16. Braza
My most distant memories of life begin some short time after my birth. Mercifully, not with the death of my parents, but with a hazy recollection of the patterns of whimsical creatures painted on a wall. I was in a holding house, a rare unwanted orphan who took to staring at the illustrations next to the tiny bed where I regularly tucked my legs under my chin and covered myself with my wings.
I was a miserable child. All orphans of my kind are, especially those too young to realize they were cut off from the embrace of the animaris of their birth parents.
But I was probably the worst example of what went wrong when separated from that essence too early. I was an animal who would bite the hands of adults who wanted to treat me kindly. My claws would come out, strange, overlong, and black against the blush red of my skin. The magic that’d saved me from the same fate as my parents had a parade of adults leaving the holding house with disgust, calling me “unnatural.”
All that changed when a different-looking person visited. She didn’t immediately try to pick me up like I was one of the brightly colored toys piled up against the far wall.
Instead, she’d sat a tail-length from my bed, with me hunched on it. “Hello, little one,” she’d said gently. I didn’t reply, only inspecting her with a child’s curiosity over the line of my knees.
She was from the Moihan tribe, the first one I’d ever seen, with feminine features exaggerated by a dusting of silver on her cheekbones and eyelids, above eyes that glowed crimson from within. Her glossy black hair was neatly pinned to stop just behind the thin curves of her spiraled horns.
She was dressed really nicely. The fall of red and silver fabric complimented her gray skin and stopped just short of her ankles and small, pointed shoes. Gems glittered on her fingers. That kind of finery didn’t belong in this holding house, on the floor where so many adults had already stood and gone.
When I didn’t reply or move, she smiled and pulled a book from the folds of her skirts. “I have a daughter your age and brought a book of her favorite stories. Perhaps you would like to hear one?” she offered.
I gave her the barest of nods and listened as she cracked open the first page and began to read the words to me. Her voice was its own magic, luring me to her when no one else had managed to get more from me than animal shrieking and “No!” plus the biting and clawing to get them to go away. I watched the pictures seem to dance on the pages when I sat next to her leg, on the soft textured fabric of her dress.
When the story was over and the title of the next stood out as she flipped the page, my eyes widened as I realized where I’d moved to. I froze, but she did not do more than turn her red gaze my way.
“Did you like the story?” she asked. I nodded mutely. “Would you like me to read the next one?”
Shyly, I shook my head no. I didn’t trust this pretty Moihan woman. She accepted my answer and told me her name, Keshora et Sudaira, and smiled wide in motherly amusement as I whispered mine back. “Bwaza.”
“I’ll visit you tomorrow, Braza.”
I’d learn later that her title meant Keshora, mate of the second prince. My backwater town had never seen a noble Moihan before. They viewed the shadowy gray peoples of their tribe and the chilly blue Vrassorm with heavy suspicion.
In retrospect, I recognized I was caught under the same web of scorn with my barely restrained shadow powers. Those claws of mine, contrasted with my Iorsio heritage, were why none of the red-skinned townsfolk wanted anything else to do with me.
They were also part of the reason why Keshora returned the next day, this time with her daughter. Her kindly presence was overshadowed by Ravai, who, in that time, always wore her hair in a high tail with a bow of red fabric that matched her eyes. The immediacy of our friendship started at first sight. It was an anam cara bond all the way in another world, when two lonely girls became immediate best friends.
Ravai and I sat and played the day away while Keshora bargained with the bitter matron who ran the holding houses for orphans and the sick in our town. The perfect day ended with Keshora seizing Ravai’s arm and leaving in a whirlwind, with the matron muttering about “Moihan scum” once the door closed behind them.
The days in that holding house were made lengthy by my young age. It couldn’t have been too long before Keshora and Ravai returned, but they’d brought someone else too. One moment, I was bored and alone, and the next, Ravai was in my room like a burst of color. She pulled me by the hand to come meet her father.
“You’re coming home with us today!” she said gleefully, listing all the fun things home entailed as we headed into the front room of the house.
“Really?” I wasn’t so sure I’d be released to go, not with all the bad names the matron had called her and her mother.
The matron’s tune had apparently changed when face-to-face with a prince, though. My first impression of Phaeron et Sudair was of the shadows that moved with him as he spoke and gestured, deep in conversation with the matron. They eddied around his boots and added extra coils where his tail twined companionably with Keshora’s. They stood together across a counter from the Iorsio woman.
He was offering her a stack of coins, but his fingers made a cage over them. The shadows suggested claws like mine.
I’d never seen the matron so nervous. “The people of this town have never seen her like before. It is unnatural for her to have a Moihan power,” she was saying.
“All the more reason she should be raised by a family that understands her abilities,” he replied.
