The Last Raven: An Urban Fantasy Noir (Riftborn Book 1), page 14
“I need clothes,” I said. “I need to heal. I need food. I need weapons. Not necessarily in that order.”
“You don’t need half of those in the embers, but you want vengeance,” Maria said, with a gleeful shiver to their tone. “I can feel it.”
“Vengeance can wait until I have answers,” I said.
“We won’t make the exit by nightfall,” Maria said. “You are too injured. Your body needs to heal.”
You don’t get exhausted in the embers, but being out at night is a bad idea. Especially as I didn’t have access to my power. The shadowy people that walked the embers during the day became feral and dangerous at night. They couldn’t enter secured buildings after dark, but find yourself too far away from a safe haven, and there’s no guarantee you’ll live to see the morning.
“How close can we get before we need to find somewhere to hole up?” I asked Maria after several minutes of silence.
“There’s a house near the stream,” they said.
I smiled at the memory of me as a child playing with the daughter and son of the house’s owner. I’d remembered the house smelling of flowers.
I don’t know how long we walked, the conversation was sparse, but it felt like no time at all. The closer we got to the house, the greater the sense of dread built inside of me, and I wondered just how dilapidated it would look.
As it turned out, the house was still intact, the flowers still littering the garden in front of it, a mass of stunning colours that appeared to bleed into one another, creating a sort of smudged rainbow effect. The streaks of blue and yellow had left the sky, replaced with a deep red, to make it look like lava about to break through a volcanic crust. It signified that darkness was about to descend upon the village.
I pushed open the door, revealing a large open room with stairs along one side leading to a landing above. Beds would be up there, I knew that much, although the house itself was both familiar and alien to me, the embers not quite getting the details right.
I closed the door and walked up the stairs, Maria behind me. There were openings in the thatched roof up there, letting us watch over the village as it became darker and darker, until I couldn’t see anything more than ten feet away. The howls started soon after.
“The shadows hunt,” Maria said. “They know you’re here. They want your power for themselves.”
“Not much good to them when I can’t access it,” I said, sounding more than a little fed up. I wasn’t entirely sure what happened to a riftborn who had been caught and consumed by their own shadows in the embers, but I didn’t want to find out first-hand, either. There are some things best left to the imagination.
“The last time you were forced here was when your Guild were murdered,” Maria said, settling beside me as I lay down on a comfortable straw mattress.
“Dan betrayed me,” I said. “I think he was involved in what happened to the Guild. He tried to kill me, thought that as I was human, he’d be able to remove me as an issue. Turns out he was wrong.”
“You didn’t expect to not be able to switch your power back on when you needed it,” Maria said. “That about sum it up?”
I nodded. “And now I’m here, after my friend betrayed and tried to kill me, and I don’t have my power. And I can’t do anything to figure out what’s going on and protect the people I care about without that same power.”
“You fucked up,” an owl said from the window.
“Casimir,” I said. “It’s good to see you, too.”
“Lots of shadows around,” Casimir said, hopping into the house. “Some of them have become larger than normal. The fact that the power flowing into this place had nowhere to go meant it just hung around, the shadows fed. Some got big.”
“Great,” I said with a sigh. “And how do we resolve that problem?”
The embers are always linked to earth and the rift; they’re like a tunnel connecting the two sides, but one only I can unlock. Unfortunately, as the power flows through the embers to me, it can create build-ups of energy inside the embers itself. Energy the shadows can feed on. Take enough energy and a shadow becomes larger, more dangerous, but sometimes enough power flows into the embers that it turns a shadow into something else. Something monstrous. When that happens, the eidolons will do their best to keep it busy while I’m contacted and expected to come deal with it. They’re called the shadow-cursed.
A shadow-cursed left unattended can disrupt the feed of power to me; it can cause, and has caused with other riftborn, untold long-term damage to their bodies and minds. In some cases, it can come through a tear and be set free into the rift or Earth. That would be considered bad on an unprecedented scale.
Casimir shrugged. “Thought you might know, considering you’re two thousand years old. Maybe you should have spoken to us before shutting yourself off from your embers.”
“Casimir,” Maria snapped.
“No,” Casimir snapped back. “You feel the same way.”
I looked between the wolf and owl. “I’m sorry.” What I’d done had felt like the right thing at the time, but maybe I hadn’t thought it through as much as I should have done.
“Good,” Maria said. “Don’t do it again.”
I smiled. “Not planning on it.”
There were more howls outside the building. Despite the name, you can’t start fires in the embers, and at night the cold mists that cover the ground turn cold enough to burn if you’re in them for more than a few minutes. Another reason why finding a secure place to stay is necessary.
I finally drifted off to sleep, safe in the knowledge that Casimir and Maria would keep watch over me.
I woke after being nudged in the arm by Maria’s nose. She was still a black wolf, but Casimir was now a small sparrow, perched on the top of a nearby set of antlers.
