Untitled WIP - First Chapter

“Yes mother.” Milo’s second reprimanding that day, the first came from a mistaken Latin conjugation, was due to Milo spilling his bowl of the cook’s stew.

Because of the latter mistake Milo was now required to buy the cook a new basket of ingredients from the market. Despite the shops being only a mile away, his mother found this to be a suitable punishment. The family was well known in the area and the Arlington’s eldest son carrying a woven basket spilling over with vegetables would cause many sideways glances and just-loud-enough conversations of “Well, it looks like he upset his mother today”, “what a shame that Marla’s handsome boy has to buy his own vegetables”, and Milo’s favorite “at this rate he’ll never carry on the family name” Marla was known for her punishments but was well respected throughout the city and Milo running household errands had never brought shame on her, only lowered his chances of finding a wife. 

Despite their stares and tales of his falling status, Milo had come to quite enjoy the hours he spent kicked out of the house. The air was not clean, the streets were not quiet, and his basket rapidly grew heavy, but Milo found that he could allow his thoughts to run freely in a way that he never could have done so at home.

The never-ending din of merchants attempting to sell their goods, angry mothers bartering, small children begging to buy just one more sweet all drowned out his own mother’s yelling in the back of his mind.

Milo purchased various vegetables and potatoes, only half paying attention, while he allowed his thoughts to wander to the shapes he found in the cobblestones below. They weren’t even by any definition of the word, but Milo enjoyed tracing the rough edges of the stones with his foot. 

He slipped his hands into his trouser pockets and stared up at the grey sky. The colors foretold of rain but this was not unusual; the sky often twisted with thousands of grey tendrils threatening to break loose at any moment. Milo had never had a talent for painting, but his older sister often scoffed at his fascination with grey skies. “Why spend your time staring at something dull, Bartholomew.” She might have had a point—her paintings earned her a husband at age 19—but Milo still appreciated the tones of an ominous sky that still held a sense of tranquility. 

Milo had filled his basket with enough vegetables to last the cook the next week, but he was not about to go home without spending some time to himself. He had managed to convince his mother that was just a slow shopper—he was a man after all—so she would not expect him back for another hour.

Today, Milo decided, he would explore more of the alleyways leading off of the main market street. He had already mapped many of the surrounding streets, but he aimed to know each road by sight before his mother decided that market trips were not punishment enough. So far Milo had been able to memorize roughly half of the streets leading away from the marketplace.

He strolled down two familiar side streets looking for others that he did not recognize. He had nearly turned a corner leading to yet another row of brick storefronts bustling with activity when a flicker of firelight cause his eye. Normally this type of thing would not phase Milo, but the accompanying smell was strangely sweet. Not sickly or even unpleasant, just strange and unrecognizable. Milo had been allowed sweets as a child and he quite enjoyed his mother’s fruit pies, but this was, well, the closest word he could seem to manage was artificial. It seemed to be of human creation, like a mixture of honey, fairy floss, and the sweetest flowers that had ever met Milo’s nose.

Milo ***LAST NAME*** was not a boy to make trouble, but he was curious enough to follow that which he did not understand. However this seemed like a curiosity that should be approached with caution.

He caught another flash of golden light out of the corner of his eye and again the pungent aroma of flowers and unfamiliarity hit him. This Milo thought is not normal.

There were no more flashes of light, but Milo had seen enough to deduce the origin of the abnormalities. However nothing unusual enough had happened yet that would warrant the possible danger of exploring some pyromaniac’s own personal workshop in the middle of a crowded market. Milo would have gone home were it not for him noticing the seemingly most mundane of the out-of-the-ordinary phenomena surrounding this corner. 

Here, the bricks and cobblestones contained patterns slightly different to those of the rest of the city block. The grooves of the bricks seemed to create—No, that’s not right, Milo thought. 

But, it surely must be. For that’s not something that happens on accident. Those are letters—no, different than that. Not letters, symbols of sort, definitely. 

Milo had seen what the sides of normal buildings looked like and these shows little resemblance. Nothing too drastically different from the usual, but out of place enough for one to notice if they were looking for something specific. Milo, however, was not looking to find odd shapes on the sides of buildings. Milo simply knew ordinary and this was not it.

Had it not been for the shapes so strangely resembling Greek lettering—his favorite written language—he would not have continued closer to the oddities of this afternoon. What finally convinced him that the shapes, the smell, and sparks were of non-coincidental origin lay at the center of his observations. 

It was an alley shrouded in a darkness too dense for this hour of the afternoon, almost as if an opaque fog was intentionally shielding his prying eyes from something he was not supposed to see. Here the cobblestones took on the appearance of rippling water and the brick buildings surrounding on either side faded into each other reminding Milo of his sister’s paintings.

Milo lost all sense of his surroundings as his own interest pulled him closer and closer to the mouth of the cave-like street. 

None of the shoppers behind Milo seemed to notice as the boy crossed the threshold separating the alley from the rest of the world. They did not notice that as soon as his foot touched the swaying cobblestones, he seemed to take on a cloak of darkness. He was still visible, just not able to be spotted unless one was looking. 

To Milo, crossing into the alley changed nothing. He thought this kind of mystique warranted some odd chill to send shivers up his spine but he only found that once he began to enter the obscure fog he grew more and more intrigued. 

