Chapter 1 #2
All sorts of breeds had gathered to Ezer since she was a child. Anything winged seemed to trust her, to see her as one of their own. But ravens were her favorite, as clever as they were beautiful, and she’d never dared believe the lie that they were omens.
For how could an omen give a person so much joy when they were near?
They were still the main choice of bird for passing messages across the kingdom, far wiser than pigeons.
And all the doves had been placed in pretty cages; they represented the animal shape of Avane, god of the wind, and people truly believed owning a cooing dove might give them some glimmer of the god’s protection should the front lines break, and the war fall to the south.
Thank the gods that the Acolyte’s army could only come out at night.
They turned to ash in the sunlight.
‘Come on, then,’ Ezer said to the raven. ‘Let’s see what you’ve brought me.’
Another yawn, and she began her work of untying the small scroll attached to the raven’s leg.
The wind howled, furious as ever, but inside the Aviary, it was calm.
Ordinary.
Across the tower, another raven cawed and dipped its beak into the small copper dish of seeds and nuts she’d laid out hours ago.
An owl hooted and turned its head around as if to avoid the raven altogether.
The two had never gotten along. A small starling chirped and a pair of tiny little white finches – only here because they liked Ezer’s presence, and not because they were useful at all for delivering messages – fluttered to one side of the tower and back again, playing a game of chase.
‘There,’ she said, as the string finally came loose and the scroll fell free of its tiny casing. ‘That’s better.’
She unrolled it and lay it before her on the table. The small nub of a candle had long since burnt out, and had hardly offered a shred of light to begin with for how much it wavered in the wind that slid through the open window.
But Ezer had always seen better, clearer, in the dark.
It was one of her abnormalities.
Her strangeties, as Ervos had called them. Things to keep secret, lest she become a prisoner in one of the cells just beneath her feet. Most of the poor souls had been turned over to the Redguard without a single shred of evidence from their accusers.
It was fear that had them locked away.
Fear that anyone who was different had aligned with the dark.
Ezer’s strangeties had first began to arrive at the age of thirteen. It was the age most Sacred – the powerful mages in the north – came into their own magic.
It was rare, though not entirely unheard of, for a Sacred Knight to break their strict laws of purity and leave the Sacred Citadel behind. If they were truly rebellious, they’d fall in love with a nomage: a mortal without magic.
Sometimes, Ezer liked to imagine her past lingered in the pages of a romance novel. Perhaps her mother was a Sacred warrioress. Her father, a stable hand or a knight’s squire, and the two fell in love, breaking the laws of the Citadel, and the result was Ezer.
Ezer …
Who got only shreds of their forbidden, muddied magic.
‘They’re the things that make you special, Little Bird,’ Ervos had told her when the birds began to follow her, and even gather to peck at her window until she opened it and let them in.
When she began to find things in the dark without ever needing to light a candle.
When she woke from nightmares of dark, dangerous things.
Things that had yet to come to pass … until days, sometimes weeks later, when those nightmares suddenly came true.
Sometimes, she thought she saw a shadow of fear in Ervos’s eyes when he looked at her. But still, he took her hands and held them close, and whispered, ‘Never show your strangeties to anyone. Never forget to hide them and keep them close.’
She pushed the memory away and focused instead on reading the raven’s scroll.
30 dead.
Attack by shadow wolves.
There were bloodstains dried upon the parchment – fingerprints that had been smeared as the other Ravenminder had written it and tied it up and sent the raven south to her tower.
It was not unusual these past many months to find a message covered in blood.
Ravenminder towers were supposed to be protected by runed wards and kept safe by at least one Sacred squadron.
It was the only means of swift communication. Wings were faster than hooves any day.
But the Acolyte was getting stronger. The casualties, more and more each week.
When darkness fell, the wolves always arrived.
And sometimes, the runes on Ravenminder towers wore away before the Sacred Scribes could return and carve their power anew. These days, more often than not … they never returned at all.
Ezer read the rest of the scroll, trying to decipher the shaky handwriting as best she could:
Send help to Carvist.
Ezer frowned. She had another three scrolls just like it tucked inside the small basket beyond her locked door, along with several that had scribbled the names of missing men, women and children.
People who’d either been eaten by shadow wolves … or disappeared, in the dead of the night.
Tomas Servain. Missing
Zerah Morvani. Missing.
Giuli Avantre. Missing.
All of them had come from messages earlier today, just like the others that came on the days before. The months before. So many had gone missing. Home one day, and gone the next after nightfall, and though their loved ones didn’t want to admit where they’d gone, most knew by now.
They were either dead …
Or they had journeyed north to join the Acolyte.
He arrived almost twenty years ago, when shadow wolves began to appear in the north, destroying farmlands and crops, devouring innocents in the outlying villages each night when the sun fell.
The symbol began to appear in shadowed places across villages and towns.
Two dark wings.
No one knew their origin.
