangling threads that might come back to bite you.”

Altheda’s voice was perfectly calm, neutral, and collected.

“I’m a very stubborn person, so don’t think anything you say will change my mind,” she said.

My hands tightened into fists at her words, my nails biting into my palms. 

I felt torn and hurt like a stake had been driven right into my chest. Her provocative words fanned the betrayal that I felt in my heart. However, as silence fell between us, I realized that my feet were rooted in place. I couldn't will myself to move. Slowly, I stumbled backwards while my grip loosened. She was right. I couldn’t do this. 

I couldn’t. I just simply couldn’t.

I drew a blank on my tenacity, and this was my limit.

I hated all of this. I hated everything about this goddamn world. The deeper into the mire I found myself sinking, the more I hated myself. With each passing day, I was becoming more and more of an unrecognizable stranger. Why did everything have to end in hatred and antipathy? I couldn’t even blame my friend for all this.

The only thing I felt was emptiness.

 

+ + +

 

Madam Altheda wordlessly shuffled her belongings around as she took her cane into her hands. With a huff, she pushed herself to her feet and hobbled a few unsteady steps with her entire weight slouched over the flimsy wooden support. Her infant was slung across the front of her chest in an improvised sling.

Slowly, she inched forward with tiny lopsided steps as she passed the threshold where the rain poured down the eaves of the tannery.

She paused at my paralyzed figure that was getting increasingly drenched from the downpour. For a moment, she just stood there without saying anything, imbibing the sensation of water pounding on her back just as it did to mine.

She finally spoke.

“Nez, don’t be stupid. Do I really have to spell it out for you?”

 

Altheda failed to elicit a response. She sighed and suddenly raised her voice.

“Use your head more! You’re smart, but it’s useless if you don’t think on your feet,” she chastised. “Why do you think I’ve told you all of this? If I really wanted to sell you out, would I really announce all of my evil plans in front of your face like a cackling second-rate villainess?”

She tapped her wooden cane angrily on the ground.

“I don’t have all day. Quick thought exercise, right now. What’s my objective in telling you everything at face value?”

Her voice was impatient and pedantic.

 

“You’re…” My voice was timid and reticent, unsure of what to say.

Meanwhile, the gears in my head chugged and spun frantically while they chased the thread I had been given.

“You’re.. telling me this because you don’t want me to be caught off guard.”

I came to my answer simultaneously as I spoke my thoughts aloud.

“Yup! Now do me a favor, Nez. I’d estimate around eight hours, give or take, before you have some very scary mobsters knocking down your front door in Quagmire Bottom. Before they and some other silly idiots decide to set fire to everything you’ve ever held dear to yourself, get out of my fucking shithole of a city. Comprendes, mi amiga?”

My expression went completely white.

This was entirely out-of-character for the Madam Altheda that I knew. It was a version of her self that she had never shown me, but somehow I recognized this unfamiliar personality. It felt warm, familial, and nostalgic. Where had I felt this feeling before?

“Get out of the city? But how? It’s at least a hundred leagues to the next urban settlement, and even then I don’t have citizenship documents, supplies, or hardly enough money.”

“You’ll figure something out, sweetie. I’m sure you’ll be fine, if you trust me at all. You’ve got what it takes already. All you need is a little push out of the nest.”

Altheda patted me casually on the head as she turned around and started limping away deeper into the pouring rain.

I watched her departing figure speechlessly, and my feelings blazed in total disarray. They churned inside me like a vortex, and my emotions felt like a child trying to fly a kite in the midst of a hurricane.

I didn’t know what to say or do or feel. Everything was too sudden. I hadn’t quite registered everything that had transpired in such a short few minutes, and my legs felt as heavy as lead anchors.

 

Was this it? Was this her stupidly indirect way of saying goodbye?

No matter how I turned it over in my head, I didn’t like it.

In fact, I hated it. I hated the way this had all come to pass.

 

Suddenly, I lunged towards her. Reaching out as I flew into the rain, I seized my closest friend and pulled her to a stop in the middle of her tracks.

I came from behind her in a tight hug. I buried my face into her back and dug my fingers into the stinky muddy fabric of her clothes, refusing to let go. Meanwhile, the rain continued to wash the dirt from our hair and blur our eyes as endless water fell from the sky above us.

“What about you?” I whispered. “Are you going to be okay?”

Altheda gently touched the back of my encircling arms with the palm of her hand.

“I’ll be fine. I’m the one and only me, after all,” she replied with a reassuring smile. “So move along, it’s time to get going.”

 

It was at those words when I realized for the first time that Madam Altheda was a terrible liar.

Slowly, the rain that rolled down my cheeks turned salty. 

I wasn't crying. Despite how I looked, I absolutely wasn't crying.

There just wasn't anything I hated more than rainy days.

 

 
 

If you follow me (@otokonoko) on Scribble Hub, you’ve probably already heard that I’m now working together with Trismegistus Shandy, who is the fabulous editor of MrSimple here on SH. Both of them are incredible veteran writers and mentors to me, so you should check them out if you haven’t already. In short, thanks to Tris’s efforts, all of the earlier chapters have been edited up until this point. XD

These past two weeks have been hard. It’s really emotionally exhausting for me to write and re-write and stress over this project, and honestly many days I don’t really know where I’m going. For those of you who read my incoherent blog on NUF and support me when I’m down, this chapter really only exists because of you guys. I love you all so much.

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