Ravai ran up to him and tugged on his cloak. “Dad, Dad! Look, I got Braza!”
He picked her up with a coil of shadow, affectionately pressing foreheads with her before passing her to Keshora. I was next, weightless for a moment, until he sat me on the counter next to the money. I inspected him with a bit of wonder. Dark blue stain marked a square in the middle of his bottom lip and dusted his cheeks, with paint of the same shade marking runes and patterns over each section of his spiraled horns.
He was Moihan-strange, and were I a bold, outgoing child like Ravai, I’d have rubbed one of the patterns on his horns because I wondered if they were permanent. But it was his eyes that fascinated me. Slitted and yellow, they were familiar in a way the rest of him was not. I’d later learn he was half Iorsio himself, and while hybrids didn’t truly exist in our world, he’d still inherited his mother’s flame-inspired eyes.
Phaeron held out a palm full of shadows that curled and billowed like a small black fire. He didn’t say anything, but his power called to mine, and I played with it like it was putty, squashing and stretching it. Everyone watched me, the Moihan family with understanding and the matron with fear.
“She is shadowborn,” he said.
With a wiggle of his fingertips, the crude wing shape I’d made became a pair of them. They took flight around my head, and I giggled despite myself when they tugged my hair.
I missed warm wing hugs and the vague memories of a mother who would envelop me completely. Moihan didn’t have wings, but still, the matron allowed my adoption and even waved with the money in her other hand as I became the fourth member of the second prince’s family.
Phaeron returned to an ongoing war once we arrived at the capital. The location would become my home, but at first, it seemed far too big as we traveled through it to the palace. The capital had sprung up around the crater of Myuna the White’s landing spot, curved like a crescent moon. Unlike the town they’d plucked me from, it was mixed with all three tribes co-existing and inter-mating with almost no judgment.
They placed me in a bedroom with Ravai, and we grew older and closer together. Those days were a blissful haze of dress-up and tasty food. Keshora became “Mom,” and even though she couldn’t give me wing hugs, she still treated me as if I were Ravai’s pinkish-red double.
I knew of Phaeron only from their stories of him. The first prince, his twin Endaeron, was even more vaguely a family member. My white-skinned cousins were adult age and served as torchbearers, so I only saw them at formal dinners and observed some uncomfortable family dynamics with a king and queen who merely tolerated one another and slavishly loved our goddess and the first prince’s family, who were all blessed by Myuna down to their unnatural coloring.
Mom relied on Ravai and me to tolerate years of oversight, calling us Ravita and Brazita affectionately. We were the shadows that balanced Myuna’s light, her less favored subjects, and even as a child, I noticed the goddess looked at Keshora specifically with something less than kind in her gaze.
The twin princes returned when there were two red stars above Soiluire, an auspicious sign that followed their victory. I was to meet my adopted father again when it was starting to become obvious that Ravai and I were of different tribes. She’d grown tall-ish with skinny limbs and a tail just long enough to trip over, with me a head shorter and broader than her with my wings to add to the effect. I, too, tripped over my tail in graceless moments, though.
We wore silver on our faces for the occasion and dusted up Mom’s cheeks and horns for her a little too zealously. The reunion happened at a banquet for our soldiers, with Myuna and the king and queen sitting at the head of the table. In those times, Myuna did not eat, and it seemed she did not need to.
The first prince arrived at the table before Phaeron, as was tradition. He was a broad Iorsio man, his skin and hair bleached white from the goddess’s touch. His mate anointed his face and horns with gold as our people cheered. He was Endaeron et Myudair, the crown prince blessed by Myuna, and the love in the room for him was palpable.
Ravai practically vibrated with her excitement as the celebration for the first prince lulled and he took his seat. We both turned in our chairs as Phaeron joined the celebration. He emerged from a whirl of shadows, casually showcasing his shadowborn powers so close to the goddess.
He and Mom touched foreheads and murmured together before she brushed dark blue powder over his high cheekbones and slid a heavy signet ring back onto his finger. The crowd loved the second prince too. They cheered for him when Mom took his hair out of its tail and twisted it to pin behind his horns. The ritual showed that he was no longer at war, and now that both princes were returned to their finery and families, the feasting could begin.
I didn’t have much to say to Phaeron, ever the quieter child next to Ravai. She chattered away about our palace life and schooling for me when he asked, the buffer I needed when he was akin to a myth in my life, the man who’d intimidated my old matron into allowing me to be adopted into a Moihan family.
“I have a surprise for you all,” he said, smiling with all his fangs. “Endaeron and I have bought an estate far from here to retire to. It will be a school for shadowborn…as I have noticed neither of you have been educated in your extra powers.”
