Grenna Fiori
The city had always been home to Grenna, caressing her with the mercantile aroma of war and the languid touch of sewage. The storm seasons grew worse and the daily fallen now outweighed the newborn hope, but gods how she loved it! The savage thrum of power and the criss-crossing array of cultures were a breeding ground for dreams. That the goddess of sleep interlaced such wondrous moments of unconsciousness with nightmare was only fitting. A young girl could not afford to become placid. Not when that young girl intended to become a legendary purloiner.
How Grenna loved the word. Purloin. The intonations rolled off the lips so easily, and combined two of her favorite machinations. Purring and loins. Though she had only recently started her life cycles, crimson slicks that they were, she had long ago understood the need to control that moistest of regions between a person’s legs to get what she wished. Purr a bit, control the loins, and men especially would do her bidding almost without fail. Women were a touch trickier, but her nimble fingers and talent for lock picking easily translated to blissful control of the same gender. Grenna’s grip tightened around the hard shaft in her hands as her mind wandered to fleshier pursuits.
‘Grenna Fiori!’ her mother’s voice crashed into her mind from the nether reaches. The acrid silence which followed brought tears to the corners of Grenna’s eyes. She had loved her mother, would have liked to love her for much longer, had it not been for the enraged fists of her father. The young girl’s attention shifted into the distance, toward the penal quarter that housed the abusive murderer that spawned her. She hoped he suffered greatly when the rubble came down upon him. He deserved no better.
What of everyone else though? Grenna’s gaze swept the ruin surrounding her.
Where a city of some twenty thousand inhabitants had stood only minutes before, now there was only rubble, and smoke, and silence. The length of blade standing point down in the young girl’s grip had ceased glowing, but she wasn’t sure entirely what had happened. One moment she had been purloining, sighing at the thought, and she remembers seeing the sword, and then reaching for it. But then nothing, well, nothing but the glow.
And then the city home of her heart was gone.