Esmeralda's Journey - Part 3

And so it went, going from town to town, learning to live on her own and how to defend herself. Despite the daily reminders to herself, Esmeralda was surprised to find herself actually making it through. As long as she avoided trouble and kept her dagger handy when it found her, it didn’t seem to be a problem. She didn’t have to use it terribly much. Looking like she knew what she was doing was enough most of the time. The only people who insisted in bothering her were drunks or unusually creepy men. With drunkards, it was easy to push their interest on to someone else, generally in a way that would cause fights she could sneak out of. With creepy men, well, she had no problem putting a dagger in their thighs. She certainly wasn’t going to be at the end of a strange alley by herself with no protection. She was alone while she was in a room she paid for, and on the path to Penance, but that was only during the day. Sometimes the villages were just too far apart for that, but there were always at least outposts for the guards. She tried passing one by, and she ended up sleeping the day away once she got to a village. She was never going to do that again.

Slowly the towns became less sketchy and more welcoming, and it was the path that worried her. The path through the swamp was more heavily guarded, because of the wild natives. Once she was out of the swamp, it was her and the wild animals, and either the outposts were getting further apart, or she was slowly plodding along. Either way, it was starting to hit sunset before she found shelter.

One day, when she had been thinking about how close Penance must be (a thought she had been having regularly for the last week or two. She had lost track of how far along she was, and determined it wasn’t important enough to ask someone), Esmeralda looked up and it was one night. She noticed the sun was starting to set, but she could have sworn she had more time. She looked for lights to tell her a village or outpost was coming soon, but the path curved, and the trees were too dense to see what was ahead of her.

She tried not to worry (an outpost couldn’t be that far away), but it wasn’t long before she heard a howl. She kept her dagger ready, but she wasn’t confident that her knifing skills could take down a pack of wolves. Wolves weren’t a big problem for the caravans, were they? Maybe the path wasn’t in their territory. Isn’t that how wolves work? Maybe? Esmeralda regretted not paying attention in school whenever they talked about nature. She moved toward the side of the road as she walked, in case she suddenly needed to climb a tree. Eventually her paranoia got the best of her and she started to sprint. It didn’t last very long. She caught her breath and settled for walking really quickly, hoping to see lights soon. It took forever (fifteen minutes) before she saw any lights, and she started running.

She had completely exhausted herself by the time she got to the village, falling asleep as soon as she got herself a room. She considered staying for a day or two to relax in a nice, locked room, but in the end decided that she wanted to get to Penance and stop traveling. In truth, she was not in as much danger as she suspected. Not only do many animals tend to avoid people, the ones that don’t would not go anywhere near Esmeralda. People have an awful sense of smell, but anything dangerous in the woods knows not to hurt anything that smells like her.

Esmeralda kept moving until she finally reached a gate to a big city that could have only been Penance. She knew it wasn’t as big as Fishery, but Fishery felt like ages ago. Now, she was here, and there was this grand wall that disappeared into the trees (she was glad when she got out of swamps and into real forests), with a small river (creek?) running alongside it. Past the gate she could see a full tavern, and looking down the streets, she could see all the wonderful shops that were closed for the night. It was exquisite. She had so missed being in a big city. The voices of her schoolmates telling storied about the dangerous Penancians echoed in the back of her mind, but that was a different time. When nothing bad had ever happened to her. Perhaps because she lived in the Upper Ward, perhaps because people knew who her siblings were and thought they might protect her. But she still patted her dagger to make sure it wasn’t too far away as she went through the gates of Penance, and put up the hood of her cloak on the way into the popular tavern.

Esmeralda's Journey - Part 2

Esmeralda opened her eyes the next morning to find she had slept comfortably and soundly. She looked around, but nothing looked different from when she had gone to sleep. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting to happen. Part of her wondered if there was anything to be worried about. ‘All in my head,’ she repeated to herself. Once she was on the path again, she began to relax. She really was doing this. She left Fishery, and she was on her own.

