The beast dipped lower as the wind swept faster around them. Lorelei clutched the handle with all her might, her fingers locked around the leather grip that kept her palm from slipping. All she had to do was hold on tight. Shiniel, by contrast, looked entirely at home in the air. She held her cap in one hand and steered the beast down by the front handle, her gray jacket billowing behind her, now obscuring Lorelei's view and slapping her across the face with the force of the wind.
"Put your jacket away," she snapped.
Shiniel, seated in front of her and taking the full blunt force of the wind against her eardrums, caught nothing but a whistle—or perhaps a slur. To her, it sounded as though Lorelei was swearing at her, so she chose to ignore it and keep her attention fixed on the descent. Perfect control mattered more, with the course running as long as it was. If the beast flipped in the worst case, maybe she could still save herself; the same couldn't be said for Lorelei, who had no way to stop a fall of her own. So Lorelei kept screaming behind her, trying to catch her attention, and thanks to the misunderstanding, Shiniel ignored her the entire way down.
They landed beside a gravel road, not far from the town's entrance. Shiniel fed the beast as a small reward for its remarkable effort, while Lorelei screamed herself hoarse and red-faced—courtesy of the jacket, and especially the loose, metallic-silver ends of its built-in tighteners. Shiniel simply pulled her cap down over her eyes and apologized.
"I thought you were swearing," she said by way of defense.
"Well, now I am! Fuck you!"
Shiniel shook her head and sighed. Continuing the argument was pointless; Lorelei would clearly accept no other explanation for her lack of compassion.
"Well, I'm sorry, happy?" she finally muttered, swallowing her pride and giving way to reason.
Lorelei glared at her and slid off the beast, which squirmed left and right in delight as it received its treats one by one.
"Let's get going," Shiniel said, circling the beast and stepping onto the gravel path.
Lorelei followed, and the creature wiggled along in the grass before catching up to them. From here, the town's yellow glow shone even brighter than it had from the sky, though it looked less alluring up close—more like the ordinary light a town was meant to have. Perhaps that was because Lorelei had grown used to the vibrant display of a night in Vinyl. The two walked side by side, the stingray occasionally taking to the air to keep pace.
"Crk! Crk!"
A guard stood before the imposing brick wall, using the entrance as a prop: both his body and the spear beside him rested against it. At the sight of the two nightly visitors, he got up sluggishly and glared at them, then planted his spear on the ground and stood tall, trying to look intimidating.
"Haven't seen you two around. Where'd you come from?" he asked, eyeing them from head to toe.
Shiniel spoke up at once, unwilling to risk Lorelei saying something that would bring them trouble later. "We came from Kaeth, by Vivas," she said, glancing at the stingray as it flopped curiously around the gate. "As you can see, he's tamed and won't cause any trouble. I'll drop him off at the Loath's as soon as we can."
The guard looked skeptical. His gaze flicked to Lorelei, then back to Shiniel, who held his eyes and read the flow of energy reaching them. His color was a vibrant purple, nearly crystal clear. She let out a soft sigh and waited for his answer.
"Any weapons on you?" he asked, grasping for a reason to detain them—the night at his gate had been far too still, and a little disturbance, a spark of argument, would have been a welcomed distraction. To his disappointment, Shiniel shook her head. He sighed and stepped aside, though the gate was wide enough for fifteen people to pass abreast; the little display had been for his own ego's sake alone—a reminder that he, and no one else, regulated the comings and goings of a gate this grand. The creature flopped its way inside, and Lorelei followed, distracted by its little wings and wriggling tail. Shiniel walked slowly behind, pulling her cap over her eyes, and whispered softly.
"Pride and poverty are ill companions."
The man looked at her, puzzled by the barely audible voice. He saw only her lips moving, heard no sound leave them, and so stared her down and clicked his tongue. Shiniel caught up to Lorelei, who was trailing the beast, and tapped her shoulder lightly. Lorelei's intense gaze, fixed on the Vivas's movements, turned toward her.
"We'll stay at an inn tonight. We'll be traveling a lot tomorrow."
