Moonguard, as the crow flies, was a giant pentagon—a fitting
design for a religious community—separated into three districts known as its “rings.”
The Inner Ring was the home of the nobility, the rich and affluent, those who
funded the city’s projects and more often than not acted as the collective
voice of the people. The Middle Ring, where Sithe reigned, was home to the
merchant class. Smiths, tanners, tailors, matrons. Guild masters. If you weren’t
born in the confines of the Inner Ring, then this was the highest you could
hope to rise.
Then there was the Outer Ring, where dwelled the laborers,
the disenfranchised. Those like William, and Vincent, who only had a single
name to their credit, carved out a life in the Outer Ring.
Typically, newcomers to the White Wall started their new
lives of peace and prosperity on the outside. If they were talented, they
quickly moved deeper, under the Golden Gate and into the mid-range districts. If they
weren’t, they floundered and died with the rest of the poor, or else left
entirely.
Anna Heiler, miraculously, had slipped right past the Golden
Gate and the Diamond Gate, and lived
in one of the largest manses on the sculpted lawns of the inner sanctum.
“I’ve long wondered something,” Sithe dared to say, as she
sat opposite Lady Heiler at the small wooden table where, not so long ago, she’d
adopted a little girl with scars on her body and deeper scars in her mind.
“Do tell.”
“You don’t dress like
a diamond,” Sithe continued, leaning forward in her seat. “For someone as rich
and affluent as your illustrious self, you seem quite ... unconcerned with
such things.”
Lady Heiler smirked. She was a tall woman, older than she
looked if her dark blue eyes were any indication, with jet-black hair and a clean,
crisp, but homespun robe. “Truthfully ... I’m not. Before we came here, my
son and I lived in a rundown fishing village with barely enough copper tabs to
run itself into an early grave. Affluence. Illustriousness. It’s all alien to
me.”
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