Sil needed no more convincing and took off. He felt even lighter on his feet than usual, which was no mean feat - Sil’s frame, much like his father’s, was less that of a woodworker’s and more that of a runner or dancer. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d sprinted this fast, but it was possible the whirling feeling all around him didn’t come from his pumping legs. The concerned expressions of those he passed hardly registered, just phantoms of foreboding he left behind in his flight.

This can’t be happening. Very few things concerned the inhabitants of the Bardenas Desert. Dune rippers, highly centralized sandstorms that traveled across the desert picking up sand and speed, were one of them - but they were rare and wouldn’t lead to raising an alarm to only Sil, who had just made it to sixteen years of age. Nor would beast incursions or even a beast tide, which were the only other existential threats Sil could remember having cropped up in the past decade. No, any real emergency would merit a town-wide meeting and likely an ushering into one of the Augury-protected buildings like the town hall.

Whatever was going on was personal. It was happening to his father, and Arlo did not know any way to fix it. A fall or injury would just mean a quick, though painful, trip to the healer’s… what could have happened that he’d go to me and not a trained adult?

Sil was dimly aware of others having left with him, but he was long out of their sights. His father’s house was well over half the town away and Sil barely noticed the distance. Time was hazy. The cold air of desert nights went unnoticed, as did the sharp, frigid wind that buffeted Sil’s face that would normally have sent him reeling. He was focused only on the ground and keeping his legs moving. Eventually, he came to the familiar sandstone of the workshop. The door had been left open.

Sil flew into the building and flitted through the messy workspace, hitting his feet on tools and wooden blocks strewn across the floor. The pain barely registered. He launched himself up the stairs, lungs burning as he burst into the living room.

The bubble of dread in his chest popped. His father was on the floor. Mateo’s face was contorted and his wiry body twisted about, clawing at the floor. Sil’s eyes were fixed on his father, on the sweat on his brow and the dry cracks on his lips and his eyes, his bloodshot eyes.

Reluctantly, though, Sil tore his gaze from his father. His perception slowly included the first thing his body responded to when he entered the room. Sil’s muscles were still frozen and his insides felt painfully, dreadfully empty as his gaze landed on the figure of a crow above his father. Its form, larger than any adult he’d ever seen, barely able to fit in the room, was made up of only swirling black particles. Its obsidian sand image struck him immediately both as a mirage and as something more real than life.

This being was not from Sil’s world. The only part of the figure that was, unquestionably, far more than an illusion was its eyes: ruby beads of unrestrained malevolence, more solid than anything Sil had ever seen. The only thing that kept Sil afoot was the fact the being hadn’t even registered his presence. If those eyes, filled with arrogance and darkness and… rage? If those eyes met his, Sil felt like he would dissolve into the same mist that made up this creature.

But it wasn’t just a creature. Sil recognized it. He knew its signs from the stories and the whispers and the sayings. He’d known it from his first step into the living room.

A Herald.

It suddenly registered to the boy what was happening - his father was awakening as a Favored. But this wasn’t what Sil was told to expect should he or someone close to him receive that vaunted blessing. No, the stories couldn’t be true: there was no dignity, no majesty in the way his father convulsed on the floor, mouth plastered open in a silent howl. None of it fit: not his pallid face, his starkly bulging veins, and not the vague darkness creeping up rapidly through his nails. His nails. His fingers. His hands!

It couldn’t be real: not his father’s hands, their livelihood, now dyed in sinister black ink. It was as if the darkness had chosen to start there to violate what was most sacred to him. The darkness that wasn’t supposed to be there.

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Pride reared its head, and rage with it. They shoved aside Sil’s primal fear. Who, what, was this crow to torture his father? What was it to instill such fear in Sil? His eyes roved quickly over the rest of the room - the two other friends of his father, regulars in their card games, lay unconscious on the floor. What sort of gift was this bird?

No gift at all.

Sil kicked forward, scrambling onto his feet - he didn’t remember falling - and rushing at the crow. His hands curled into claws as he tore at the mist. The skin that made contact with the black sand burned, as if covered in liquid fire, but he paid no mind to it. The pain in his hands was all he could feel: it reminded him of the horror invading his father’s body, and Sil’s exhale was sharp and desperate. He just wanted the crow to leave.

The mist burned everywhere, but it was manageable until a hungry breath drew in a trace of it, and his eyes watered. The pain now was incomparable to before, and his willpower waned. The world now pulsed in waves, drowning and burning, and his body ground to a halt temporarily. Weakly, though, he started clawing at the Herald again, suddenly aware of a suffocating silence. No matter how furiously he fought, it did nothing, elicited no reaction. He was miniscule.

Even as his body started to shut down, he caused no response. The pain started to fade. Instead, Sil just felt cold. He recognized the feeling from one night as a child, when he’d stayed out too long. He’d collapsed on the sand, and it had drained him of all his body heat. If not for an adult finding him, he would have died there, cold and tired and numb. He might die here, instead.

Suddenly, he caught flashes of bright green in the black cloud, puffs of emerald flame. His eyes had been open?

His side heated up, then burned like fire. The searing was a relief. Sil could have been imagining it, but it felt as if the air was a little less cold. The smoldering did not spread: it stayed in one specific area. Thoughts moved through Sil’s head like through gossamer now, but one realization made its way through the webs: that’s where I put the night cedar.

That idea fell to the background, though, when Sil looked down to see more bright fire streaming off of his body - a gradient of green, with hints of electric blue now. Where the darkness terrified, this fire danced and shined. What had once been flashes of flame, quickly swallowed up by the black sand, now fled from his body, as if Sil had been doused in oil and set aflame. It’s protecting me…

Just me!

New panic struck Sil. While he had been flailing away at this perverse manifestation of a Herald, his father had been dying. And now, even now, with hope of making it out alive, Sil still hadn’t changed a thing.

He dropped to the floor and embraced his father, trying to cover him with his body. The verdant blaze only intensified around him, pushing back the blackness, and a comfortable warmth that carried the same color had begun to spread from his right wrist.

It was a warmth that spoke. Even though Sil didn’t want to listen, even though all he wanted to think about was saving his father, the warmth whispered in a way that cut through the pain and grief to remind him of ingenuity and curiosity, of laughter and brightness and potential.

Quickly, the feeling filled him, though it was slightly weaker at a small spot on his side: the same area where he’d felt the night cedar root burn before. Now, he could feel it leaking from his body, streaming into the wood through the box. But there’s something more…

The cold, too - the black sand tore at him even perceiving it. It continued to swirl into the wood so quickly that a second after he noticed it, it pushed past the warmth and entered his veins. For an instant, Sil didn’t worry. There was so little, trace amounts of it spreading throughout his body. The instant did not last: the breach seemed to open the floodgates and he felt the cold subsume him just as he had the warmth.

This feeling spoke of the rage Sil had felt when he entered the room. It spoke to his pride. It didn’t hurt, anymore, as it whispered greatness and collected on his right wrist. The same place the warmth had. He could feel them both now, swirling and joining, emerald and onyx.

It seemed an eternity before he slumped onto the ground, eyes shut. He fought to stay conscious, if only to open his eyes and check on his father. Whatever just happened… did it save him? As hard as Sil tried to summon any semblance of strength, his body had stopped listening to him.

Unwillingly, he slipped into obliviousness. The last thing Sil could remember was the ringing shriek of two birds resonating in his ears, then nothing but the unmistakable impression that the pinpricks of light before his closed eyelids were stars.