Stealing from Wizards

Detritus Lane

Detritus Lane is a very unusual street occupied by very unusual people. It is roughly ten miles long, with one end opening into a used bookstore in Halifax, and the other into a disused public washroom in Vancouver. It also passes through most of the worst parts of Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, Edmonton, and half a dozen others. The street is barely wide enough for two people to pass in most parts, and paved with a mix of cracked asphalt, uneven cobblestone, and crumbling concrete. It is crammed with crooked and broken buildings that look like they were dropped out of every era since the Vikings landed. Mud huts, battered brick townhouses, moss-covered limestone churches, rotting wood cottages, and mangled modern monstrosities all fight for space, leaving the road eternally in shadow. The architecture of many of the buildings is so decrepit and precarious that one might think they were held together by magic.

One would be right.

Detritus Lane is a magical street, a faerie road where a single step along it can cover a hundred miles across normal land. Moreover it is a place where the veil between the non-magical world and faerie realm thins and tears. There are places along it where things can pass easily from one to the other. Lost things slip through these tears in the veil from the mundane world into the faerie realm. It is where unattended pens, missing cats, lost socks, and undelivered mail inevitably arrive. It is the place where things that have fallen through the cracks in the world come to rest, and it has been so since before humans set foot in the Americas.

The occupants of Detritus Lane are as strange as the street itself. Some would dwarf the sturdiest of men, others are so small and delicate that they catch on the breeze. Those that one might mistake for ordinary people can often be seen holding conversations with animals, and speaking in strange tongues to nobody at all. Most, though, are not delusional.

The animals are listening. They are familiars, spirit creatures given form and life. The solitary proclamations are magical spells, used to do everything from polish shoes to move mountains. The people of the lane are witches and wizards, elves and fairies, warlocks, sorcerers, ogres and trolls; magical folk.

Nobody lives in Detritus Lane, not really. Many people reside there, but few would call it living. Like everything else in the Lane, its denizens are those that fell through the cracks of magical society and found themselves with nowhere else to be. They are the poor, the lost, the criminal, and the exiled.

If anyone were to truly call the Lane home, it would be Kuro. He was one of the unfortunate few children residing in the perpetual gloom of Detritus. During his short life there, he and the laneway became close partners. He knew every crack and crevice along its length. He knew which shadows he could hide in and which shadows would try to hide in him. He knew which sewer grate led to an alley in Vancouver, and which closet opened into a bus station in Boston. Detritus was his home, his shelter, and his only friend.

While the labyrinthine alleyways and buildings hid Kuro, they provided little to sustain him. In order to eat, he had to scavenge, beg, and as was becoming more and more common, steal. That could not be done within the lane. People, there, guarded what few items of value they had, jealously. There was nothing to be gained begging from beggars, stealing from thieves, or scrounging from piles of refuse already claimed by larger and more dangerous scavengers. To survive in Detritus Lane, Kuro often had to leave it.

Begging was best done in Bytown. It was the largest city behind the veil. It sat at the borders of the three great kingdoms of Alfheim, Acadia, and Tirnanog. Not by coincidence, it was also the meeting point of several faerie roads, including Detritus Lane. It was a city of trade, where magical folk bought and sold all manner of wares, from simple foodstuffs, to enchanted carriages, from kitchen tools to great works of art.