Flight of the Mage #1
Lucy Highlander, the only surviving daughter and heir to the powerful Highlander family, an ancient matriarchal Mage house, finds herself fleeing in the dead of night from the home of her aunt and uncle where she has been trapped for the past 14 months. To her dismay, chance puts her directly into her cousin’s path.
LANGUAGE – 1
SEX – 1
VIOLENCE – 2
The setting is meant to be turn of the 19th century in some major city – think London or New York City. Magic exists, clearly, and thus the whole setting is more of a steampunk, late Victorian vibe. Magic is kept underground, only for the rich and powerful, and not known to the general public.
I’ve reused this general concept a couple of other times (stick around long enough and you’ll notice this is a trend, I like to reuse the stuff I’ve written when it comes out well, AUs are my best friend) and there is another flavor variant of this concept with a different opener and a similar character I might also throw up sometime!
It was a dark and eerily silent night. Not stormy, like how so many stories begin.
She would have preferred a storm. It was too quiet, too still.
But this was the only chance she would have.
Quickly and silently, as she practiced for months, the Mage undid the thick strings of magical wards that hung both around her person and around the prison they called her bedroom. She had done it so often she could do it in her sleep now. When the last ward faded away, she reached with slightly trembling fingers and threw open the window to the third story room, and looked down.
The courtyard stretched out below, empty and still. Quiet. No alarm raised. She pulled back, swallowing back the force of her heart in her throat, and hefted the knapsack by its straps from the floor beside her.
All she owned was stuffed into a knapsack that she stitched together herself – her citizenship and identification papers, what little coin she managed to pilfer and pocket over the last year, a few changes of clothes, and some toiletries. Enough to get her to her destination – to a tucked away shop in a seedy side of town whom she believed might help her either hide from her family or get out of the city altogether. And from there, hopefully, the little she possessed would be enough to get her started, wherever she ended up.
She paused again and listened, straining for any noise. It was still silent. So out the window went the knapsack, and the young redhead followed shortly behind.
She only risked enough magic for a non-limb-breaking fall, too worried someone would sense the magic if she just floated down, and she caught herself hard on her hands and knees as she hit the ground and rolled. Thank goodness she opted to dress herself in the trousers and waistcoat of one of the servants – just in case.
She did it. Lucy escaped the house.
Now to get off the grounds and make her way into the heart of the city proper.
She didn’t have much time. As soon as they came back to the townhouse and realized she was gone, all hell would break loose. She picked up her knapsack and began a fast jog for the courtyard gate, still on high alert for anything that might give her away.
Nothing stirred. She lifted the latch of the side gate as quietly as physically possible, squeezed through the narrow opening she allowed herself, and Lucy was out. Free. The closest she had come to freedom in months. Now – all she had to do was find East Whitebridge, and the little shop she sought on it… and she would be safe.
That task proved… far more trouble than she expected. She was not familiar with this city, or the side streets she attempted to take. Before she had gone more than four or five dozen blocks, leaving the well paved cobbles of the upper class neighborhood behind and plunging into the seedier underbelly of the city, Lucy realized she… was hopelessly lost.
She took a deep breath.
She was dressed as a working hand, so no one paid her any mind, thank goodness – but asking for directions was out of the question. Not only would it draw attention, but her relatives might be able to use the fact against her, if they could at all trace her route.
She decided she needed to get off the street altogether, start taking the alleys – and she turned off at the first one she found to do just that.
It was all right. She would be all right.
She did not expect the back alleys to be just as populated as the main streets. She was in some sort of ‘entertainment’ district, she realized with a start. All manners of men and women wandered in and out of the bars, taverns, and… ‘private homes’ of the surrounding area.
Lucy froze mid-step, hunching her shoulders, but after a pause – when again, no one seemed to pay her any mind – she plunged forward.
Too bad she only made it as far as the next bend. Lucy hardly turned the corner when she came face to face with someone who shouldn’t be there any more than she should.
She almost felt as though her own alarm reflected in her cousin’s face.
Cyrus Highlander initially looked shocked, then guilty at being caught coming out of some seedy bar – but before Lucy so much as opened her mouth to ask what on earth he was doing here, his expression shifted into a sharp, dubious suspicion.
“What –” Cyrus started to say, but did not get more than a word.
Lucy reacted on instinct, even amongst the throng of people. With a surge of energy up her arm and a twist of her fingers, she swept her arm to the side and body slammed him out of her way and back into the bar’s back door with a solid wall of near-transparent magic.
