Six months had passed since Melusine had been found outside the Dragon's Labyrinth, laid out in the midwinter snow. She had never been a friend to any of the villagers, but now they avoided her. Closed off from the rest of the world with only gossip for entertainment, her peculiar disappearance act had spread like wildfire. The village had ostracized Melusine's family long before her father's death, but their treatment had gotten worse after her stint in the Forbidden Caves. Melusine had always tended to avoid interaction with the villagers, but lately she was lucky to get a single word said to her during errands. To make matters worse, her mother was being turned away from her side job of mending old clothes.

She sat on a stool in front of a window in her home, one elbow propped up on the sill. The new red pigment of her eyes was reflected in the warped glass and fractured by cracks. She could barely make out the mud of the pig pen outside due to the clouding and age-old dust.

Melusine's mother entered their shabby hut, her dark brown hair tied up in a messy and knotted bun. Mud caked her boots, face, hands, and her cheap linen skirt. Melusine's focus shifted to a spindly spider balancing on its web in the corner of the window.

She scrambled for something to kill the spider with, settling for a tin cup on the tiny dining table in the corner. The flat bottom smacked down on top of the creepy arachnid before it could scurry away. Melusine cursed under her breath. The cup was crushed flat like it was made of paper, not metal. She attempted to toss the crumpled tin away, but her mother plucked it from her hands.

Custance Tepes flipped the thin disk, a forced smile on her cracked lips.

"I don't suppose you could mold it back into a cup?" Melusine's mother asked of her.

"I... doubt it," Melusine admitted. The disk was placed on the windowsill, the spider's remains twitching on the underside.

Custance's fingers curled underneath Melusine's chin as she stared into her daughter's eyes. Her once fair and smooth brow had become ruddy and wrinkled with old age and a lifetime's worth of worry. Years spent with limited and often foul food had made both mother and daughter's cheeks sallow. Despite all of their blemishes from a rough life, Melusine had taken pride in sharing her mother's innate comely features. Except now she had a blemish that distinguished her from Custance.

"I've only seen red jadeite once... but your eyes remind me of it," her mother murmured. With a light and playful flick under Melusine's chin, she let go. "You can't laze about the whole day, Melly. Go fetch some water. I'm making soup tonight."

"Again?" Melusine groaned, but despite her childish whining got to her feet.

"Yes, again," her mother scoffed. She smacked Melusine's side with the rag tucked into the strap of her apron. The teen squeaked and bent her torso in an attempt to avoid the attack. "Now get going."

"You got my tunic all dirty!" Melusine accused, pulling her clothing taut and rubbing at the undyed grey linen.

"It's just a bitty ol' smudge! Staying inside so much isn't good for your health, and it's only to the well and back. Ask around for potatoes while you're at it, we're running low."

Melusine grunted in reply, hiked up her skirt hem, and shoved her feet into her boots by the door. She couldn't even get her hands on fresh produce. Only rotten vegetables and junk were offered to her from the stalls nowadays. The baker had begun to toss her his oldest bread like it was charity, even with product spotted with mold. She glanced over her shoulder at her mother and caught the grim sadness in her eyes. Her mother cleared her throat, pursed her lips, and turned her back on Melusine. "Time to go, Melly," she urged again in a suddenly quiet voice.

Melusine silently obeyed, but not before slamming the rickety door shut behind herself. Skirt held up well above her ankles, Melusine stomped through the muck that eternally surrounded her home. It was easier than it used to be to pull her boot free from the sunken hole her weight made. Her toes curled in an attempt to keep grip onto the inner sole of her boots. When she'd reached the ramshackle fence surrounding her family's humble property, Melusine heaved a sigh of relief to ease the stress tightening around her lungs. Melusine gripped onto a fence post to catch her breath.

The post was actually a stick— a chopped off branch sharpened to a point and stuck in the ground, then dulled and frayed over time. The entire fence was made of thin stripped wood, all bent and leaning to form a rough outline of their claim to land. She pushed her bangs back, then glanced at the decrepit, slanting shack that her father had pieced together and then abandoned in death. The young lady with eyes of red jadeite turned her back on her home and picked up the water bucket from its spot outside the mud.

Her trek down the path through the woods was silent and relatively peaceful. Sunshine peeked through the pine needles of the evergreen forest, fluffy white clouds rolling at a lazy pace across the sky. There was a gentle breeze, and Melusine could swear she smelled a hint of salt in the air. Perhaps her mother was right, and stepping out would be good for her. If only the villagers weren't so insufferable.

When she reached the village gates proper, she nodded her head at the guards posted on either side. Ever since she was discovered outside the Dragon's Labyrinth, the guards would click their tongues at her as if she were a leper. But today they merely tensed and turned their heads away. Melusine stopped in her tracks and stared at the guard to her right, then to her left. The longer they refused to look at her, the more her stare turned into a glower.

"Dullards," Melusine muttered and kicked some dirt in their direction before she passed into the village market square. Trying to confront the guards would only escalate the situation into taking a bad turn—that was a truth Melusine learned at a relatively young age.

The square had little in the way of adornments or wealth. A few necessities such as bread and produce were being sold in store fronts along the edges of the square. Most of the buildings were made of stone and wood, with thatch roofs. The windows had only simple shutters or curtains to protect inhabitants from the elements. In the center was the community well, decorated with potted plants. In Melusine's eyes, decoration was an unnecessary endeavor that only got in the way, but the community and her mother insisted that it was a "good," and "pleasant," thing for the village.

A gaggle of village girls stood by the farmer's market stall, one of them glaring at her over the shoulder of a man in a suit of armor. The girls were Melusine's age, the youngest being a mere sixteen winters, but they were flirting with a maturity that was beyond Melusine. The stranger's hair gleamed in the sun; his helmet carried under his arm. The glaring villager's finger pointed at the red-eyed teenager, and the man's head turned. Melusine was quick to continue on her errands.

She had to step over a few bushy pots as she trudged up to the well. She placed the bucket on the stone brick rim and gripped onto the pulley rope.

"Melusine Tepes," a baritone voice called from her left. It belonged to the man who'd been speaking with the village girls. His ash blonde hair swayed in the gentle breeze, and his narrow eyes were like two brilliantly shining sapphires. Melusine could see why the girls had been swooning over him. But despite his beauty, he was obviously fully grown, perhaps in his mid-twenties. He was of average height for a human man, which meant that he was eye level with Melusine. His armor was blued to a near black and decorated with white paint, the designs symmetrical arches and markings that reminded Melusine of blooming flowers.

"Yes?" Melusine replied in a reluctant and hard tone with a raised eyebrow. She noticed that the villager girls were now waiting in a disorderly line, heaved a sigh, picked up her bucket, and approached the man in armor. "Who are you?"

"My name is Baugulf, Miss Tepes," the blonde answered with a fist pressed to his chest plate in greeting. "Would you be willing to answer a few questions in private?" Melusine's left eyebrow quirked further up towards her temple.

"Am I suspected of a crime?"

"No, it's merely—"

"Has there been a crime that you suspect I have information on?"

"No—"

"Are you even a guard or investigator?"

"A knight, actually—"

Melusine put the bucket down on the ground, turned on her heel, and sped away as fast as she could. "My father always told me not to follow strangers to secluded places. Goodbye."