Daphne’s hand flew to her lips, her eyes widening with alarm as she saw the chaos. The piece had fallen directly on one of the guards who was protecting the float, and his fellow guards began to pull his body from underneath the debris. The crowd stood further away and shook their heads; clearly, this lady skimped on construction materials, causing this accident! They booed her as she passed.
Penelope Huntington looked close to tears. Her chances of dating Atticus had just gone up in smoke!
However, that was just the beginning.
Soon enough, more and more screams began to reverberate through the streets. Pieces of every float began to fall off, landing everywhere as hoards of people began to run away hysterically in a bid for safety, causing many to fall in the mad rush to get away.
Daphne watched in horror as her eyes caught sight of an old man getting trampled by the crowd. He was swept up in the crushing wave of people, but he couldn’t keep up and fell.
"Help him!" Daphne ordered her guards, but they shook their heads. Their orders were to keep Her Majesty, Queen Daphne, safe no matter what! Instead, they circled her float to make sure that no debris would rain down on the people watching.
Strangely enough, Daphne’s float remained intact. Before Daphne could heave a sigh of relief, piercing shrieks of fear cut through the air. She looked up and gasped.
Francessa Seibert’s float was on fire. A huge chunk of flowers on her float spontaneously erupted into flas, causing her to back away in shock.
The flas grew and spread to other parts of the float, quickly engulfing the once beautiful flowers and turning them into char. The crowd scread in fear, worried for their favorite lady.
Daphne’s earrings began to tingle as she tried to focus on her magic. They weren’t too far away and she had been working on her skills the last couple of weeks― she might be able to quell the flas. She might’ve hated Francessa Seibert and ntally threatened to have her torched but she wasn’t going to stand there and do nothing when it happened in real life!
Making sure no one noticed, Daphne stared hard at the flas, her earrings burning against her skin. She needed to get the fire down before it beca life-threatening.
Under Daphne’s control, the flas slowly died down. Francessa Seibert, too, looked fairly unhard, if not a bit frightened. However, Daphne barely had ti to breathe a sigh of relief when another sharp shriek pierced through the air, drawing her attention.
"It’s raining!"
Daphne looked up; the sky was now completely overcast, and the puffy white clouds from before were now darkened and gray.
"Please no... don’t... no storms...no..."
Daphne prayed to herself in quick, desperate pants, but her prayers were unanswered.
Lightning split the skies. The roar of thunder followed not even a second later, and Daphne felt her heart race in her ribcage, panic rising in her throat. She gripped onto the railing of her float to steady herself. She could not fall from her perch. It would be disastrous, and her people did not need further reason to panic.
She took a deep breath; the air was heavy with the sll of rain. The heavens began to pour with a vengeance. Shouts of dismay began to fill the air, and Daphne wanted to join them.
How had the weather turned for the worst without any prior warning? Daphne had hopes that it could simply be a small passing spring shower, but that was dashed with every passing second.
The heavy rain simply got heavier without any signs of stopping, plumting from the skies above, raining hard on everyone as though the heavens above were trying to drown Vramid in a torrential downpour.
"Get inside! Darling, help the kids!"
"Hurry! To the house!"
"Dixie! Where are you? Co here!"
It beca a massive free-for-all as the crowd dove into the nearby buildings for shelter, desperately trying to keep themselves as dry as possible while avoiding the falling debris. Ironically, their efforts to avoid injury led to greater injury, as they tried to squeeze under roofs and into buildings that were simply not ant to house that many people.
"Watch out! Be careful!" Daphne tried to call out as she saw children dash through the wet streets, slipping on the cobbled tiles, but her voice barely made an impact in the noise. She could only watch helplessly from her float as the entire parade fell into shambles.
Every other lady’s dress was soaked through, their ticulous hairstyle now nothing but a tangled ss that pooled at the base of their necks. Their floats did not fare much better.
Every other float had entire portions of them missing, as though they’d been gouged out by a particularly vicious creature that feasted on floats. Daphne shivered as she visualized the size of the missing pieces― did they hit anyone and cause severe injury?
She could not forget the harrowing sight of a guard buried under the debris.
Thankfully, the guards that had been stationed to protect Daphne were fine. They were soaked through, their uniforms clinging uncomfortably onto their skins as they stood their ground, but they were unhurt.
There was another very tiny silver lining. The last of the flas on Francessa Seibert’s float was eventually snuffed by the rain. It had even washed away the charred bits of the float that had been scorched by the fires.
Yet, while the world was suffering from the rainfall, Daphne stood right in the center, perfectly protected.
The rain avoided her, almost as though they were two ends of a magnet that repelled one another. Even if the rain fell directly above her head, it would stop several inches above before sliding down a good distance away from her as if she were a rose placed within a glass do. Only the bottom of Daphne’s dress had been affected by the rainwater that started to pool on her float.
"... What on earth is going on?"
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