chapter 1 : a way in

During the War of the Ashen Fields, countless refugees and victims of the conflict flooded the well-defended walled city, hoping to gain the protection of the king and his retinue. As they reached the famed capital of Malgoren, instead of help and protection, what they found was closed gates and repression. The newcomers quickly established themselves at the bottom of the massive city walls, villages and slums appearing overnight, growing like weeds around the roots of the ancient city. Yet, they were mercilessly refused entrance, only a handful of traders and officials were allowed to pass through the gates. The rest had nowhere to go, and survived from the trade that wouldn’t be allowed inside the pristine streets of the capital. The shanty towns were plagued by illicit trades, crime, prostitution, and hard, unsanitary industries that would repulse the sensitivities of the urban denizens of Malgoren. It was a scar on the kingdom, and a testimony of its ruler’s tyranny.

Like many others born during the war, Sarya grew up as an orphan, scavenging the streets of the shanty towns surrounding the kingdom’s capital. She spent years surviving in the fringe of society, going through trash at first, then begging, stealing from merchants’ stalls, until she found her true calling as a pickpocket. She had a true gift for it, and after years of owning her skills, she stumbled into adulthood as a very successful thief, one of the few that retained her innocence in the eyes of the traders and the private guards they hired. No one suspected her, as she knew how to leverage her looks to her advantage to dismiss suspicion and go unnoticed.

Rather short, Sarya had brown curly hairs waving down to her clavicles. Fair skinned apart from a few freckles, she had a cherubic face, with large blue expressive eyes and gorgeously plump lips. She enjoyed a slender and lean body, her shapely figure supporting a pert bosom, a narrow wasp-like waist, seductive hips, and a round and toned bottom. She was short and lithe, her nimble and spritely build allowing her to sneak with ease, to deflect any suspicion with her youth and airs of innocence, and to perform quick escapes when needed. When lesser thieves inevitably got caught, Sarya always managed to flee, running into an alleyway, slipping through a damaged fence, or vanishing into a narrow hideout, an escape path planned in advance by the clever rogue. If the clever pickpocket wasn’t necessarily the quickest or the most athletic, she was thoughtful and well prepared, never going for a target without some kind of emergency plan in case things went sour. In the worst case scenario, she even moved around Malgoren, jumping to a slum on the other side of the city if she aroused too much suspicion where she stayed.

This methodical and prudent approach to thievery eventually made Sarya the most experienced and well-connected pickpocket in all the shanty towns. When her reputation began to spread in Malgoren’s underworld, her life quickly began to transform.

Sarya was introduced by a contact to an illicit marketplace that was used as the liaison between the shanty towns’ shady trades, and the gated elites of the capital. Hidden in the abandoned dungeons of the old guard post, the Grey Market was only accessible by two specific entry points. One was a secret stairway that led to a fancy tavern inside Malgoren, the front of the whole operation. The city authorities thought that the former guard post was sealed and the dungeons collapsed, but criminal guilds had secured this ancient access and maintained the underground for their own use. The second access was much cruder, at the image of the community that used it. The passage leading to the slums was nothing but a wide crevice in the outer wall, large enough to allow single file passage to the malnourished young smugglers that used it daily. It was through this narrow slit, unknown to the guards, that contraband entered and left the city.

When she learned the existence of this secret passage, Sarya’s mind went into motion, slowly building up an angle through which she could leverage this new connexion. With the street urchins and petty thieves always getting caught outside in the slums, she realised that she was more than simply experienced. She was safety, she was worthy of trust. Stolen goods were always in demand, and she happened to be the single stable element of the pickpocket world of outer Malgoren.

Using her unparalleled reputation amidst the orphans and other thieves of the slums, Sarya began to buy most of the valuables that were taken in the shanty towns, and began moving them inside the Grey Market, introducing herself to all the resellers and some wealthy costumers in the dimly light stands of the illicit trading zone. Before long, she turned herself into the fence through which most of the stolen goods of the street reached the best buyers. She went by the alias of the Weasel, and she quickly realized that she just slithered inside the farmer’s granary. There was wealth to make for herself, and for the first time of her life, Sarya’s began to see a future for herself away from the squalor of poverty.