Chapter 20: Chapter 20 – The Pauper Princess, Part 15

Luci gripped her phone with trembling hands. The shaking screen was hard to read, but the message was clear, gut wrenching.

“Ms. Stella,” she breathed. Her voice was hoarse.

The message was sent from an unknown number. It read, We have your fence. Come to 242 Batwing Lane, South Shanties, or we’ll kill her.

Attached to the message was a photo of Stella. She was tied to a chair with her arms bound behind her. One of her eyes was black and her face was swollen all over. She wore her usual crop top and skirt combo, but her cat ears had been replaced with a white beanie that had rabbit ears poking up on top.

“Wha—what do I do?” Her breath quickened. Her pulse raced.

She checked her contacts. Wip’s name jumped out at her. His was the first and only contact she’d added to her calling account and it had made her so happy. She stared at the card with his name on it, thumb trembling over the screen. All she had to do was call him, to give him the location.

She locked her phone. Standing, she shrieked, “This is your responsibility, idiot! You can’t rely on others to fix your mistakes.”

She searched all around her for an answer and found nothing. She was in a self-made tent on someone’s private property, hidden beneath a canopy of trees. It was the middle of the night. The moon was coming out from behind the passing rainclouds. All she had was her staff, her phone, her box of possessions—now scattered across the mud—and herself.

That was all she had. That was all she could give.

Luci stuffed her phone in her pocket. Gasping from panic, she scraped up all of her crystals back into her box. She was so desperate she didn’t care that she’d shovelled some dirt in as well. She slammed the lid back on the box and stuffed it under her armpit. Then she grabbed Lunacogita and bolted into the night.

Her legs burned, but she ignored them. The meagre contents of her stomach were doing summersaults. She held it down. Fresh tears flecked the corners of her eyes and she let them fall. Her cowl fell off as she ran. She abandoned it. Her long hair flowed behind her, glowing silver in the moonlight.

She pounded past farms, past the city gates, past guards who watched her trail moonlight through the city streets. Every eye was fixed on her and her glowing hair. It was too late to worry about being caught; Stella was in danger and it was her fault. They were after the Daughter of the Waxing Moon, whoever these people were. Luci had to fix it. Three months of struggle meant nothing in the face of that.

While she ran, she took her phone out and loaded up a map. The maps for Anypaxia were unreliable, especially those for the Shanties and other undesirable places. Worse, as it was a free version, she had to wait for an ad to finish playing before she could use the application. She shouted at her phone more than once before, thankfully, control was handed back to her. The street loaded up and she mapped out a path.

She wound through alleys, through busy streets, until she was pounding up the sloped road onto Katarasi Bridge. The great arched bridge spanned the widest part of the Gethalat River, crossing a full three hundred metres of water. And it was scarily thin. Four crystal-powered rikshaws could barely fit side by side. Those thin lanes were currently all taken up by both foot and vehicle traffic.

It was painfully slow progress. Luci tried to push through the crowd, but with how worn out she was, she was actually the one being pushed. Each of Luci’s laboured footfalls sent shockwaves through the bridge, making it rock. She tried to ignore it, tried to focus on moving forward.

As she walked, she was slowly shunted sideways until she pressed against the low handrail, staring down into the dark waters far below. Vertigo and fatigue made her vision swim and all she could think of was to keep walking, to keep walking.

She was so dazed that she only noticed at the last moment that a rikshaw was charging straight at her, horn blaring. The crowd had already parted out of its way, leaving her alone before it. The driver was not stopping.

With a yelp, she pressed herself hard onto the low handrail, dropping her box of possessions onto the road. The handrail bent under her weight. She scrambled to brace herself, and in the process, Lunacogita slipped out of her hand.

The cloth-bound staff plummeted to the murky black river below. Holding her breath, Luci spiked her enma and chased it down with threads of conform. Snatching, clawing at the staff, her threads wrapped around it just a moment before it plunged into the water.

Luci steadied herself. Every breath she took was agony. Her legs threatened to buckle beneath her and her grip on the railing was weak. She was spiking as high as she dared to maintain her hold on Lunacogita, even using an outstretched hand to reduce the distance between her and the staff by a precious half metre.

She struggled to push herself into a more stable position, but in doing so she put more weight on the handrail. It groaned and then gave a little under her weight. Each passing second only made it worse as her high enma draw was slowly increasing her weight.

Her body trembled, from exhaustion, from shock, from fear. She was weak—now more than ever—and she felt so vulnerable. People were watching her, judging her. She knew they’d recognise her. On any other night, she would have cared. Now, she just wanted to get her legs moving again.

One of the handrail’s legs made a crack sound as its foot bent a few millimetres away from the bridge’s surface. Luci took a deep breath.

