The market was an animal, savage, cutthroat, a cannibal whose mouth teemed with parasites and whose belly held worms of a capitalist sentiment, vultures who swoop and cackle and gloat when they find fresh meat. Pavara sat on a broken wooden crate, in an alley with one such vulture.
He was a goblin, Grashnak, he said, and he had a dragonskin pouch with a hydra gizzard inside. Not just any hydra gizzard, either. It was a Savageborn Hydra gizzard, stolen from a Gruul victory revel.
She was flirting with him. She used the weapons her training had given her...
"Yeah? I bet he's not as strong as you, though..."
Locking eyes, then dropping contact, turning her torso toward him and leaning forward when he spoke, laughing at his jokes...
"You're the funniest man I've ever met! And you're pretty cute, too..."
Pretending to hide little smiles, he was putty in her hands, just as that hydra gut would be.
Finally, she let loose her killing blow: "You wanna go somewhere more private? Talk a little more-" She put a hand on his knee. "-intimately?"
Naturally, he agreed. What she didn't know was that he also planned to rob her. It wouldn't matter in the end, of course.
"Come on! My place!" She took his hand, tugging him through the crowd into a rundown slum on the border of the undercity, close to where the tunnels and dank halls of the Golgari began. She led him to 'her place', but, contrary to Grishnak's belief, it was not her home. She took him to an abandoned apartment, reeking of blood and filth and excrement, a mouldering one bedroom hovel wherein she kept horrors before recycling them, sometimes even letting two fight to the death beforehand. Grishnak, a goblin fairly well used to the smells, noticed nothing wrong, as she held open the door for him. Then he saw the kitchen table. A spined, horrible wormlike mess of diseased flesh and teeth and-
SPLAT!
"MY EYES! IT'S IN MY MOUTH!" He screamed. But the neighbors, poor and oppressed enough already, knew better than to interfere. The pouch hung on the goblin's waist, suspended only by a thin leather-
WHOOSH! Her cutlass scraped out of its sheath like white lightning and whistled across the goblin's belt.
The impoverished family next door, on one side taxed to death, on the other, next door to death, heard everything.
The screams of a goblin.
The thud of a stomach wrapped in dragonskin on a rotting floor.
A young woman, saying "I know you're hungry, baby. Look what I brought!"
The goblin's screaming, no longer in pain, now in horror, then subsiding into a choked gurgle.
The children cowered by their mother, as their father was long dead. They cried, as they always did, and their mother knew, when it was all over, they would beg to leave and go somewhere else, as they always did.
Pavara collected her loot, fat wet weight slapping her thigh as she walked, hung on her belt, leather strap retied. She needed to return to the market, for corpseflowers and something to make lightning. After all, a proper Horror needs to look good too. The lightning was unrelated, but necessary nonetheless.
As she strode down the street to Sun's Height, she whistled a song to the beat of an earth elemental pounding on the bars of its cage, reassured. No one noticed anything...
