Black ones stalk, their mission clear
In empty rooms, no one can hear.
Mon Carrol, the Governor of Arkana, sat at his desk and huffed a loud, irritated sigh.
Tek'Hari was late with his reports, again.
Carrol scowled down at his own pudgy fingers drumming on the dark, polished wood. No papers littered the desk; reports were always given to him verbally, in person. Occasionally, Tek would hand him one that was written on parchment (usually when the Ambassador was in a spiteful mood), but Carrol could not make head nor tail of it. In fact, he couldn't read at all, but this was a fact that he was loath to admit.
The other council members were reluctant to ban the practice of writing altogether, mainly because some of them actually enjoyed it – particularly Tek. This made Carrol deeply suspicious, as though they were plotting things behind his back, but there was little he could do about it.
His scowl grew deeper, twisting into a sour look. He hated that damned library beneath the city even more, filled as it was with foul magic and blasphemous secrets. Often, he had fantasised about arranging to have it 'accidentally' burned. But most Angels – including all of the council – considered it holy. Like Caer Sync, Grath Ardan was built by the Ancients and thus was treated with a great deal of reverence and fear. It had been agreed that the best thing to do was simply lock it up and leave it alone.
That didn't stop others getting curious, however, hence the guards stationed down in the forest. Thankfully, there had been little need of them since the incident with the black-winged Angel. Carrol was glad that the city's youth were no longer in danger from that creature's corrupting influence.
Carrol had taught him a good lesson, and he had flown away in fear, never to return.
Ha!
Carrol fidgeted with the golden bands sunk into the flesh around each of his fingers. Of course, his mind whispered uneasily, there is still the prophecy…
Tek had confided in him everything that he had seen in the Aurellian.
All of it.
Carrol had been forced to seriously concede the possibility that Tek'Hari, was, in fact, insane… until the Seraphim had awoken, thus proving that part of the vision true. The three giants now stood outside, one in the city, the other two above the forest to the east and west, protecting Arkana.
But Tek had witnessed something else in that crystal, as well. Something that matched up disturbingly with that old prophecy…
Swallowing, Carrol glanced nervously about the large hall that served as his office. A line of tall, narrow windows stood at his back, letting in great bands of bright afternoon sunlight that gleamed on the white and gold floor tiles. Heavy, dark red drapes framed the windows, and the statue niches on the opposite wall. The desk and high ceiling beams were made of dark timber.
The room was not constructed in an Angelican style; it had been built and decorated by his predecessor, who'd had a fondness for Human culture, particularly Darorian. Red was not a fashionable colour in Angel society; the tradition of taste dictated light, pastel colours and soft, whispery fabrics.
Carrol despised Humans, but he rather liked this room. It was bold and daring and grim and practical, just like him. And he enjoyed the distasteful looks on the councillors' faces whenever they entered.
He wished one of them would enter now.
The room felt suddenly too empty.
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, making it creak, his brown and green feathers ruffling in indignation. Damned chair! He was sure it grew smaller every time he sat in it…
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, making it creak, his brown and green feathers ruffling in indignation. Damned chair! He was sure it grew smaller every time he sat in it…
Goddess damn him, Carrol cursed silently. Where is Tek?!
He felt himself beginning to sweat, as the silence continued around him.
Just late, he told himself determinedly. Pointedly late. He KNOWS that I cannot show up to the meeting without being briefed…
His thoughts trailed off, and he went suddenly still.
Something had changed in the room.
A black – a very black – shadow had appeared at the far end of the hall, to his left.
Carrol felt a terrible coldness pass through him, but carefully avoided looking at it. Perhaps, if he ignored it, the shadow would go away. Perhaps it was merely his imagination, sparked off by Tek's lunatic ramblings…
Slowly, he turned his head to look.
It was not his imagination.
Footsteps echoed through the room as the black-winged Angel walked forward, slowly, deliberately. He passed though the first beam of light, then stopped in the second.