Mom was delighted immediately, while my heart sank like I’d done something wrong. Was I supposed to be practicing with my shadows more? They were mere wisps compared to the power he seemed to have at his fingertips. She occupied his time with questions about where, exactly, the family would be escaping to and how often they’d have to return.
“As infrequently as you prefer, my heart,” he’d replied in an undertone.
Mom suggested something that had me shifting shyly late into the banquet. They were both deep into their cups, and while he fed her bits of fruit from his fingers, she leaned heavily against him and drew sigils on his horns all crookedly. Between giggles, she said, “Why don’t you take the girls to our new home? I’ve had them to myself for years. I’ll follow behind with our things.”
It was a great idea once we figured out the awkwardness of absence in the long carriage ride to our new home. Ravai sat on her hands and clamped her jaw so I could get to know the man who would be my father better. He was smart, athletic, and so very powerful. I ended the trip giddy to finally finish the animaris ritual with him and Mom and become their child by soul and essence.
I held a twist of fragile hope in hand for the days we waited for Mom to arrive. We were eating dinner when a servant burst into the room. Phaeron jumped to his feet, hand on the hilt of his sword, when in stepped a familiar Moihan man. The family’s head of security, who was supposed to protect the caravan of our valuables.
He placed a shrouded body on the ground and dropped to his knees. “My Sudair,” he said in a broken voice.
Ravai and I exchanged wide-eyed looks. I recognized the general shape of the body and its delicate, curved horns.
“I-it happened in the night—”
“Stop. Use some sense,” Phaeron hissed. “There are children.”
The head of security looked up, noticed Ravai and me for the first time, and lowered himself further. Phaeron beckoned to us, and we went to him, dinner laying forgotten on the table. His broad palm and shadowy magic covered my sight. We walked out of the room, and he closed the door behind us with his tail.
Ravai was already keening, making high sounds of grief in her throat while her eyes shimmered with the onset of grief. I was a trembling animal next to her, my leathery wings making shivery sounds. I waited for Phaeron to tell us it wasn’t the Sudaira…that Mom wasn’t dead.
Grief heavy in his voice, Phaeron said, “Ravita, Brazita, go back to your room. I will handle this.”
Still keening, Ravai took me by the hand and tugged my stunned self away. We waited together until our room’s lamp flickered with the end spurts of its oil reservoir. Phaeron let himself in. The meager light reflected the grief in his eyes.
He told us as gently as he could. Mom had died in the night, her body unmarked but her skin cold and her heart stopped. There was nothing anyone could’ve done for her. We stayed huddled on the floor together for the rest of the night, grieving together.
The head of security continued working for Phaeron at the Royal Shadowborn School. Gossip spread amongst the staff and students about Mom’s sudden death and led me to take a peek under her eyelids before she was buried to see if the rumors were true. They were. Her pupils were gone, leaving her eyes flat circles darkened to maroon. I didn’t tell Phaeron I’d seen them, but the sight haunted me for years.
Soon after the funeral, he took me aside and offered me a flower with gleaming blue petals. In a world of darkness, it was one of the only pieces of flora that dared to shine bright. I keened low in my throat as I took the bloom, knowing it was Mom’s favorite.
“I know we don’t know each other well yet,” Phaeron said carefully. “But your mother’s love for you came through clearly in every letter she wrote to me. It is my duty to care for everything she loved.”
He’d come to kneel before me so I wasn’t craning my head. I felt a familiar glimmer of hope. Dread threaded through it at the possibility he was going to crush my dreams of remaining here as Ravai’s sister.
“Without her, I cannot ‘properly’ adopt you, but I would like to all the same. You and Ravai deserve to grow up together.” He put his hand over the one I used to hold the flower’s stem.
“I would like that,” I said in a small voice. I hugged him fiercely when he scooped me up, our foreheads touching briefly in affectionate acknowledgment of one another. He was my father from then on.
Dad treated Ravai and me the same as time passed. He loved us in his own way, as the one to personally tutor us with blade and shadows alike. The other instructors thought we were child prodigies, but it was really endless drills and a ruthless regime of early wakeups and long dinner conversations about values and strategy.
As we grew into our adult bodies, Ravai and I had our petty little rivalries, but we were still the definition of inseparable. We were the star pupils of the Royal Shadowborn Academy. Other students would gather to watch our rooftop duels, the same as when Dad and Endaeron would get a wild hair and show off their skills with battles of blades and black and white shadows. Those days, my sister and I always wore shadowborn black.
I had a quiet dislike for the garish white shade of Myuna and her followers even before the Age of Decay. But the day it started, it became the color of death and betrayal. The teachers and students had paired off in the school’s courtyard for practice duels. It was a completely mundane morning…until it wasn’t.
Myuna’s soul feast was marked by a palpable shift in the air. I’d felt it like a creep of dread across my scalp, stepping away from Dad mid-practice duel to gaze at the sky and then across courtyard, where the other students were backing away from a flash of bone white.