When she got to the next town, there was about an hour of daylight left. Esmeralda went to the local inn, got a room, and went directly upstairs to relax until tomorrow. She was only there for about ten minutes before she decided to leave. If she was looking for her siblings, she was going to have to do more than travel and sleep. The next half an hour was spent deciding whether she should start now. She was unlikely to find them here, after all. She heard them. They were going to Penance. And they left over a week before she did.

Eventually, she convinced herself that she should be more adventurous because she wasn’t going to find them if she wasn’t brave enough. The town was relatively quiet. As she was reaching the edge of the town, she thought she heard someone yelling. She started walking towards it before her mind had a chance to make a decision. ‘It probably wasn’t even real. I’m sure I just imagined that. It’s just that it’s gotten dark. It’ll make me feel better just to see… I’m sure it’s nothing.’ But as she moved closer, it didn’t go away. It turned into a man, pleading with someone. She couldn’t hear what was being said, just the begging and sobbing of a broken man. Her mind tried to convince her to go back. ‘Pretend you never heard anything. It’s none of your business. He probably deserves it.‘ And yet her feet kept moving forward. She saw the man as he was collapsing to the ground. More importantly was the man standing over him with a sword (or a knife, she wasn’t entirely sure).

‘RUN. Run now!’ Her feet were ready to listen now, but didn’t get the message before the man turned around to see her. She ran as fast as she could. He was faster. He tackled her and held her to the ground.

“What did you see?”

“Maybe next time you should do private things in private.” He pulled her head back by the hair and a knife appeared in front of her throat. ‘Oh, shit. Fuck fuck fuck. I didn’t mean to say that out loud. I’m so fucking stupid. Did I really say that out loud?’ “I…I meant nothing! I heard nothing, I saw nothing! All I meant by it was… if you’re concerned about what I saw, maybe you could benefit from some more, uh… discretion?”

The knife disappeared and Esmeralda was flipped over. The man’s face had clearly been on the wrong side of a blade before. He smiled a revolting smile, took his dirty, bloody hand and wiped away her tears. “That’s okay, beautiful. I understand. You still put me in a bad position, my love. Now, you understand that, don’t you?” She nodded frantically. “It would, however, be a shame for such a beautiful creature to leave this world, especially like this.” A kiss on the cheek. She felt as though she were being kissed by the swamp itself. “Perhaps we can work something out.” 'Oh, no. No no no.' A kiss on the neck. He lingered. She closed her eyes. Was this really happening? ‘Just think. You can get out of this. Maybe I can… Oh god, I can’t breathe. Concentrate on breathing. Just breathe. Am I breathing yet?’ She felt lightheaded, and the last thing she felt before passing out was his hand pressing against her chest.

As Esmeralda’s consciousness crept back, she lied staring up at the stars for a few moments. It was incredibly relaxing. Esmeralda snapped fully back when she looked to see where she was, and what took place earlier that evening flooded her memories. She jumped to her feet, and ran back to her room at the inn, passing a trio of guards playing cards.

Taking stock of herself, she wasn’t badly injured. Her hands and knee were scraped, and she was frazzled, but she felt fine otherwise. Her clothes were a bit dirty, but only ripped where she had scraped her knee. Importantly, she had all her clothes. She checked her pouch, and she had all her money too.

It didn’t make any sense. She fainted. You can’t get any more defenseless than that. He was in a position to take whatever he wanted from her. Why did it seem like he hadn’t done anything to her? Maybe someone scared him off. Someone that would have gone through the trouble of scaring off an attacker, but not help the woman being attacked? Maybe the less-than-stealthy assassin suddenly had something more important to do. Or maybe she should just consider herself lucky and not worry about why she was okay now.
Once she had calmed down, she remembered the guards and marched out to where they were playing.

“A man attacked me tonight!”

Not one of them looked up from their cards.

“Are you going to do anything?”

The guard closest to her sighed, put down his cards, and looked her in the eye. He looked like a soldier, maybe even a captain, with his big ugly square face, and his dark rough beard. She took a few steps back, startled (having an unhappy guard stare you down will do that). He asked her if the man was a native. Esmeralda was puzzled by this question, but answered, “No…”

“Then it isn’t our job. Our job is to stop smugglers, protect cargo, and keep out the savage natives, which if you ask me, is all of them, but the empire considers some more civilized than others.”