"Okay?" Lorelei replied. "Where are we traveling tomorrow?"
"I'll tell you later."
"What about him?" Lorelei glanced at the stingray, which was drifting steadily farther from them.
"Don't worry," Shiniel reassured her. "He knows where to go."
She picked up the pace and turned the corner at the first intersection, not far from the gate. Lorelei spotted a post and read the name on the brown wooden sign: "Fellvill Street."
She hurried to Shiniel's side. Her cap was lowered as usual, but beneath her seemingly laid-back expression, Shiniel was quietly scrutinizing every passerby—the flow of their energy, the color of their core, anything that might spell danger. She could see not only the color of a person's energy core but, with deeper focus, the individual state of every human layer, even individual parts of the body. The flow guided her, tracing the outline of fingers and bones, toes and muscles, eyes and nerves. She could even tell whether a person was ill or only beginning to show symptoms: a shaky, unstable flow meant weakness, and the spot where the flow weakened or wavered pointed to where that weakness or illness lay. Then, as she rounded the left corner of Fellvill Street into a dark alley barely wide enough for two, Shiniel shoved Lorelei aside and struck swiftly at the spot where she had just been standing. A gush of blood sprayed across the walls, and a man's scream rang through the alley. The passersby on Fellvill Street only glanced at the scene without much interest; such things were common in a rural town.
Lorelei saw a brown, tattered, cloaked man rolling on the ground, clutching his severed arm. His face crumpled into tears, his mouth stretched wide in a scream of pain, wrinkles furrowing the corners of his mouth and eyes as the blood spread across the ground and reached Lorelei's gray boots. A blade caught her reflection as his cloak thrashed with his agony. She looked down at him, expressionless. Shiniel, to no one's surprise, marched on without sparing him a glance.
The alley opened up, thinning the darkness into other, similar stretches. Lorelei turned to Shiniel, who still hadn't dispersed her sword; it stood imposing in her hand, wavering in the dark. Little specks of ice broke off into faint blue particles, and the crest on her abdomen glowed dimly—the only light in the alley.
"Why did you cut his hand?" Lorelei asked, though the reason hardly mattered to her; she felt no need whatsoever to reprimand her.
Shiniel turned her head, cap still over her blue eyes, and pointed at a wall that seemed a little off—almost as if it had been made up. Then she reached out and formed a small icicle, no bigger than a toothpick, between her thumb and middle finger, and flicked it at the wall. With flawless precision, it struck and shattered into glass shards that scattered across the ground, slowly breaking down and dissolving into blue energy particles, leaving only tiny trails of dim-lit crystal. A group of men stood watching them, still too absorbed to realize their cover had been blown. To bring them back to reality, Shiniel unsheathed her sword and leveled it in their direction. At the sound of the blade cutting swiftly through the wind and shifting the sluggish current, they all stared and fled, tails between their legs. No explanation was needed—Lorelei understood at once: they had forced the man into doing what he had been about to do to them. She gave Shiniel a slight nod. Shiniel had lifted her cap with her thumb, revealing her short bangs, seemingly waiting for her reaction.
"Shall we go, then?" she asked, a hint of a question in her voice—an opening for Lorelei to voice any lingering opinion or disagreement about her methods.
"Yeah," Lorelei answered, satisfied.
They walked a little farther before—almost leaving the shady alley—Shiniel turned to face a cracked door, and Lorelei, eager to be out of the alley, bumped straight into her.
"What is it now?" she asked, rubbing her forehead.
Shiniel pointed at a brown cardboard sign hung above, dangling in the air at the mercy of the soft spring currents. Bold, disorganized white writing adorned the brown board, almost as if a toddler had scrawled it: "Inn services."
"You're joking, right?" Lorelei asked, pointing at the broken door.
As Shiniel took a step toward the three small steps, the cardboard fell onto her head, making it wobble slightly and pressing down on her silver-black cap. Annoyed, she took it off, tapped it back into its imposing, squarish shape, and kicked the door open.
"Anybody here?!"