I write these words with a heavy heart. This is not me trying to escape punishment for my crimes by justifying them. I am a traitor and a kinslayer, that is fact and my soul is forever stained by those heinous acts. I had to do it, but that knowledge is a poor shield against the tide of evil thoughts that assail my mind as my pen travels across the page. If I could go back, I wouldn’t have done it, and that scares me. Because it needed to be done.

Forgive my ramblings, you can consider this a foreword of sorts to the tale of Cassius the Terrible, or the Great. He will always be great to me. Though I suppose calling it Cassius’ tale might be a misnomer; this will be my story, from a dark tunnel, through a city in flames, to the greatest battlefields of the age, all the way to the halls of the gods, only to end here, in this dank tower, where I sit, scratching away at this brittle sheet of parchment like my life depends on it.

There have been countless songs and tales about Cassius’ exploits, and even some about mine, but none of them have been faithful to how I remembered those wondrous terrible fantastic indescribable years. That is what this is, my best recollection of my part in the epic tale that was Cassius’ life.

--Silas Ravenlane, The Evernight, and The Tyrant’s Shadow

Prologue: Ravenfall

The hard stone floor of the escape tunnel pounded against my feet and all I could think was that I should have taken my walking boots instead of the softer, more comfortable riding boots. Lillian pulled me along and out of my reverie; my twin sister had always been more focused on the practical. We reached the end of the tunnel - it appeared to be only a plain brick wall, but we both knew that it was so much more than that.

“Hurry up, slowpoke!” she said, her voice a harsh whisper as she pushed her index finger against the brick wall and started to draw a sigil in a very specific spot. Our family’s Crest: An eye crying blood, flanked by two wings. My body felt like it moved by itself as I turned away from her work and started on my own. My finger carved through the material realm and into a higher plane, etching a series of dark symbols into the soul of the wall. The bricks greedily drank in my clumsy magic and turned it into a deadly trap. Such were the advantages of old Houses. Our estate was practically a Realm unto itself. Its very foundations were steeped in a hundred generations’ worth of specialized magic.

“I guess we’ll finally find out who’s the heir,” I said, nudging Lillian with my elbow. Even at twelve, I was good at acting, but that didn’t matter. My voice quivered, and my throat felt like an eel had crawled down it and lay curled up in my chest.

“Head,” she responded absentmindedly. My throat closed up even further and my heart skipped a beat; I’d been avoiding thinking of that. Our parents had undoubtedly deserved whatever had been done to them, but they were still our parents. We looked away from each other, silent for a couple seconds, before Lillian pulled out her brace of non-poisoned needles from a fold in her skirt and pricked her finger with one of them. “I really hope this does nothing and you’re the heir,” she said, then pressed the bead of blood into the glowing sigil.

The moment her finger made contact with the Crest, the world shifted an infinitesimal distance and we both knew that our souls had been marked — Lillian as the head of house Ravenlane, and me as her chosen heir.

Pain became my world and my knees buckled under the immense pressure, hitting the dusty floor with a dull thud. The pain in my spirit was so intense that I didn’t even feel the fall. I remember being very angry at myself for mucking up the nice pants, then I remembered that now they were just the pants. Such strange thoughts pass through one’s mind when under extreme duress. Lillian fared far worse, buckling under the pressure of forty nine -seven times seven- generations’ worth of stockpiled energy being shot straight into her soul. She thrashed on the ground, in too much pain to even scream. I couldn’t bear to see her hurting so. Closing my eyes and crawling over, I held her in my arms while the magic devised by our forebears scarred our very souls into their proper shapes.

*****

I woke first, my body sticky with half-dried, cold sweat. Lillian looked even worse, the changes made to her would take time to heal. She needed sleep. I gently stroked her forehead for a moment, taking the time to run my hands through her hair like a makeshift comb and straightening out her dress. Gods, she barely even stirred. Gently disentangling myself from my sister, I rose up, fire burning in my muscles as the dense well of magic I now had access to yearned to be let free.

I don’t even remember why I decided that I should go through my stretches at that point, but I did. And it was as I was bending backwards, hands on my hips, that I saw him. A dirty, unshaven man in his mid forties hung there, impaled on three shadowy spikes. He tried to make a sound, but a weak dribble of foamy, cherry red, arterial blood was the only thing that left his mouth. I couldn’t help it, I cried. It wasn’t because it was some horrifying sight; I had seen much, much worse during father’s training.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

I cried because it meant that the only reason we were alive was that this absolute idiot had found the escape tunnel, and went in without telling his friends what he had found. Pure. Dumb. Luck. Dark rage did its very best to bubble up from my stomach and take control of me. I pushed it back down with the ease of practice, turning the raging fire of anger into the cold steel of determination. My belly felt like it was full of a million tons of metal.

I walked up to him with a jerky gait, my movements more like those of some cheap marionette than a young nobleman. His skin was feverishly warm against the back of my hand and the pool of blood on the ground was halfway coagulated already. I kept my hand against his clammy skin while I berated myself for only setting a single trap. More foamy blood dribbled from the dying man’s mouth. I ignored him.

