[Quest] there is healing and there is hate,

[Random Events]

 a desire to reach for miracles

The little black filly is crying, the fur of her cheeks stiff with the salt of tears, but it fades to just sniffles when she sees the boy. 

“Please,” she says, her voice thick and dark eyes glimmering with water yet unshed. She steps closer, shyly, thinking she would have hidden instead if he weren’t so young (as young as her) with such softness in his eyes. “I’m hurt and lost. Will you help me?”

It is hard to see just how she is hurt, with the long summer evening fading at last into night, the crickets and whip-poor-wills singing there at the edge of the city. But there is the smell of blood faint on the air; nothing serious, nothing deadly, a scraped-up knee and a bruised shoulder and a long cut that winds between them both, clean and deep as though made with a piece of glass, or a knife. It stings and frightens her, and she is too afraid to go home, not when she is sure she will be punished. 

See, it went like this: 

The day had started out fine, and she had gone with her basket of mushrooms and little trinkets of soapstone and wood from her home at the edge of the forest down to the marketplace. Her family were half-gypsies, traders and sellers, not so strange for Denocte but still distrusted - as she found out from the dock-children that ran in half-feral gangs among the stalls and alleyways. 

It was her first trip alone, and she was so excited to be trusted with the job. It went well, at first: most of her wares were sold for pieces of copper and silver signos or traded for wool and grain. She bought herself a honey sticky-bun as a reward and ate it within sight of the beach, laughing at the seagulls and sandpipers that circled ever-closer, tossing them bits as a reward. It wasn’t until she began to head home, when the afternoon had slipped into evening thick with sunshine and long shadows, that the trouble came. 

She doesn’t know how many of them there were, altogether. At least five. At first the other children and scraggly-lean yearlings only called after her, teasing and jeering, but then the first one ran up and knocked her basket out of her hands. She lunged for it back, but they set on her quicker than gulls, quicker than crows, quicker than the little dragons that wound like bright ribbons through the marketplace. One boy knocked her down, laughing. And when she told them Stop and that she would tell on them, he grew serious and pushed her down again (that is when she cut her leg). 

You’ll say nothing, he said. You didn’t see us at all. You’re only a clumsy girl who lost her basket.

The look in his eyes told her better to protest. And then she got up and ran, without looking back, tears stinging her eyes and blurring her way, panic making her lost in the alleys that eventually turned to hills and dirt tracks until she found herself here, alone and hurt, in the growing dark. 

But this boy, he looks so kind. She wipes her nose on the inside of her foreleg and looks up at him and again says, “Please.”

---

@Kibou will be walking through the markets when it might feel the scratch of eyes down his back. Or perhaps he doesn't notice the girl until she's peeking out at him from the darkness between two booths. Will he feel the need to help her? Will tend to her wounds or like his mother will he seek to find the boys who hurt her and bring them to justice? 

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This quest was written by the lovely @griffin

Enjoy!