Indigo and Red (closed to Mari)

[Astrophel]

For once, in Knife's Edge, the weather was good.

A soft breeze swam in from the harbour, bringing with it a salty chill air that filtered through the crevices and streets. But the white sun hung high in the cloudless sky, singing down its glory to the people of the usually snow-filled land. For today there was merely just the hint of freeze, with the cobblestones highlighted in only a faint cobweb of frost. The lintels of doorways were clean from snow, and the thatch of the older buildings was drying under the heat. Crows flew from dock to public house, darkening the pale skies just briefly with their jet palour, only to merge with the dullness of the brickwork. They cawed a new day, a new dawn, and carried on the will of their particular gods - be that the sun, the wind, the rubbish heap or the midden - collecting and discovering.

One particular fine crow, with a greying head and a white tip to his left wing, was down an alley this day. He was following the scent of a certain old sack of potatoes, taken from a ship on the harbour and brought down this way to be disposed of. A hulking figure, with great broad shoulders and an uneven temprement had the sack of the moulding tuberous crop slung over his shoulder. As he walked he sang with a raspy voice about a maiden fair whom he could never get in the real world. The grey-headed crow fluttered from one side of the street to the other, trying to be as stealthy and silent as possible as he waited for the potatoes to be dropped.

Then there was a hiccup. A mistake. Years of freeze and shaking people had left the back streets of Knife's Edge very under-kept, with dirt and homeslessness filling them up. Drains leaked, sewers overran, and in this particular place a large cobble stone jutted out where it should not be. After it came a dip, a pothole, and it was over and down this obstacle that the sack-carrier tripped, causing him, just for a moment, loosen his hold on the potatoes.

Desperately the crow thought this was his chance, and he flew down like the scavenger he is, ready to sieze the first thing to slip out of the sack. Claws went down, beak opened for a defiant croon, wings angled rightly to take the wind's current - but to no avail. His enemy, the sack-carrier, shifted his hold just as fast, and continued on, though limping slightly, and allowed only one item to fall. As the crow saw it fall with a soft 'clunk' and landed by it to watch it carefully, he knew that it was not a potato, and it was not food. Anxiously, even so, he pecked at it, and only received the chill and hardness of burnished clay back.

Unsatisfied, the crow flew off, but left his potential prize.

A dirty clay teapot, unbroken and inedible, with a small mark of an 'x' on one side, lying in the middle of the street.