Osanna: The Apprentice

Loroth's youngest apprentice,

Pushed through the crowd of the market place. Fishwives hawked their wares, merchants haggled over cloth, spices and racks of stolen goods gleaming in the bright noonday sun. Echos of far off lands and spilled blood. The apprentice had a mission, shoulders squared, remaining teeth bared, pushing her way through the crush of taller people.

A pathetic excuse for a thirteen year old girl, she could have easily passed for nine or ten if not for the hard expression on her pixieish features and the apprentice mark swinging from her neck on a worn leather cord. She was not tall. She was not strong and she always seemed to have a runny nose. As it had been for the majority of her life, nobody noticed, or cared to notice, the girl, little more than a child, forcing her way through the masses. That was how she liked it, finally making her way to the head of the crowd.

"Exotic snakes! Beautiful exotic lovlies! Live!" The merchant, rather looked like a snake himself with a long, serpentine torso and oddly slanted eyes. He looked exactly as they said he looked. The older apprentices Weldfarn and Gabriel put toghter their meager savings to buy one of the irridecent, coiling, living peices of jewlery. Every wizard worth 'is salt has a firmilliar! Gabriel had said, grinning in his particularly oily manner. No wonder he'd gotten that little fool Weld in on his game, with all his promices of greatness. A caravan out of this rat hole port town. But neither one, had noticed, that someone had over heard, pinned under the sweaty arm of Lorath who for all his 'great powers' hadn't detected that his youngest apprentice, was the one bringing his world down around his ears. Nor had they noticed, when the money jar, had disappeared. "Twelve copper!" She barked, a big voice for such a skinny little mop of a girl. The merchant's lip curled over his golden cast teeth. "Fifteen," he sneered with a stream of ugly brown spittle into a copper bowl. "What's a little chit like yeh need a snake fer?" The apprentice, smiled. "Tis' fer my master, Loroth Blue Beard, needs th' blood of yer finest asp,"



It wasn't asp's blood on the youngest apprentice's proverbial hands when the undertaker wheeled his cart down the cobble stone alley way in the quickly dissapateing morning fog. "Who could have cursed him?!" Gabriel snarled, his face unwillingly tear streaked, his lower lip stiff, fists balled at his sides.

"Who would have done such a thing?"

"As if yeh t'weren't plannin' it yerself,"

"I had one bloody year left wi' tha' ol' codger 'an I coulda been out o'this mud puddle kingdom!"

Osanna, merely picked up her bags. Gabriel, was the only one shackled to this grimey warf.