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“You’re weak, Luci,” she told herself. They were her mother’s words. She sputtered them between gasping breaths. “You need to stop letting your family down. You need to stop letting yourself down. So, get up. Move. You’re the Daughter of the Waxing Moon. Your duty is to protect your people. And if you don’t pull yourself together, someone else is going to get hurt!”

She tried to push out more enma—masses of blame, knots of whim. The effort was like running sideways up a cliff. With one last push, she collapsed onto the handrail. It creaked a little more under her weight.

She was stuck. There was nothing she could do. Soon, she’d drop Lunacogita, or fall into the river along with it. She was weak. That reality crashed down on her again and she started to sob.

I just make it do what I want.

Luci sniffled up her tears. Wip had trusted her. He’d praised her in spite of how useless she was today. He didn’t even care that she’d tried to hurt him, even laughed the whole thing off like it was a joke. He was stronger than her mother, she was certain. Maybe not in raw power, but the things he did today defied reason.

“I’ll just make it do what I want,” she muttered. “Because it’s my enma.”

Gathering her will, Luci delved deep into her soul. Enma was measured using three distinct levels: passive, flow, and spike. Her passive enma was at level twenty-eight. Her flow was measured to be, on average, thirty-one, when she’d last undergone the testing device at the Dungeon Fort. And her spikes, on average, were at level thirty-six. As spike and flow capacity is multiplied by ten for every ten levels they gain, relatively speaking, it meant her output was not that strong for an enma-focused dungeoneer of her passive level.

But there was a catch. The reason her average flow and spike was so weak was because her enma was heavily, heavily skewed in one direction: towards conform. When tested alone, her conform spike was at level sixty-one.

All her life, she’d been taught to meld with multiple forms, to prefer flow over using a single spike. Because of the harsh lessons she’d received, she’d been subconsciously beating her enma down, using only as much conform as was viable in a multi-form meld. She was done with that. She needed power. She had it. If there were ever a time to ignore her family’s advice and just do what felt right, this was it!

Taking a deep breath, she drew as deep as she could, then dragged out everything she had in threads of half-melded conform and spun them everywhere. Enma howled through her. Whips of conform tasted at the air. The hairs stood up on the back of her neck. Her heart raced. The power, the excitement, the madness of it all; for the first time in years, she embraced it.

Everyone was watching her, watching her hair rise and fall, pulse with silver light, from the sheer excess of enma that she pumped through her body. She didn’t care anymore. Her fear fled her and she felt weightless, as though she was somewhere else, floating above her earthly body, controlling its every move like a marionette.

Then the world started to rise.

Dirt lifted off the ground. People rose gently into the air, screaming, holding onto the rails and vehicles to stay grounded. The handrail began to shake. Bolts rattled and burst from their holes, and the rails barely managed to stay grounded. Water sprayed up from the river far below and lingered in the air. There was no order to it, no meld causing the world to lift. It was just a whistle spike, untamed, unruly, tempered only by Luci’s dedication to the Path of the Moon and the cries of her soul.

No, that wasn’t right. The Path of the Moon did not life things from the ground. It was a path of orbits, of closeness and distance, of space and motion. This was her own path, her own deviation.

It was a reality she’d been denying all her life from fear of failure. But now that she had failed, now that she’d reached the absolute bottom of the well and there was nobody there to drag her out, she stopped caring about what others thought and did was felt right.

Breathing heavy, she melded a simple strength enhancement meld. She’d never been able to pull it off in training. Now, with torrents of enma radiating off her, she made it work by brute force. Every spot which she couldn’t get right with her other forms, she slapped a bunch of conform in that she twisted in such a way to emulate the effect.

She knew that this was all wrong. Her instructor would have beaten her silly if her saw this. But it worked. It felt right. It was stupid, inefficient, but it was how she used her enma.

Luci laid the meld over her entire body. It covered her like a lattice, glowing as brightly as her hair. The effect was immediate: her body felt as light as a feather, like she was floating in the sky. Without weight, every motion was easy.

This wasn’t a strength enhancing meld, but something entirely her own.

Luci brought her under control and everything dropped. People hit the road. Paving stones splashed into the river below. The handrail tipped over at a precarious angle.

She pushed herself off the handrail. As she did, its bolts gave out and it tipped slowly over the edge and into the water. Still holding her staff by threads of conform, she reeled it in and it snapped into her hand. Then she dug the balls of her feet hard into the road and took off.

Unlike Wip, she didn’t blast across the terrain like a bullet. Unlike her mother, she didn’t curl the world in on itself, bending space to bring her destination closer to herself. Rather, she hopped over the crowd, weightless, effortlessly, and a little too quickly.