Then she sprinted for it.
It couldn’t have been thirty seconds before he managed to recover from the blow, because even over the roar of blood pounding in her ears she could hear his aggravated yell.
“Lucy! Lucy!!”
But she did not slow down to even consider her state of blind panic. She only ran as hard and fast as she physically could force herself to go, and willed that he couldn’t keep up.
But her cousin knew the district better. Lucy ran half-blind in terror, dodging people and shoving things out of her way, and she could hear the crash of sounds behind her that meant Cyrus was giving chase, and gaining quick. There was no way to hide from him in this mess of people, she had to find some place to duck and hide and hope he barrelled straight past her in the darkness.
She didn’t know how long she ran until the mouth of an alleyway yawned into her line of sight to her left. Though her lungs burned in searing pain she didn’t dare slow down, veering straight into the blackened shadows and searching wildly for some blackened shape that meant cover.
Lucy hardly made it more than a dozen strides before a heavy shape hit the back of her knees and sent her crashing to the ground. She bit back a shriek – she didn’t have enough air in her lungs as it was – and twisted around. Kicking out at Cyrus, who had managed to tackle her, and for a moment the two wrestled; Lucy to shove her cousin off and Cyrus for her hands, to keep her from summoning another spell.
“No! No! Get off!” She wailed, half-broken in painful gasps for air.
Neither cousin paid any attention to their surroundings, too focused on the tasks before them. Outside of that sharp cry, Lucy fell silent, teeth gritted, mouth curved into a grimaced snarl that practically matched the one on her cousin’s face, as she fought to throw him off.
She didn’t want to draw attention, she forgot herself in her panic – if someone were to come, if police were called, it wouldn’t matter if she got free of Cyrus now… she would be delivered back into her aunt and uncle’s hands no matter what she did or said. She would be caught red-handed as a runaway, dressed as she was, carrying all she could in her knapsack… and then she would never be free of them again, she knew it.
But the tackle to the grimy cobbles knocked the wind from her already burning lungs. Cyrus was larger, with the physical advantage of being a strapping young man in good health, and although Lucy struggled wildly, kicking where she could and flailing to claw herself free from underneath him… she had never so much as punched a person before, let alone fought someone off.
He caught one wrist, wrenched her arm, and caught the other as she gasped in pain and went for his hand.
Both wrists slammed into the ground above her head and Lucy yelped again at the shock of pain. Cyrus leaned his weight on them to hold her still, shifted his legs to better pin her own, and then… held there, until her struggling quieted by exhausted degrees.
For a moment the only noise was their mutual ragged breathing. The shadows in the alley were too complete for her to really make out Cyrus’ face, but she could still see the outline of a deep scowl.
“What… are you doing, Lucy?” He panted, after a span of heartbeats that throbbed harsh in her veins.
“Please, please, let me go. Let me go.” The heady swirl of adrenaline and terror made her dizzy, made her voice crack and tremble even at the hissed whisper she dropped into. “Pretend you didn’t see me. I won’t tell a soul you were here –“
He acted like he hardly heard her.
“How did you –” He shook his head, and in the flash of light from the street she thought she could see a smear of blood across the side of his face. Did she throw him into the door that hard? She couldn’t find it within herself to be remorseful.
“The wards on the room… did you break them?”
Lucy didn’t bother to answer anymore than he bothered to listen. “I will not spend another day of my life in that house. Please. I know you have no love for me – but as your cousin I beg you –“
He shifted his grip on her wrists to one hand, and Lucy yelped again at the stinging slap across her cheek. The atmosphere seemed to shift, the shadows pressing in closer around them, as she could practically sense the building rage from him.
“Ungrateful bitch,” Cyrus snarled. “After everything Aunt and Uncle have done for you… what the Matriarch has done… and you still try to run away?”
“I can’t — Cyrus please –“
A hand closed around her throat, squeezed, not enough to cut air completely but enough to cause the words to choke. Lucy began to flail again. Cyrus muttered to himself, mostly under his breath, too quiet for her to hear over the roar of blood in her ears.
She tried to summon something to her, power within or object without, clawing deep within her own strength for anything that could possibly save her as his grip on her throat continued to tighten to alarming levels.
A sharp crack rang through the alley. The pressure on her throat immediately ceased, along with the grip on her wrists, and Cyrus slumped to a dead weight on top of her. Lucy shoved him off to the side, then clutched at her throat, gasping for air past the burning in her lungs and the burning of tears in her eyes.
What… happened?
