Lave is walking through the market when someone fails to kill her. It's a bright, sunny day, though the distant hills are still marred by the tattered remains of the fog that always seems to find its way in off the sea and the breeze stinks of fish. Some fish-smell is to be expected, of course. The market is outdoors, brightly colored stalls sprouting from the seaside promenade, and probably a third of them are selling some sort of seafood: freshly caught salmon and cod stretched out on ice, shrimp and crab and lobster awaiting their demise in well-used coolers, even a scattering of filter-feeders, though the sea hasn't really agreed with oysters for years now. And the stranger things too, the ones that Lave is here for, slow-moving catfish grown thick with crystals from decades spent feeding on the effluvium of distant false-islands, clockwork parasites clogging the soft innards of shellfish, even a smattering of relics laboriously dredged up from the dreams of sunken ruins.
*(the rest of this story is over on my own site: clickie the linkie to go there. 2.2k words about what it's like to fight a witch, as seen through the eyes of a witch.)