Endaeron writhed on the ground, his claws sunk into his head and his wings tangled around him. Ravai had placed her sword aside and turned him over in a misplaced effort to help him as corrupted magic started to twist and rend his skin and bone apart.
“Ravai! Get away from him!” Dad screamed.
Even then, he’d been suspicious of Myuna, but he couldn’t have predicted that she’d empower and corrupt my uncle’s soul the way she had. He became the Hungering Darkness as a flash of white mist, abandoning his ruined body to jump into Ravai’s. And then he hopped into several more bystanders, leaving behind soulless corpses and further spreading panic.
Dad personally killed the last student Endaeron jumped into, panting with shock and horror as the kid slumped to the ground. Not knowing the true evil Endaeron had become yet, we both thought we’d lost him and Ravai in the same breath. I saw her eyes, chilled by the pupil-less maroon circles staring across the grass at nothing.
“Her eyes…like Mom,” I stammered out, giving away the secret I’d held within all that time.
“Myuna,” Dad growled, hatred turning his face into a snarling mask.
Myuna had killed Mom. We still didn’t know why, and we never would; everything happened so fast after the Age of Decay kicked off.
We received word from the growing stream of survivors fleeing to the school. Myuna had killed and consumed countless others, first reaping the capital city and moving outward from there. Her ghostly torchbearers brought her feast to her. Killed and twisted by her magic, just like my uncle, they were immune to common weapons yet were cut down easily by shadowborn claws.
Thanks to this, we hosted a refuge for survivors, and amongst them the Hungering Darkness lurked unseen, biding its time. No one was untouched by the insane grief of that time. Most faces were unmarked of colored dust and paint, wiped clean a final time after the deaths of mates and loved ones. Chief amongst them was my father, who dressed for war each day and cleared paths to the school for survivors, cutting down unnaturals with ruthless fury.
I went with him every day I could, afraid he’d get himself killed with the single-minded anger that’d consumed him. The two of us made for an unstoppable team. With my help, he returned to the Royal Shadowborn Academy every day, usually with a new group of survivors in tow.
Though I was still just a teen, I was a witness to history by my father’s side. When it became obvious killing monsters would never be enough to stop Myuna’s single-minded consumption of our people, he sought the insight of others.
“There must be a way to defeat her,” he would say at the beginning of each meeting with the most intelligent of us left. It would kick off hours of debate and ideas.
It was Auric et Vess who came up with a mad plan that just might work. He was a Vrassorm man and an old political friend of my father’s. Unfortunately, for it to work, they needed the help of a vicious rival in the Iorsio woman Mencha et Syroni. Complete with Dad, they were the most powerful survivors of the three tribes.
We could escape through the Void and deny Myuna our souls by heading to a different world far from her reach. As a Vess, Auric would bend the Void to allow them through. Dad’s shadows would protect us, while Mencha’s flame would light our way forward. All tribespeople with magic would follow their lead to magnify their abilities for the long journey.
“Shall we do it, my prince?” Auric asked. Everyone looked to Dad for direction now that the king, queen, first prince, and my cousins were all deceased. The second prince, who would be king if he stood still for a coronation. I stood at his right side at each meeting, trying to hide the fear from my face to look tough and capable.
Dad agreed. We gathered everyone we could and left, stepping into the nothingness between worlds. The magic of the Void marked us as we spent an unknowable amount of time walking and walking and walking without fatigue or rest. Our features and teeth smoothed out to better resemble humans’, the dominant species on the world we approached. I noticed the mark of language and humanity on the membrane of my wing, while the same one appeared on Dad’s back and random places for everyone else.
These subtle changes were beautiful to us, but when we made first contact with humans…they were horrified by our appearances, calling us demons and fracturing the alliances within our peoples.
Most of the Iorsio tribespeople followed Mencha in becoming the monsters they decried us as. She preached that we were stronger, taller, and more powerful than they could ever dream. Why not prove our superiority by enslaving them? She led her followers away in disgust when Dad met and fell in love with a human woman.
Morgana was present when the Hungering Darkness starting making one of my school friends act erratically. I barely remember the actual circumstances of my death, come to think of it, only bits and pieces as moments fracture into frayed strands.
The agony of having Endaeron’s teeth ripping my soul into two messy pieces.
Blood spattering me when Dad killed my assailant.
His panicked face swimming in and out of my sight.
“Stay with me, Brazita,” he’d begged, gathering me in his arms.
We pressed foreheads for a final time, my labored breathing and erratic heartbeat proving that I was already three limbs in the grave.
I still gasped out a request and a consent to something I barely understood as my tattered soul unhooked from my body and my pupils smeared into the dull gold of my still eyes.