The shadow of his shadow sprawled out across the polished floor.
Carrol found that he had stopped breathing.
“M-M-Mekk'Ayan,” he stammered finally, as the black-winged Angel fixed him with his dark green gaze. His wicked wings curved behind him like a cloak of night at his back. He was dressed in black, his short green jacket shimmering banefully with an iridescent blue-green feather pattern.
He looked even darker than Carrol remembered him.
Especially his expression.
“W-what do you want?” Carrol forced disgust and anger into his voice to cover up the fear. “Why did you return here?!”
Mekka said nothing, simply lifted a gloved hand and tapped the patch over his left eye.
Carrol felt suddenly trapped in his chair. He struggled to extricate himself from it, then hurried around his desk to the doors in front of him.
He grabbed the gilded handles.
They were locked.
He pounded on the hard wood, instead. “Guards!” he cried. “GUARDS!”
“I wouldn't bother,” Mekka said quietly from behind him. “They are dead.”
Heart beating fast, now, the Governor looked around himself in desperation. There were no other exits from the room… save the windows. Maybe… maybe he could smash one, and then hope that he fit through it…
But the black-winged Angel was moving again, walking towards him. “Look at you,” Mekka murmured, running his hand along the smooth, dark wood of the desk as he slowly circled it. “You cannot run away. You are so fat, I doubt you can even fly.”
Some of Carrol's blood returned in a hot flush of embarrassment and anger. He slammed his fists into the door again. “HELP!” he screamed, as loud as he could. “HELP!”
Mekka seemed unfazed by his yelling. The Angel stopped in front of the desk, directly opposite him.
He held a black dagger in his right hand.
Carrol pressed himself up against the door, the handles digging into his back. His robe had become damp with sweat. “You… you can have whatever you want!” he pleaded, licking his lips. “I… I will resign as Governor...”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“I have no interest in your filthy country!” Mekka said with a sneer. “This city can fall out of the sky and rot, for all I care!” Lifting the dagger, he pointed it at Carrol, his eye narrowing. “I came back here for you.”
Carrol's mind felt paralysed with terror. He couldn't think of a way to escape; all his thoughts seemed to have fled. The only thing left scurrying around in his head was Tek's frightened warning, and the words of the prophecy…
The black-winged Angel will destroy Arkana…
No, Carrol thought in despair. No, no, no! It's all coming true!
“Do you realise what you took from me?” Mekka's voice was a whisper, but Carrol heard it clearly in the silence of the hall. All of his senses seemed to have sharpened to agonising clarity, as though aware that he wasn't going to sense anything for much longer.
Carrol's flabby throat quivered as he tried to think of something to say.
“YOU TOOK EVERYTHING!” Mekka's scream made him jump. He tried to press himself further into the door as the Angel advanced on him.
“You,” Mekka went on, the dagger still raised. “You made me HATE MYSELF!” The echo of his words bounded around the hall. “You made me believe that I was nothing more than slime, to be wiped off the heel of someone's boot! You made me glad to feel pain, for it was exactly what I deserved!”
His dark eye radiated fury. “And all for what? Some stupid prophecy, scrawled down by a raving FOOL, hundreds of years ago?? How many others have you condemned to the Pit for this? You and all these pompous, ignorant city folk? Every child born with black feathers??”
Mekka gritted his teeth, and his eye narrowed. “You… BASTARD!”
As he screamed the word, his arm swung around, slashing the Governor across the face with the black knife.
Carrol cried out, clutching his cheek as pain bloomed across it.
“Please,” he whimpered through his bloody, shaking hands. “Please!”
Mekka ignored him. He cried out again as the Angel grabbed him by the collar of his robe and threw him heavily to the floor.
“Well,” Mekka said from above him, “if you believe in this prophecy so fervently, if my life has been destroyed in its cause, if many have died in its despicable honour, then I suppose I have no choice but to fulfil it.”
He looked down at Carrol: a dark Angel of death looming in the light-filled hall.
