Date: The Night of the 2nd Day of the Month of Blossoms, Year 1107 of the Imperial Calendar.
Location: The Avenue of Lanterns, Central District.
The city of Aethelgard was trying to drink itself into oblivion.
Even though the storm was raging, the taverns along the Avenue of Lanterns were still bleeding light and noise into the wet streets. The festival of the Emperor's Selection was an excuse for excess. Men stumbled out of doorways, arm in arm, singing bawdy songs to the thunder.
Aanya drifted through them like a piece of debris caught in a river.
She had left the silence of the Merchant District behind. Here, the world was loud. It smelled of roasted meat, spilled ale, and horse manure.
To the drunkards, she was just a shadow. A beggar in a sack. They ignored her, stepping around her hunched form as if she were a pile of wet trash.
Aanya's throat felt like it was filled with sand. The rain water running down her face was salty from her tears and tainted with the chemical run-off from the mask. She needed clean water.
She saw a group of three men and two women standing under the awning of the Golden Stag tavern. They were well-dressed, laughing, holding tankards of wine. They looked warm. They looked kind.
Just a sip, Aanya thought, her mind fracturing from exhaustion. I will ask for just a sip.
She stumbled toward them. Her bare, bleeding feet slapped against the wet cobblestones.
"Please..."
Her voice was a rasp, barely audible over the rain.
One of the men turned. He was young, flushed with wine, wearing a velvet cap. He blinked, peering into the darkness beyond the awning.
"What's that? A beggar?" he laughed, reaching into his pocket. "It's a festival night! Here, wretch, catch!"
He tossed a copper coin. It landed in the mud near Aanya's feet.
Aanya didn't look at the coin. She looked at the tankard in his hand.
"Water..." she croaked, stepping into the circle of light cast by the hanging iron lantern. "Please... help me..."
She reached out a hand. The burlap hood she had been clutching slipped back.
She lifted her face.
The lantern swung in the wind, casting a harsh, yellow light directly onto her.
The young man's smile vanished.
He didn't see a girl. He didn't see a human being.
He saw a nightmare.
The rain had washed away most of the surface resin, but the base layer, the adhesive that had burned into her skin, had turned into a thick, gray slime. It hung off her cheek in drooping tendrils, like melting candle wax. Beneath it, the red, raw meat of the scar pulsed angrily. One of her eyes was swollen shut from the irritation. Her hair was plastered to her skull with mud.
She looked like a corpse that had been dug up halfway through decomposition.
"GODS!" the man screamed, stumbling back so fast he tripped over his own feet.
The women in the group shrieked, pressing themselves against the tavern wall.
"What is it? What is it?" one of them cried.
"Look at her face!" the man yelled, scrambling backward on the wet stones. "It's the Rot! It's the Flesh-Eater!"
"Plague!" another man shouted, drawing a small dagger. "She's a leper! Get back!"
Aanya stood frozen, her hand still outstretched. "No... I'm not..."
"Stay away, witch!"
The first man, terrified out of his mind, grabbed the nearest weapon he could find, a heavy glass bottle of wine sitting on a barrel.
He hurled it.
He didn't aim to warn her; he aimed to kill the monster.
The bottle spun through the rain. Aanya flinched, turning her head.
CRASH.
The bottle smashed against her shoulder. It didn't break bone, but the impact sent her spinning into the mud. Glass shards sprayed across her back. Red wine soaked the burlap, looking like a fresh arterial spray.
"Kill it before it infects us!" the man roared, looking for something else to throw.
Terror, primal and electric, finally jump-started Aanya's heart.
She scrambled up, slipping in the mud. She didn't try to explain. She ran.
"Get out of here! Monster!"
A stone whistled past her ear. Then another.
Aanya sprinted blindly down the street. She didn't feel the cuts on her feet anymore. She only felt the shame burning hotter than the chemical fire on her face.
They think I'm a monster, she sobbed, gasping for air. They think I'm the plague.
She turned a corner, ducking into a narrower street lined with closed shops. She collapsed against a storefront, her chest heaving.
She slid down the wall, hugging her knees.
I was the Queen, she thought hysterically. Two hours ago, I was the Queen.
She looked up.
She was sitting in front of a tailor's shop. The display window was dark, but the streetlamp opposite cast enough light to turn the glass into a mirror.
Aanya looked at the reflection.
She stopped breathing.
She had avoided mirrors for seven years. Then, she had loved the mirror for one week. Now, the mirror was the judge.
The thing staring back at her was unrecognizable.
The "White Jade" was gone. In its place was a creature of gray sludge and red meat. The resin hung in grotesque flaps. Her eye was dragged down. She looked like something that lived in the sewers and ate rats.
"Is that me?" she whispered.
She reached out and touched the cold glass. The monster in the window reached out too.
That is what Veer will see, a cruel voice whispered in her head. That is what everyone will see.
She wasn't Aanya. She wasn't human. She was the Phantom of the Street.
A wave of self-loathing, black and toxic, rose up in her throat. She hated the face. She hated the Alchemist. She hated the parents who made her this way.
But mostly, she hated the reflection.
"Stop looking at me!" she screamed.
She pulled her fist back.
With all the strength left in her starving, freezing body, she punched the glass.
KR-RASH!
The window didn't just crack; it shattered. Large shards of glass rained down around her.
Aanya didn't pull her hand back. She left it there, buried in the jagged hole she had made.
She looked at her hand.
A long slice ran across her knuckles. Blood, dark and real, welled up, dripping onto the wet pavement.
She watched the blood fall. It was the only thing about her that was still pure.
"I hate you," she sobbed to the broken shards on the ground. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you."
She pulled her hand back, clutching it to her chest. The physical pain of the cut was sharp, grounding her in reality.
She stood up, swaying. The sound of the breaking glass would attract the city watch. She had to move.
Bleeding from her feet, bleeding from her hand, and bleeding from her soul, the Phantom turned and limped deeper into the shadows.
She had no destination. She only knew she had to find a place dark enough that even her own reflection couldn't find her.