MistNovel - Read Web Novel Stories & Fiction Online

Morning came too quickly and without mercy. Cressa opened the shop at dawn despite the knot of fear that had lodged itself in her chest overnight. If she closed, people would notice. If people noticed, the Guard would ask questions.

She could not afford questions.

The fairy district woke slowly, music and laughter replacing the silence as shopkeepers opened their doors and vendors set up stalls in the narrow streets. Cressa moved through the familiar morning routine of watering plants, restocking shelves, and preparing tonics for the day's customers.

The dead shadowbloom sat on her workbench like an accusation.

She had wrapped it in cloth and hidden it from sight, but she could still feel its wrongness radiating through the fabric. The corruption was not natural. It was deliberate, calculated, and growing stronger with each passing hour.

By noon, three more plants had begun to wilt.

Cressa locked the shop and headed to the market square. If the blight was spreading through the fairy district, someone would have noticed. Someone would know what was happening.

The square was crowded with bodies and noise. Vendors shouted their wares from wooden stalls while customers haggled over prices and children darted between legs like schools of fish. The smell of fresh bread and roasted meat mingled with the sharper scents of magic and unwashed humanity.

Cressa kept her head down and moved through the crowd with practiced invisibility. She had spent twenty years perfecting the art of being unremarkable, of blending into the background until people's eyes slid past her without truly seeing.

The scream cut through the noise like a blade.

Cressa turned toward the sound and saw the guards first. Three of them, silver armor glinting in the sunlight, surrounding a young fairy woman with violet wings and terror in her eyes. The woman clutched a lute against her chest as if the instrument could somehow protect her.

"Your permit," one guard demanded.

"I have it." The musician's voice shook as she fumbled with a leather pouch at her belt. "I have the papers. Please, I have done nothing wrong."

"Street performance requires a citizen sponsor." The guard snatched the papers from her hand and tore them in half. "You have no sponsor. You are performing illegally."

"But I..."

The guard's gauntleted hand closed around her wrist. The musician cried out as magic flared, violet light sparking against silver metal. Her wings beat frantically, trying to pull her free, but the guard held firm.

The crowd watched in silence. No one moved to help. No one dared.

Cressa's hands clenched at her sides. This was not her fight. She had spent two decades staying invisible, staying safe, staying alive. Intervening now would be suicide.

The guard raised his other hand, and Cressa saw the spell forming in his palm. Blue light, cold and sharp, designed to burn away fairy magic at the root.

She moved before conscious thought could stop her.

"Wait." Cressa pushed through the crowd and stepped between the guard and the musician. "She has a sponsor."

The guard's eyes narrowed. "Who?"

"Me." The lie came easily, smoothly, wrapped in the calm authority she used with difficult customers. "I am her sponsor. There was an administrative error with the paperwork. I will file the correct documents this afternoon."

"You are...?"

"Cressa. I run the herbalist shop on Thornwick Street."

The guard studied her with the cold assessment of someone trained to identify threats. His gaze traveled from her human features to her plain clothes to her empty hands. Finding nothing obviously dangerous, he released the musician with a shove that sent her stumbling backward.

"File the papers by sunset," he said. "If you do not, we will arrest you both."

"Understood."

The guards left, their armor clanking with each synchronized step. The crowd dispersed slowly, returning to the business of survival now that the entertainment had ended.

Cressa turned to the musician, who stared at her with wide, grateful eyes.

"Thank you," the woman whispered. "Thank you, I..."

"Go home." Cressa kept her voice low and urgent. "Do not perform in public again until this passes. It is not safe."

The musician nodded and disappeared into the crowd, her violet wings folded tight against her back.

Cressa stood alone in the square, her heart racing, her hands trembling with the aftermath of adrenaline. She had been so careful. So invisible. And now she had drawn attention to herself for the sake of a stranger she would never see again.

Foolish. Reckless. Necessary.

Movement on the high platform caught her eye. She looked up and felt the world narrow to a single point of focus.

Lord Riven stood at the railing, gray eyes fixed directly on her. He was too far away for her to read his expression, but she felt the weight of his attention like a physical thing pressing against her chest.

He had seen everything.

Their eyes met across the crowded square, and Cressa felt something shift in the air between them. Recognition, perhaps. Or calculation. The moment stretched, pulled taut like a bowstring, until Riven finally looked away and spoke to the guard beside him.

Cressa turned and walked toward home with measured steps, refusing to run despite every instinct screaming at her to flee. Running would confirm guilt. Running would make her prey.

She reached her shop and locked the door behind her with hands that still shook. The familiar scent of herbs and earth should have been comforting, but the space felt wrong now. Exposed. Marked.

She had made herself visible to the one person in Atheria who could destroy her with a single word.

Cressa moved to the back room and stopped in the doorway.

Half of her plants were dead.