On A Broken Street (Nikomas)

[Kit Rowan]

Season of Summer, Day 34, 513 AV

Kit crept through the street like a little phantom, dodging from broken bit of masonry to masonry. She brushed her hands against smooth stone barricades and peeked her head over the top to catch a view of what lay past. The whole world was a street the twisted and twined up and down through the air, up and over Kit's head and into a spiral that reached up as far as Kit could see.

The street had been ravaged, torn, buildings along its side shaken from their places to fall into nothing. As Kit took a reluctant step a chip of the street loosened and fell beneath her feet, spiraling away into the vague kaleidoscope of color that was everything that did not rest suspended in the air with this endless street.

In Kit's dream-addled mind, this was not just unsurprising but expected and right.

She peered around a corner down the street and saw a raven perched on a street-lantern that twisted into a corkscrew. A raven that was black and not black groomed itself, cawwed. "Momma," Kit murmured, "Daddy . . ."

Kit moved from hidden place to hidden place on the street, drawing ever closer to the raven. Behind a fallen bit of masonry here, pressed up against a wall there. She crawled up the side of a bakery as though it a ladder and made her leap for the Raven from the top.

The raven flapped its wings, once, Kit reached out her hand, and snapped its fingers shut so close she found feel the raven's feathers slipping right through. It opened its beak. "Become someone interesting," It said, in a voice like all voices, and when Kit looked up again she found the raven just out of sight, perched on a crooked tower of impossible architecture.

Kit fell to her knees, smashed her fists into the ground in frustrated rage and screamed a scream that echoed back at her from the forever.
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[Nikomas]

"What...what is going on up there?" Nikomas barked from the other side - the under side, that is - of the street as he first heard the pounding and then the screaming. "This is no way to behave in a public setting," he continued to prattle on as he found a spot in the road where a brick had gone missing. "No way at all," he called toward the hole as he stood over it. Bending to examine the portal, the leather-clad, young man slipped through the tiny opening, continued to fall - when, in dreamality, from the other side of the street it looked like he was rising - then, stopped, floated in mid-air for the briefest of moments, and then came crashing down upon the road, feet first! "Well, hello there," he acknowledged the girl who was huddled upon the road as he approached her. "What seems to be the matter?" he then asked as he loomed over her, for he was not normally this tall, but, in this world, he most certainly was. "Have you lost your way? A loved one? Your mind?" he continued to ask as he proceeded to remove a thick, silver needle attached to a silken thread the color of the night sky from just inside the top of his right, knee-high boot. Without a care of where he was or who was watching or what was truly going on, Nikomas the Master Leatherworker continued to work the needle and thread as if he were a maestro orchestrating a sixty-piece ensemble of trained musicians. The needle danced through the air in his left hand as it stitched and unstitched and restitched the same threads that kept the right sleeve of his leather tunic held together around his bulging bicep and broad forearm. "Do you fancy yourself a new outfit?" he questioned with a wicked grin as he continued to look down upon the girl with his left eye as his right kept track of his handiwork. "As soon as I'm finished with this, I could make you something pretty...or horrible...whichever you would prefer. It really doesn't matter to me. I'm not the one who will be wearing it. Although, I will be the one having to see you in it, so I guess I should air on the side of something pretty...and not pretty horrible."

[Kit Rowan]

Kit looked over her shoulder to Nikomas and tilted her head to the side just so. "Oh?" She asked, "oh!" She pushed herself up and stood straight as she could and planted both hands on her waist. "You've no room to talk, none at all! You floated through the floor! How improper!" The diminutive redhead crossed her arms and huffed at the Vantha.

"I have!" She insisted at his questioning. "I did! I will! And worse, worse than all those three!" Kit threw up her hands and paced, paced, paced. "I lost all those things! I lost the bird, the raven, the all-colored trickster, and now, ah! See?" Kit pointed to the impossible architecture where the talking avian had perched. It was gone. "They're gone! Gone, and now I have to start all over again." She ran both her hands over her face and made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat.

"Clothes?" She answered Nikomas' question with a question. "Clothes?" Kit looked down.

She was bare as the day she was born. Had Kit been like this the whole time? She must have, surely, Kit knew, or else she would not be like it now!

Kit raised a hand to her chin and hmmed, tapping an unshod foot against the street, shame and embarrassment as foreign a concept to her in that moment as flight to a fish. "I suppose I could use some clothes," she admitted, thoughtful, as though something to cover her nakedness was a thing that had simply never occurred to her before. She clapped her hands with a sound like a chime's soft ringing. "Spin me a miracle!"
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