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Stone in the shoe

When you were a kid, you lived with your grandmother in the small town of Silvertree, on the edge of a magical forest. Grandma is a witch, and she taught you how to use your magic to affect the natural world, too. “Magic is a part of you,” she always told you. “Learning how to use it means figuring out who you are.” Now you’re 19 and on your own. After years of living in the forest while you perfected your witchcraft, you’ve returned to take care of your grandmother’s house and crow-familiar while she’s gone. Figuring out who you are feels more important than ever - not to mention, figuring out what Silvertree is. A lot is just as you remembered: the friendly generous next-door neighbors with a kid just your age, the proud town council, the quaint little shops with quirky punny names, the gentle shadowy forest full of magic.

PlayerOliver · Kỳ huyễn
Không đủ số lượng người đọc
443 Chs

92

The sound of shattering glass makes you freeze on the spot.

For an instant, silence falls on the street—until another crash comes from somewhere across the road, and the crowd erupts with shocked cries. You start getting shoved and pushed about as people run to try and find the source of the noises, and it's a struggle just to see over the heads of all the protesters. However, once you've recovered from the initial surprise and found your bearings again, you're able to peer through the crowd and make out a carpet of broken glass covering the sidewalk outside the Town Hall—and out of the corner of your eye, you see someone with a green woolen hat pulled low on their head sprinting away towards a corner and out of sight. You're pretty sure that person wasn't one of the protesters.

"Everyone, please, just stay calm!" you hear Rana calling, but with no way to get to her megaphone, her voice is lost in the commotion as the crowd starts to pull in every direction at once. People are flooding across the road to get a look at the damage that's been done—and when you find a safe spot to stand, you see that the two main windows on the front side of the Town Hall have been totally smashed. At the same time, other groups of worried-looking people are trying to push away from the protest site altogether, but with so many people all trying to move at once, it's impossible to find a clear path, and so you can start to see people getting stuck just trying to get away. And when that happens, people start to panic.

"What on—what on earth's going on?"

You hear a voice pierce through the chaos, and glancing up, you see Dina watching, awestruck, from the entrance to the Town Hall. Behind her are a few other members of the Town Council, all of them looking equally as stunned. You realize as you watch them take in the scene in front of them that, rather than seeing a crowd that has begun to panic at the sound of breaking glass, they may well assume that the protest has become a riot, and that it's the protesters who have started smashing windows.

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