Prologue #3
I choke down a strangled noise of desperation as her steely gaze clouds over. She shakes her head to herself, as though to clear her thoughts, and starts walking back to the main street.
The brand on my neck becomes fire. I stumble, trying to close the gap between me and the mortal woman once more.
Whoever she is, she pauses at the end of the alley, and whirls around.
She hurls something—a small knife—directly at me.
Pain. Blessed, impossible pain slices through the side of my neck.
I gasp, as the blade pierces what should be incorporeal flesh. It clatters to the cobblestones.
For one heartbeat, two, I am solid. I am real. I exist.
Rooted to the spot, I rub my breastbone, where beneath, my heart thunders with the force of a cavalry unit.
Shaking, full of disbelief, I watch on as the woman tips her head to the sky, before muttering a curse with another shake of her head, and strides back to the bindery, her braid of honey and sunlit tones swinging behind her as the door closes—
My vision blurs, my brand sears, and I’m violently hurtling through mortal and Azkari realms, racing along the Weave, to where I am eternally bound: Gravereach prison.
It’s here that Malevron keeps his trophies of war, rotating through the rancid cells of his dungeons, trapped, listening to the moans of pain and the weeping.
Gravereach is a sprawling network of cells, torture chambers and fighting pits beneath the poisoned lands of Morzanmyre.
There is no sunlight to mark the passing of time, only guttering sconces that line the dripping stone walls.
Here, among the branded, I exist in my full form, with Malevron’s power trapping us here long ago.
Every time I venture out into the realm to search for the Confluence and rid the world of branded supporters, the Silver-Tongued Deceiver’s curse spits me back into this place…
As I arrive, the fire of my brand dulls to a distant sting.
It’s only when I collapse against the icy stone floor of my cell that I feel it…
the trickle of something on the side of my neck, just below my marred flesh.
When I touch it, my fingers come away wet with crimson.
Real blood. My blood. I stare at it like it’s liquid starlight, then press my fingers to my lips, tasting copper.
The proof burns on my tongue—for a moment, however brief, I was flesh and bone again in a place other than this cage and the presence of an unbranded.
“What is it?” Cahir asks from the cell next to mine, trying to pin me with his hooded, glacial blue gaze. It’s the kind of gaze that makes people shift uncomfortably, like he’s seeing through skin. “Ke-Vor?”
Ke-Vor. The prisoners of Gravereach had dubbed me so since the moment I’d been thrown into its dark depths and icy cells nearly two hundred years ago.
A language of old, one that translates to Dark Shield, if my addled memory serves me half as well as it used to.
It’s a term of respect here, though I’ve done little to earn it.
The opposite, in fact. It’s my fault we are trapped here.
Their pain and suffering is mine to bear, for when it came down to it, in the final battle of the Reckoning, my hesitation cost us everything.
We have been destined to rot as the centuries roll by ever since.
“Ke-Vor?” Cahir prompts.
Still staring at the blood on my fingers, I can only croak, “I found someone,” I say slowly, my body prickling all over. “Someone who saw me.”
“Rook!” Cahir shouts over the madness of the prison. “Ke-Vor has done it; he’s finally lost his mind.” He turns back to me, playing with the thin chain that hangs at his throat, just below his brand.
Our friend Rook scrambles to the front of his cell from across the way, his odd colored eyes wide, his heavy, expressive brows knitted together—the kind of brow that furrowed instinctively at the world, not from anger, but from the habit of thinking hard and trusting slowly. “This should be good,” he says huskily.
Attempting to rub warmth into his ink-stained arms, Cahir turns back to me. “So, you found someone, whatever that means. And then what?”
“And then she was gone.”
“Ah, always the way,” Cahir sympathizes with a knowing nod, scratching at the faint shadow of stubble that follows his wide, blunt jawline. “What was her name?”
I’m already reaching for my sketchpad and charcoal I got by bribing one of the guards, another botanical design blooming in my mind.
All my life, I have drawn in charcoal, more than content with black on white, allowing the weight of the lines and the shading to tell the story.
But every now and then, usually when the quiet grows so loud around me it’s almost unbearable, do I dream of color.
I wonder what the color of desire is, whether it's passion, anger, ambition.
The desire for more, the desire for enough. What color does it manifest as?
“I have no idea,” I reply at last. For the first time since I can remember, a faint smile tempts my lips, where I can still taste my own blood. “But I’m going to find out.”