I must have stood there for at least a minute or two, just imagining all of the ways it could have gone wrong. They could have simply dashed our heads against the stone floors while we were unconscious, and our house would have been gone. Or worse, they could have captured us. I shuddered at the thought, but I once more turned the anger to steel before it could even rise again.

A tear rolled from the man’s left eye and landed on his mangled chest. His ruined tabard looked like it had once worn the colours of house Elisin, one of the houses that had betrayed us.

I raised my hand and prepared to recall the spell. The dying soldier’s eyes widened, he tried to speak and he tried to move, but it didn’t matter. His eyes met mine and he did his level best to beg for mercy. I closed my hand, and called the magic home to me. Another ingot made its home in my stomach.

Barbs made of shadow ripped through the dead man’s soul as well as his body, torn out along with the pillars of darkness that had impaled him. A wet, tearing sound assaulted the dead silence of the tunnel, and I held out my hand, greedily drinking in the mottled black surge of magic and pieces of ravaged spirit. Some of his soul went to rejuvenate my body, but most of it was simply ground down into raw power that I would be able to use later.

Such a monstrous magic. I shudder to think who Lillian and I would have become had things not turned out as they did.

*****

While Lillian slept, I worked wonders, testing the limits of my newfound magical strength. The normally tedious task of carving runes and turning them into true, functioning magic was nothing like it used to be. The sheer ease with which I etched the arcane symbols made the whole experience a lot more pleasant; what would have taken several hours took less than half of one. I even experimented with new variants: Some which would automatically recall to me after a certain amount of time had passed, some which were focused on preserving as much of their victim’s soul as possible, and a few more that were focused on nothing but pitiless lethality.

The childish wonder that always seemed to suffuse my otherwise perfectly regal mother when she worked magic now made sense. All of those distant, trailing explanations about the beauty of shaping energy with nothing but your will and creating works of art, they finally made sense.

Tears ran down my cheeks and great, heaving sobs tore their way out of a throat that felt far too cramped. I fell to the floor, and the rune I was halfway through carving fizzled and died a quiet death while I held my knees to my chest, finally allowing myself to cry. Deep pulses of pain that seemed almost physical radiated from someplace just behind my sternum. I lay there for more than an hour before the thirst and accompanying headache forced me to stagger to my feet.

Mother and father dead, slaughtered in their own home by those they thought were their allies. The names and faces of the servants and soldiers who had helped raise me and Lillian flashed through my mind and I knew that they were dead, or would be very soon. I promised to honour all their memories.

Streaks of salt covered my face, and the front of my doublet was covered with a blotchy stain. I thought that I must have looked disgusting, and I hated it. I straightened my clothes with a mechanical precision, brushing them free of the dust and grime of the tunnel, then I ran my hands through my hair a couple of times, arranging the black curls in something approximating a fashionable hairstyle.

When I deemed myself sufficiently cleaned up, I turned my gaze to Lillian and did my best to fix her appearance as well. She had cried in her sleep; I gently cleaned her face with my cuffs, and placed her hair back behind her ears, making sure to leave a single lock dangling over her left eye, the way I knew she liked it.

It didn’t look like Lillian was going to be waking up anytime soon, so I steeled myself, then punctured a small hole in the walls to the reservoir of power inside my soul. It was so much easier now that I was marked as Heir. My soul had been shaped into what centuries of Ravenlane scholars had decided to be the optimal shape for our brand of magic. And it showed. From that reservoir of power, a tiny trickle entered my soul, and from there my body.

The energy I stole from the dead man had rejuvenated me, but Lillian was taller than me by at least a two inches and I could barely lift her. Carrying her while I walked was out of the question, at least with just the strength of my body.

The magic flowed through me, burning with an icy chill as it suffused my muscles. There would be a price to pay in the morning, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to stay here any longer than necessary; our childhoods were already over, better to cleanly break away from this first chapter of our lives than linger until we were forced away.

I picked up Lillian and slung her over my shoulders. She stirred in her sleep and mumbled something that I didn’t catch. No longer just my sister, Lillian was now the head of our House, and I was sworn to serve her. Serve her I would, I promised to myself. As I carried my sister and liege out of the ruins of our life into the greater world I burned the faces and names of those who betrayed us into my mind.

I promised to hunt down Untavor Elisin like the filthy animal he was, I promised to draw a blade across Johan Katonir’s throat while Igor, his father was forced to watch, and I promised that Maria of Leanan would choke on her own enchanted sword. I vowed to see them broken before me and to scatter their legacies to dust.

I saw them all die at my hands, and imagining their life blood staining my face gave me the strength to continue walking for long after the magic left my body.

Lillian and I slept in some farmer’s hayloft, curling up in a corner and covering ourselves with the dusty straw to avoid detection. She woke up just after I’d tucked us both in. She was barely cognizant, but we held each other tight.

I dreamt of vengeance on that first night, but it wasn’t all that I dreamt of.

Maybe that meant that I wasn’t yet beyond saving