“The shadows have gone back to their dwellings,” Casimir said.
“It was quite the evening festivities,” Maria said with a sigh. “The power you stopped using has been leaking into the embers; it’s meant that places like the hut next to where you woke were saturated with it.”
“They destroyed the hut,” I said, getting to my feet and stretching.
“One of many,” Casimir told me. “Your lack of using your power has disrupted your embers. I believe once you have access to them once again, the shadows should settle down. Until you arrive again, at least.”
“How far to the exit?” I asked.
“An hour away at most,” Maria said.
It was frustrating that we were so close to the exit but had been forced to camp the night. An hour in the darkness with shadows running after me was an hour I would rather not suffer through. I’d fought shadows before; I’d almost been killed by a group of them a few hundred years earlier. I wasn’t entirely sure what shadows were; no one was. I’d once heard them described as a magical white blood cell, which I always liked, although that meant I was a foreign contaminant to the body of the embers, which I wasn’t particularly keen on.
I left the large hut and saw several shadows walking past, as if deep in conversation between themselves. Behind that were three more shadows. It was much busier early in the morning as shadows went about what would have been their normal lives.
Most ignored the eidolons and me, with only one or two stopping for a moment to watch us walk by. It was a strange sensation, and I was never sure if there was still a little of the hunt left in them from the night before. In the scheme of things, it was a mild threat, but it was one that always sat with me.
There was no way of telling just how long it took to walk, as my watch hadn’t worked from the moment I’d entered the embers. It would, bizarrely, show the correct time and date when I left the rift, as if it were moving normally outside of where I was. I’d tried to think about it in deep terms a few times and usually ended up with a headache and a desperate need for alcohol.
The three of us reached a large lake that I’d once swam in as a child. There had been fish the size of my ten-year-old self in there, although I couldn’t remember the types for the life of me. I stopped at the water’s edge, the mist swirling around my feet, and looked out over the dark lake.
“Something wrong?” Casimir asked as he landed on my shoulder.
I shook my head. “Whenever I see this place, it just brings back memories. My father fishing, my mother trying to teach me how to swim. I didn’t realise how content life was as a ten-year-old.” I turned away and caught up with Maria, who stood outside of the mouth of a large cave.
“In there?” I asked.
Maria nodded. “I’m coming with you.”
Eidolons could traverse between the embers and the rift, so long as the riftborn was with them; unfortunately, they couldn’t change shape inside the rift, so whatever Maria chose to become, she was stuck with.
“I’ll keep watch here,” Casimir said. “I’ve never liked the rift.” He flew off into a nearby gnarled tree, and Maria and I stepped into the cave.
Purple-and-blue power crackled across the tear to the rift, lighting the otherwise-dark cave in brilliant colour.
I placed a hand against the tear, and it drastically increased in size, filling the entire wall of the cave.
“Are you ready?” I asked, turning back to Maria, who had turned back into their large stag form.
Maria nodded. “Let’s hope that Neb will be able to help.”
I had to believe that she would, because if Neb couldn’t help and I was no longer able to access my power, I wasn’t sure how I was going to help my friends caught up in Dan’s treachery.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
From stepping into the tear in the cave to stepping out of the tear in the rift was instantaneous. Maria and I found ourselves in a cave that looked pretty much identical to the one we’d just left, although in the rift, looks could be deceiving.
It didn’t take us long to leave the cave, and we found ourselves atop a large hill; the view of the rift stretched out before us. It took my breath away.
Parts of the rift were twisted with power, full of monstrous creatures and danger around every corner, but that was far from Neb’s settlement. Far from the vistas we found before us. The plains stretched for tens of miles, with huge mountains looming up in the distance. The grass on the plains was a mixture of green and orange, and spread out as far as I could see. Inaxia, the rift capital city, was far from there; Neb and the council didn’t exactly get on.
While there are plenty of animals in the rift that are native to the place, the people living in the rift had all once lived on Earth. Some still moved between the two freely, but a lot of people had settled on living in the rift, even with the dangers. They found a peace or place to call home that they couldn’t find elsewhere.
Neb’s settlement was called Nightvale, mostly due to the fact that for one week every year, the entire area was bathed in twilight. It was roughly halfway between where Maria and I stood and the mountains. The huge central black stone tower of her settlement loomed among the colour of the plains. I looked up at the sky and found nothing but bright blue and purple clearness above.
“Weather looks good,” Maria said, as if considering my own thoughts.
Bad weather in the rift was . . . well, it was bad. Really bad. The kind of awful weather that TV news shows like to put their weather presenters out in to prove to their viewers just how dangerously bad it was. Except, if they’d done that in the rift, they’d lose weather presenters at a huge rate.
The sounds of various animals in the distance were a welcome change from the embers. Just the noise the wind made as it brushed over the grass was something I hadn’t realised I could miss. The first time I’d traversed the embers and arrived in the rift, it was closer to a city, and the sounds and smells of everything from normal everyday life had caused me a sensory overload. It was still a lot to take in even after all this time.