“But he—”

“Not. My. Problem. Look, we’re off duty as it is. We’re all tired, and we don’t want to be doing somebody else’s job. All we want to do is cards, and then bed.”

“Whose job is it?”

He shrugged and went back to playing cards. Esmeralda hated the swamp. She dragged herself back to her room, locked the door, and tried to sleep. It was impossible. The more she tried to get comfortable, the less it worked, and the longer she stayed awake, the harder it was to stop thinking about the events of the night, and to stop her imagination from running wild with ideas of what could happen to her if she did fall asleep. She stayed in bed until she had enough energy to move on the next morning. She wasn’t sure if she had slept at all. (She had, if only for short periods here and there.)

She considered going back to Fishery. She didn’t even like her family. She could finish her last year of school, get an apprenticeship and never concern herself with her family again. Perhaps she could take her time and find some sort of caravan on their way to Capitol. She heard that’s a wonderful place to live. She thought on this as she procured a knife (which was actually a dagger) and a cloak for herself, useful for whatever she chose, since she would have to spend at least one more night in the swamps. But confronted with the decision, she began moving forward to Penance. She was certainly not going to let this get the best of her.

She did, however, need to be less careless. She had no idea how to take care of herself, that was obvious. She cursed herself for believing that the fear and worry she felt was all in her head. But she could do this. She just had to concentrate, be confident, and practice. Upon her arrival in the next village, which for the life of her, she could not tell apart from the first two, Esmeralda wasted no time in getting to a room where she could practice using her new knife.

Out, in, out, in. The first step was getting it out quickly, without hurting herself and most importantly, without dropping it. Gripping objects should be a basic human function, something you get the hang of as a toddler, so she found it amazing how easy it was to fumble the blade. Sometimes after arming herself particularly quickly, Esmeralda would reward herself with a few swishes. Over the next few days, it was more of the same, slowly progressing towards practicing slicing and stabbing the bedframe, which was beat up enough that a few notches here or there didn’t change its look.

Esmeralda's Journey - Part 1

So this is the beginning of Esmeralda's story. I have a bit of prologue that's bothering me, but I don't want to post it. It's something that I'm not sure if I want to change or take out completely. It was written a long time ago, and doesn't quite... fit anymore.

Not to say I'm absolutely in love with this. It's just that it's complete enough. It could be the first chapter. If, you know, I don't completely axe it.

Edit: Okay, I'm splitting this into 3 parts. It's so long for one blog post.

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She thought she would be okay on the path, but now Esmeralda felt unprepared. School had taught her the area around Fishery (surrounded on three sides by swamp, the last by water), but studying maps in school was different from being there. There are small villages periodically through the swamp. These were not originally villages, but outposts for guards to sleep when not on duty, protecting us from the unreformed natives of the swamps. Once out of the swamp, the towns are more scattered. She wondered if this would feel less intimidating if she had been more adventurous as a child, like her siblings. Perhaps she should have waited until morning. Once Fishery was out of sight, the path was the only thing she had to keep from being entirely lost. The air seemed to be a thick greenish brown, which she didn’t even realize was possible. The fog made it much darker than she had anticipated, even though the moon was nearly full.

How could she have believed that knowing it all on paper would mean she could find her way in real life? She knew from school that Fishery in itself was a great feat of the God King. Traveling to and from Fishery was certainly easier now, but it was generally done with more than one girl who was not even of age yet, alone in the middle of the night. She paused to look around, and then quickened her pace. Esmeralda tried to ignore the swamp and concentrate on the glorious stories of the God King. How he always kept the smartest by his side, and worked with them to figure out how to use the ocean beyond all of this swamp.

‘The natives simply lived in the swamp, but we were smarter than that. Fishery was a place built half on the swamp, half on the ocean itself, so that we could use the waters and not have to endure the hardships of the swamp. The God King and his best workers built the brick path as they went so that the families could make it through the swamp to live in this great city.’ She was proud to be from Fishery, and to be a part of the Empire.