But it soon became clear it was a call.
And those who understood its meaning laid down their love for the gods, and marched north to join the Acolyte.
His stronghold was hidden in the Sawteeth Mountains, as far north as one could go in Lordach. Protected, at all times, by a storm of pure shadow.
He had thousands of shadow wolves. And all those who had disappeared were found with him …
changed. They called themselves Darksouls, with their black eyes, and strange, twisted magic.
The strongest ones rode winged hybrid monsters, raphons, into battle.
A battle that King Draybor, the ruler of Lordach, had led against the Acolyte for nearly twenty years now.
Sometimes, the warfront felt like a faraway, distant dream.
Like a nightmare concealed by frozen mist and shadow, where few knew the whole truth of what went on. There were hardly any survivors that returned south. And the stories that reached her tower had always felt too wild to be true.
They claimed the Acolyte had created some sort of dark religion, a following that turned their lifelong adoration of the gods into something twisted.
Something hungry for blood.
Still … some part of Ezer had always wondered what it would be like to go north.
She was born there, after all, had nearly died there too.
She longed to see a bird as large as a sea wyvern. To see if her connection to the common ravens would carry across to a beast as fearsome as a war mount.
She doubted so, for Lordach’s war eagles and the Acolyte’s raphons were only commanded by people with true magic.
She had vapors, if anything at all.
‘Well now,’ Ezer said to the very normal raven who perched before her.
‘I suppose the only birds I’ll ever connect with will be like you, little corvid.
’ It blinked up at her with dark, trusting eyes.
‘Not that I’m complaining. We’re perfectly safe here in the south, far from those awful mutts that attacked my village. ’
Ezer shuffled across the tower and dropped the bloody scroll through the small slot on the door. It tumbled into the basket beside the others, where the prison master would come for it sooner or later.
‘Stay the night,’ Ezer said as she turned once more to the raven.
It looked exhausted, its wings drooping and its eyes already shining a bit less than moments before.
‘Get warm and dry and fed, and we’ll worry about what to do with you come morning.
I won’t be sending you back to Carvist any time soon.
We’ll choose another route instead. Perhaps one that leads to the gold mines out west? ’
The raven cawed joyfully.
As if it heard her words and understood.
They’d always had a love for shiny, shimmering things.
Perhaps that was why Ezer so adored the moon.
Sometimes, she stared out the window for hours, wondering what it would be like to be out there.
Seeing the places her ravens had been, the places written about in books.
Doing more than only taste the wind, or stare into the distant darkness, wondering what it was like beyond these rounded tower walls.
There had to be more than this.
More to her than ravens and scrolls.
She squeezed her fist over her mother’s ring, a comfort as she crossed to the small cot she’d set up in the corner of the room.
With a grunt, she pulled her chains upon it, then lifted her scrap of a worn blanket to her chin and listened to the wind as it whistled past the window.
She wouldn’t dare close its shutters, for fear of locking out a weary bird that had given its all to reach her with a message tied to its leg.
But she certainly wanted to.
For every so often, Ezer swore the wind changed.
Every so often, it went from a whistle to a whisper.
And she swore she heard it calling her name.
She supposed it should have frightened her, that the wind had a voice. But it had never done anything to bring her harm, and each time, the sound faded as soon as she thought she heard it.
But it always caused her to turn her eyes north. To stare out the window of her tower and wonder if there was more for her outside Rendegard.
A story still waiting beyond the shimmering black sea.
She felt safe with the birds perched all around her. They would warn her, should anything strange arrive.
Her eyes began to droop, heavy from the day’s work.
But on the other side, the nightmares came.
She saw herself hunted by shadow wolves.
She saw herself die, her throat ripped out by a war eagle with eyes like molten fire.
In these dreams, she often found herself adorned in a black cloak, riding on the wrong side of the war. Bowing to the Acolyte instead of the five gods.
Sometimes, perhaps the most peculiar nightmare of all, she stood at the warfront in the Expanse, a land of snow and ice … and it was there that she found herself accompanied by a faceless man, his hood full of shadows.
‘Ezer,’ he breathed as he ran his calloused fingertips across the scars on her face. ‘Come back to me.’
She’d just drifted off to sleep when a caw shook her awake.
As if the raven had heard, seconds before her, the sound of footsteps that now approached from beyond the Aviary door.
The prison master, here to collect the messages, Ezer thought … but the gait was much heavier than his.
Her heartbeat hastened.
No one ever visited her tower beyond the servants who delivered plates of stale meals, and certainly not at this hour.
The raven lifted its wings and soared to a high perch, its absence leaving Ezer cold.
‘Traitor,’ she hissed.
She stood from her cot, chains clinking between her ankles as a pair of skeleton keys rattled outside. The lock twisted, and the heavy black hinges screamed as the door swung open.
A warrior from the north stood on the other side.
A Sacred Knight, with hair as pale as snow.