Although the mist became slightly more transparent once Milo was entirely within the confines of the ally, it still took his eyes a few moments to adjust. The whole of his body itched with interest but the tingling in his fingers and the twisting of his gut tried to pull him back onto the cobbled street. Either he could no longer hear the noisy crowd just feet away or he was too distracted to notice. 

By this point Milo was a full foot away from the line that separated the outside world from this darkened abyss and although part of his mind screamed at him to go back, he was too lost in thought to listen. There were no more sparks of light, but the pungent sweetness was still there. It was nearly sickening. 

Milo was about to take another step further into the ally when he froze. Resting with one leg tucked under her and her chin resting on her other knee was a dirty, thin, probably freezing girl.

She was huddled over an odd contraption that looked to Milo like what his teachers used to instruct their pupils in science. A thin metal dish piled with amber powder sat on top of a glass dish. The dish was held up by a glass bottle filled about four centimeters with water. A wire stand suspended the bottle above a tiny fire set into an aluminum container containing a waxy-looking cream colored substance. Milo decided it couldn’t be wax, however, because it was not being melted by the fire. The boiling water inside the bottle must have been what was the heating the powder and in turn releasing the smell. 

The girl hadn’t seemed to notice Milo—despite his heavy breathing upon entering the ally—until now.

Her eyes flashed upwards and in them he caught a glimpse of the adventures that he wished to have but would not let himself imagine. Milo was a boy who followed rules. He was curious, yes, but he was not about to do something rash. 

“How—?” The girl started but Milo cut her off.

“What are you doing?”

“Excuse me?”

“I assumed that smell is coming from whatever you’re doing back here.”

“I’m doing nothing that concerns you,” she tried to sound threatening, but interest seemed through the cracks in her words.

Right as she said it another flash of light appeared from where her hands had just dropped a thin metal instrument and the girl rattled off several curse-sounding words only half of which Milo could recognize. 

“Shit, sorry,” she blew forcefully on the tiny fire that had sprung up from the same place as the sparks. “I must have miscalculated the powders…” she trailed off when she realized she had been speaking out loud.

“Sorry if I interrupted,” Milo said “is it my imagination or were those sparks much too bright and much too orange to be natural.”

She gave him a wild grin and again her eyes flashed a kind of mischievousness that told Milo she had experienced things that he could dream. 

“How did you know I was here? Are you spying? Are you one of Daedalus’s friends?” She said this without malice, but the slight edge in her voice as she spoke the name Daedalus succeeded in convincing Milo that she was not someone he should think to double cross. 

However the word “spy” soured Milo’s opinion of the strange girl and he couldn’t help but feel offended at her ludicrous claim. 

“I am no spy and I did not find you on purpose. I don’t know who whatever-his-name is and I was simply trying to figure out why this specific side street was so odd. I’m sorry if I seemed suspicious, I can leave if you’d like.”

He had thought his apology was sincere, but the girl was already on her feet, a slim metal spoon coming dangerously close to Milo’s throat. He wasn’t sure that she had much leverage against him using only a spoon, but he was not about to test her. 

“Then how on this bloody planet did you know to walk over here. I don’t see any maps on you and you don’t look like you know how to use the powders.” She said the words the powders as if they were holy objects but Milo was beginning to get the sense that this girl was entirely beyond sanity. Still, she went on.

“Whatever the hell you’re playing at I would really like to know.” Her words had an edge to them but beyond her intensity there was a fear that Milo was beginning to picked up on. 

It was then that the girl caught fire.

Milo leapt backwards, nearly tripping over his basket that he must have dropped when she held that spoon too his neck. 

“Fire!” It was an obvious exclamation, but Milo was not one for staying calm under pressure. 

“Hold on, just give me a minute!” Despite her sudden rise in volume, the girl did not seem concerned at all. She stamped vigorously at the corner of her cloak that had fallen into the flames. Even more confusing to Milo, she only seemed to grow confused after the flames had been extinguished.

Her eyebrows knit together in confusion as she poked the now blackened pile of yellow powder.

“It couldn’t have...the flame wasn’t hot enough...maybe the glass had a residue…?”

“I’m sorry,” Milo sounded more incredulous than he intended, he softened his tone. “I’m sorry, but what on earth are you talking about.”

Her eyes shot back up however this time they were looking at him. The girl stared at something just past Milo, her eyes trained on a spot in the distance like a cat stalking its prey. 

“Get out of here,” she whispered. 

“Excuse me?” Her tone made Milo’s heart beat faster and his legs felt weak and jelly-like. 

“Get out of here!” This time she screamed it. She waived her arms in a “leave” motion, signaling for Milo to run. “Dammit run!”

Milo didn’t look back. He took off as fast as he possibly could, leaving behind his basket from the market. He didn’t even know this girl! Why on Earth had he listened to her. Other than whatever powder she was talking about he has sensed no danger anywhere near them. But something in her voice had made his blood run cold. The intensity with which she approached their conversation had convinced him that she held no fear and her warning to him had been like a punch to his chest.

Milo’s pounding feet drowned out the blood rushing through his ears. His lungs shrieked for him to stop, but he refused. It wasn’t until he was blocks away from the marketplace that he allowed himself a moment of rest.