“And you.” Stepping forward, he knelt beside the cowering Governor. “Do you hate yourself yet? Are you writhing in a puddle of your own self-pity?” His gaze was cold. “Do you wish that you were dead?”
Carrol thought that he was writhing in a puddle of something, but he couldn't find any words to speak. A strange, tingling coldness was spreading across his face, numbing the pain, even as warm blood trickled down it.
Mekka leaned closer. “And what shall your fate be?” he whispered. “What do you deserve, Governor?”
Carrol blinked at him, watching in horror as Mekka reached up slowly and removed the black patch.
His left eye socket was crushed and deformed, the area directly around it healed into a mass of ugly scars. The eye itself was still there, but unlike its twin, was not deep green, but a dead, milky white.
“How about,” Mekka said, smiling slightly, “an eye for an eye?”
And without another word, he raised the black knife and plunged it towards the Governor's terrified face.
The scream was long, and filled the hall.
* * *
Ice gleamed, covering walls, floor and ceiling, entombing bookcases, dimming the light under thick, crystal layers to a dim, silvery luminescence. Books and their pages of unknowable knowledge, ripped and scattered, lay about the room like the bodies of papery birds, encrusted with frost. Four pillars surrounded a shattered table like silent witnesses; all of it still and glittering white, and filled with the cool hush of a ruined temple.
The Sword of Frost protruded from a bookshelf at one end of the room, embedded deeply, as though the twin snakes sought to burrow themselves into the bastion of ice. The diamonds on its hilt reflected the diffused glow in tiny glints of clear light.
Amidst it all, Ferrian sat, with his back to the wall and his head in his hands.
Emotions washed over him in alternating waves: disbelief, despair, anger. Though Grath Ardan had damned him with the truth, he was aware that it was a result of his own stupid curiosity, and had no desire to take vengeance upon untold centuries' worth of collected knowledge. Nor did he want to find out what would happen if he tried: likely, the great book was covered with deadly protective spells.
Besides, the shock had lasted long enough for him to stumble a few floors up to his practice space; and there he had unleashed the full force of his Winter, somehow managing to confine it to just this one room and turning it into an ice cave in the process.
Now, he glowered at the frozen floor in front of him: half furious, half grief-stricken.
He had tried confronting the Dragon again, but she refused to speak to him or even show her face. In the white space of his mind, Ferrian had raged at her, then collapsed to his knees, weeping there for a long time as his real body was no longer capable of producing tears.
He gritted his teeth so hard that he thought he might break them. Just as he'd feared, he had regretted writing his own name in the book. He had half-hoped that there would be nothing there at all, just empty pages; after all, not many people knew his name, let alone had reason to write it down.
But someone had written it down.
There had been only a single page: part of a diary.
Meriya's diary.
Ferrian wished it were possible to unknow something; he felt as though his life was simply unravelling further and further into horror…
But certain things now made an awful kind of sense. That the old woman, Meriya, had known about the Winter when she had abandoned Ferrian in the storm, that night. The reason Lord Requar had ridden back to the valley, on Serentyne, in such haste.
He had known Ferrian's name.
And he had known about the Winter.
He had known these things, all of Ferrian's life.
He had known, when he had told Meriya, as he approached her one day on the road, handing her a tiny bundle with strange, silver eyes...
And he allowed me, Ferrian thought in despair, to be hated by the gypsies, to be abandoned by them in the snow to die… and to spend my life wandering the countryside in misery and loneliness and fear.
ALL THAT TIME, HE HAD KNOWN!
Ferrian's fingers curled into his hair. Requar had never intended to help him! The sorcerer had only come back to… what? Apologise? Make excuses? How had he found out about the Winter in the first place? Had he murdered Ferrian's parents, or taken advantage of Arzath's 'accident' with the crystal to steal him away?
Arzath had been right all along. Ferrian disliked that sorcerer intensely, but he now realised that the man had, ironically, been the most truthful with him than anyone else he had met on this ill-fated journey...
