Die Blasse Frau

Spoiler: .

A pale woman drifted through the streets of the city, not in the dead of night, nay, but in the bright and shining daylight. Wraithlike, she floated through the pedestrian crowd, subsumed by the vastness of the urban structure, of that great unwashed mass. Of the tall blockhouses. Any sound of her step drowned out by the grinding of wooden wheels over the brick paved roads. The folk about her were varied, a few knife-ears, a sorcerer here or there. She paused at an alcove along the road to observe the crowd. That flood, she panned over it for any sign of gold. The initial motivated panning turned into a trancelike and empty gaze over an hour's course. The numb buzzing, brought on by the tabacca which she so readily consumed, turned the trance into a haze. Numbing it was, to the senses, to the soul, perhaps, that urban experience. Endless rows of blockhouses, an endless river of folk. All one and the same.
The pale woman drifted to the outskirts of the city, to the precipice of the noble townhouses. There was but a trickling stream here, servants passing on the road, interspersed with the occasional nobleman or noblewoman. She crept about, off the main road, to observe the courtyard of one of those noble homes. Grass, shorn short, covered the ground. The trees too, had their leaves, their thicker foliages shorn. They were being tended to by a servant most proper. There, in the center of the courtyard was a patio, littered with tables and chairs. The makings of an outdoor lounge. She observed the noblemen, noblewomen, sat about this table. As they played their card games amongst themselves, smoked their cigars, drank their liquor. Twilight set in, and the insects began their nightly chirps, the birds too. The buzzing became apparent again, and the nobility of it all faded.
The pale woman's feet fell softly, thudding against the wooden bridge into the slum town. The air was choked with smoke. Smoke, and blood. The sickly sweet aroma of opium, and the strange unnatural scent of magical burns. The thumps of wood abruptly turned to the squelching of mud, and the other filth of the slum street. She drifted into a bar, draping her head over the counter. Ginger hair sprawled out over the wooden surface, garette trailing gray smoke into the dense air.
She wept.
It was over.