“You can ride on my back,” Maria said. “It’ll be quicker.”
I swung up onto Maria’s back and they started at a trot, the small animals that had been hiding inside the footlong grass scarpering for cover, but as we reached the bottom of the large hill, Maria began to build up speed until I was holding on to their neck for dear life.
The closer we got to Neb’s settlement, the more I realized that it had grown by a considerable amount since I’d last stood before it. A thousand people had lived there twenty years before, when I’d last visited. Judging from the size, I’d guess ten times that amount lived there now, maybe more.
Despite the rift being home to millions of people all from different countries throughout history, I wasn’t concerned about not being able to understand anyone. One of the stranger parts of the rift was how everyone was able to understand everyone else. After only a few minutes of speaking to someone in a language you didn’t know, you were fluent. Reading and writing took a little more effort, but it too was made easier to understand. No one knew why or how it happened. There were theories it had to do with people who had died in the rift and their essence becoming absorbed by the tempest, their knowledge flowing out of the tempest back into the world, but no one to my knowledge ever got close enough to the tempest to find out without being turned to ash.
“You think she’ll be happy to see you?” Maria asked after she’d slowed down enough that it didn’t look like we were about to attack the settlement.
I looked up at the ramparts, where there were dozens of guards, all in black and green armour, all probably watching our approach. “I really hope so,” I said eventually.
Maria stopped a few hundred metres from the settlement entrance, and I swung myself off, landing on the ground, and walked toward the main gate, where four guards were stood outside, all carrying long spears, all with the same black-and-green armour of those I’d seen on the ramparts. The armour was a mixture of steel and leather, with steel helmets that had green feathers in them. I had no idea what creature they’d used to get those feathers, but if it had been from something in the rift, it probably hadn’t been easy.
“Halt,” one of the guards shouted. They walked over to me as I did, with Maria hanging back a few feet.
“Name?” the guard demanded, her voice loud enough even from several feet away.
“Lucas Rurik,” I told them.
She stared at me for several seconds. “And the purpose of your visit?”
“I need to see Neb,” I said.
“Is she expecting you?” The guard asked.
I shook my head. “I doubt it, but it’s imperative that I speak to her. Please.”
The guard looked beyond me at Maria, who raised a hoof in a sort of waving gesture.
“Eidolon?” she asked, more inquisitive than demanding.
“Yes, I’m riftborn,” I said. “Their name is Maria.”
“Wait here,” the guard told me, and walked back, their armour the only sound before she reached her comrades and began a conversation.
“You think something bad has happened here?” I asked.
“I haven’t heard of anything,” Maria said. “I haven’t been in the rift for a long time, but we eidolons do stay in contact.”
The guard made her way back over to me. “You are allowed entry,” she said, and removed her helmet, revealing long blond hair, a stark contrast to the dark armour. “I’m to inform you that you are considered a friend here.”
“Hence you removing your helmet?” I asked. There were a lot of customs in the rift about people not wearing anything on their head when greeting a friendly visitor.
She nodded. “If you fail to comply with anything you are asked to do, you will be dealt with accordingly. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Please follow me.”
I followed the guard to the front entrance, where I was searched. Once allowed through, we continued into the settlement and past two large guard posts, where another dozen guards stood, all watching Maria and me with a mixture of interest and outright hostility. Newcomers aren’t welcomed warmly in a lot of rift settlements.
The settlement was, like many rift settlements, built in five rings. The outer ring was the guards and military, the next one merchants of one form or another; after that were living accommodations, and the fourth ring was full of schools, libraries, and places of learning, including military academies. The final ring was the power structure of the whole settlement. Five streets stretched from the inner to outer rings, making navigation easier.
For Neb to have made her settlement so much larger, she would have had to build it from scratch while demolishing the old one. A big undertaking, and I wondered what had happened to create such an influx of new people.
“Have you been here before?” the guard asked as the smells of the merchant area threatened to overwhelm me.
“Not for many years,” I said. “When I was last here, Neb’s settlement had a thousand people.”
The guard looked back at me and chuckled. “At least twenty years, then.”
“What happened?” I asked, trying to ignore the mass of delicious food we were walking by.
“It’s not for me to say,” the guard told me. “Neb saved us all, and we owe her much. That’s all you need to know. Everyone here is loyal to Neb.”
The threat was implied; Screw around, and you’ll regret it.
We reached a guard post that stopped people from entering the central ring and, by extension, the tower, and there were several guards training on either side of the tower. “I thought that happened in the military ring or in the schools,” I said to the guard.
“Those here wish to advance,” she said. “They have to fight in the shadow of the tower and win to be given the chance to advance in rank.”
“That’s new,” I said.
“A lot has changed,” the guard said, before turning and saluting to another guard, although this one had silver on their armour along with the black and green.