She loved stories of the God King. That’s how she became friends with Sarah. Their family used to live in Capitol, and when the family they served came to Fishery, they packed up too. They came to town around a year after Esmeralda’s father died. And they had a collection of God King books. Their master had given them the family’s children’s books after the children had grown and left. Sarah and Esmeralda met at the Festival, where Sarah was buried in one of the books, holding onto her mother’s hand, ignoring the festivities. After Esmeralda learned Sarah had such a collection, they began meeting secretly, and reading them to each other. Esmeralda loved the stories, and loved even more that the subject was taboo in their home. She never found out why they never talked about the God King in their home. There was never a punishment for it because it was never acknowledged as something bad. It was something to be swept under the rug, nothing more, nothing less.

Esmeralda always assumed that the stories of Fishery and the swamp were exaggerated, like how much of the road the God King himself built, and the vastness of the swamp. While she could say nothing of how many bricks the God King had laid by hand, she now considered “vast” to be an understatement in terms of the swamp. She had no sense of how far she’d gone or how long she’d been traveling.

She noticed a man in armor walking her way, so she tried to look confident. She had to hide her shaking hands when he asked what she was doing here, late at night, but she had prepared.

"I know it's late sir. I got word that my cousin is sick in Penance, and they don't know how much time she has left, so I started out as soon as possible."

He thought about this. Esmeralda thought about all the things that could happen if he didn't believe her. What if he sent her to the Penance prison? That's not the way she wants to get into the city. But they don't send you to the mines for little things like this. Do they? What if he thought she was a threat? If he had to "take care" of her? She could be taken down by most people fairly quickly. A trained guard in armor could tear her apart. Before Esmeralda's mind went any further, the guard turned to her and asked if she knew the way. She told him she did, and that she tries to see her cousin as much as she can. In fact, she had just come back from there, having spent the year with her. She had only been back for a month. It was frustrating considering it takes easily twice that long to travel there, but it was her cousin after all. The point was, she was sure she hadn't forgotten it. Esmeralda wasn't sure why she built on the lie. Since she had already tricked him, most of it was fluff. Regardless, he was satisfied with the answer. He asked to look through her bag, but then let her continue on. He was only the first guard she would come across, and she had a pretty good story now.

Was it necessary to lie at all? The guards patrolling the path here wouldn't be concerned with a girl running after her siblings. Especially if they believe her to be an adult. They were here to look out for smugglers and to protect us from those damn natives. The stories of the natives in the Blight are worse than stories of the Penancians. The natives in the colonies supposedly have some respect for the kingdom, but it's better to be safe about things like that.

The first town she came across was right in the middle of the swamp, and it felt like it. The air was thick, slimy, and dank, and the people were no different. Well, they didn’t look any different. Esmeralda wanted to assume they were perfectly nice people that were unkempt because it was difficult in the swamp, but she felt no need to find out one way or the other.

There was a pervasive smell in the inn that seemed like what the swamp would smell like if it had somehow gone bad. When she walked in, there was a strange man in the corner, staring at her, and another strange man behind the bar, who ran the place. He reminded her of the monster in the children’s book Sarah read to calm her the first time she ran away from home. That story was about the early days, when the God King was just starting to build the kingdom, and a great monster was threatening the people. The God King, of course, fought the monster, and when it was destroyed, he vowed to always protect his people from the evil of the world. It was all very grand.

She suddenly felt very aware that she was not in Fishery anymore. She could feel her heart beating, and had a brief thought of getting home on fumes and adrenaline. She told herself to keep going. There was nothing she could do in Fishery. Everything was towards Penance. And from what she’s heard about Penance, Esmeralda was wondering if she’d ever feel safe again.

But nobody had harassed her. Nobody had even talked to her, or even come near her. She let the weirdness of this new place get to her. She marched up to the bar, determined to be cheerful and friendly, and asked for a room. Looking at the man again, a bit more calmly, she realized that he looked nothing like the monster. He was not, by any measure, an attractive man, but not monster-like. She grabbed the key and headed to her room. She still felt a bit spooked by this place, but she was exhausted. All she could do now was close her eyes and hope nothing gets into her room while she sleeps.