Requar was not to be trusted. He had never cared about Ferrian, only about his magic. Perhaps he had wanted Ferrian to wreak havoc on the Outlands!
And yet… and yet… Ferrian had talked to Requar through the castle shield, directly into his mind… and he had seemed so concerned about Ferrian's welfare, so genuine. Had he been faking it, or... did Requar really care? Had he, in fact, had good reasons for everything he had done?
The possibility that the latter was true was even more terrible, more difficult to deal with. Much easier to hate him, as Arzath had done…
Ferrian stared down at the pale strands of hair in his hands. He had tugged at it so fervently that it had come away in clumps. Just another reminder that he was falling apart, in more ways than one. He had thought that he had finally gained control of himself, only to be shattered all over again.
He ached with the need to cry. It was a pressure in his head that could not be released. Instead, he stared at the ice-cased bookshelf opposite him. He didn't know what to feel. He had learned much of the truth, but not all of it. There were answers that only Requar himself could give.
But Requar was nothing more than a mindless corpse, being devoured by trigon. The Dragon seemed to think there was still a chance he could be saved. And that Bladeshifter guy… Flint… he had stayed behind at the castle. He must have thought the same.
But do I WANT to save him? Ferrian thought, his mind turning suddenly cold and hard. Does he deserve to be saved?
Ferrian had already decided to travel back to the Sorcerer's Valley, but only for the Sword of Healing. Maybe it was bound to Requar, but he had managed to make it work once: he could do it again. Maybe he could use it on himself–
A distant scream invaded his thoughts.
Ferrian blinked and jerked upright.
He listened, wondering if he had imagined it. Had it come from within his own mind? But it hadn't sounded like the Dragon…
The scream came again: high pitched and frightened.
Leaping to his feet, Ferrian ran to the entrance of the room, an archway that overlooked the central shaft. There was nothing to be seen there, save endless, silent rooms full of books, and far at the bottom, the single tome on its pedestal.
He recognised that voice. But... it couldn't be: could it?
“Li?” he said aloud.
When there was no further sound, he looked upwards and yelled: “LI!”
There was more silence, save for his own voice disappearing as it bounded away up the shaft.
Then a faint sound echoed down in reply, the words indistinguishable.
Turning, Ferrian ran across the room, leaping over frozen chunks of debris, and grabbed his Sword.
It was stuck fast into the wall.
Bracing himself with one foot on the ice, Ferrian gripped the hilt with both hands and pulled as hard as he could.
After a moment, it slid free with a sudden hiss, toppling him over, the blade clattering to the floor. Scrambling to his feet, Ferrian snatched it up and raced out of the room.
A narrow stone walkway connected his room to another on the other side of the shaft. He ran across it without hesitating, despite a drop beneath that once would have seemed horrifying.
What is she doing down here?? Ferrian thought in astonishment. Hadn't she gone out with Mekka?
The terrible, dark feeling returned to his stomach, gnawing at it. The sense that bad things were going to happen, or were happening already…
Reaching the room, he turned immediately to his right, running directly towards the wall. Nearing it, he leaped into the air and landed neatly on the wall, which had now become the floor, and kept running, barely slowing. Nimbly he jumped from wall to floor; floor to wall, now so used to traversing Grath Ardan that the ever-twisting perspectives were no longer disorienting.
He kept calling out as he sprinted and leapt and spun through the library, but worryingly, there were no further sounds.
Grath Ardan had fallen back into silence, save for his hurried footsteps, though now it was far more ominous.
It occurred to Ferrian as he ran that it might be a trick, an aspect of the library's magic that he hadn't yet encountered. Or perhaps he had simply spent too much time down here, and his grip on reality wasn't as firm as he thought it was…
He shook the doubts stubbornly away. He was certain that it had been Li.
And worse: he thought he knew where the cries were coming from.
He hoped fervently that he was wrong.