I was Twelve .....
My hands trembled so hard I thought they'd fall off.
I pressed my palm over my mouth until the taste of iron filled my tongue. The floor under the table smelled of smoke and old incense. Outside, someone ..no, something....was chanting the Law.
They called it punishment. They called it cleansing. They called it mercy while my father screamed like the air itself was tearing...
I saw the blade. I saw the line of light sliding along his skin and then his face folding into something empty. They reached for him like vultures. They didn't take his body first ... they took the shine from his eyes, the shape of his laugh, the part of him that had told me stupid jokes every evening...
I saw my own father's death....
His soul was torn away, piece by piece, drained before my eyes. His body was cut apart under the name of purification, while his cries echoed until they fell silent
If I made one sound they would find me.
So I held my breath until my chest burned. My back felt hot as if someone had set a coal against my spine.
The wings under my skin throbbed--wild, wrong--pinpricks of heat that wanted to split my bones open.
My father had always warned me about the bloodline on my mother's side...
"You have her feathers," he'd said once, half smiling, half warning.
"You'll know when they wake."
They woke with the scent of fear.
I told myself it was a dream. Then one of the men laughed and said my name..."Kael "
That's when I lost the rest.
I ran. I didn't know where else to go. The table legs scraped the floor like teeth. Outside the alley was a blur of torchlight and long coats..neighbors who had turned their faces as if the sky itself had been shamed. The street swallowed me and when I hit the wall, something tore inside my ribs and the world folded...
I woke up...
My eyes snapped open to darkness. Just another nightmare.
My endless companion--my night friend.
Sweat stuck to my hair. My heart pounded like a hammerstone.
I pushed myself up and felt for the wings wanted to come out fully from his hiding place.
They were there. Not leathery, not scaled like the monsters in stories--feathers, black and glossy, like a crow polished with oil. They pressed against my back like a second spine, angry and alive.
I tried to keep calm.
You cannot show them what you are..
my father would have said.
Hide it !..Survive...!!..
I threw open the window because the air in my room felt too small for the burning in me. The night tasted of rain.I climbed through the window, letting the cool night air hit me. And then my body shifted...
Bones cracked, pain shot through me, and in the blink of an eye I was no longer a human body. My body stretched, changed, twisted and I became a black dragon.
But my wings… they were not like the others. Dark glossy feathers, unlike any dragon I had ever heard of, spread wide behind me.
I flew toward a restricted area we'd been warned to avoid. Shadows clung to the alley walls, the silence broken only by my wings cutting through the night.
A voice from the darkness said my name again. This time it was not in the nightmare.
"Show yourself, Crowblood.." it said.
I stopped.
No fear. No tremor. Fear was a thing I had buried way before... I had to be stone. Stone did not squeal when the world bled.
I straightened the rough hem of my shirt and turned. Close enough now to see the cloth--white like bone, wrapped like the dead used to be, a kimono that smelled faintly of ash and rain. White hair fell over a face like frost. He was smaller than the men who took my father, but something about him ate the light.
His eyes were pale milky orbs. Blind, I thought. Blind men rarely scared me. They didn't look for what the world hides.
Then he looked at me.
Not with sight. With the sort of full-weight attention that made the night wobble. My laugh came out a little too loud. It sounded angry even to me.
"Don't laugh, child," he said. His voice was soft like a bell in water. "I know what you hide. I know about the crow-feathers."
I swallowed. My hands curled into fists. The world had ears; apparently, it had a mouth, too.
I'm not stupid..
I snapped in my mind. My breath was a blade.
I remembered the way the villagers had stared at me when I'd walked to market with wings folded tight under my clothes. I remembered the way my father had rubbed the scar along his wrist and said, "Hide it." I had learned to hide and also I had learned to lie to myself ...
And here everyone believed my shifting form was only a dragon, wings like the others.
No one knew of my Crow -feather wings..
He smiled without moving his lips.
"No,"
he agreed as if he had read the inside of me like a letter.
"You are not stupid. You learned well. That is why you are dangerous."
Dangerous. The word should have made my throat clench. It didn't. Stone doesn't clench.
"Who the hell are you?" I hissed.
The alley smelled of old prayers and wet dirt.
"Not your concern," he answered. "Listen. You will be given a purpose soon."
The words should have meant nothing. They stuck like thorns.
"I don't want one," I said. I meant it. I had wanted nothing for years.
He laughed once....not cruel, not kindly, but something older.
"You think you made yourself stone of your own hand."
His fingers twitched as if plucking strings. "You have been hardened because of what you are. That ends when you find her, girl with golden black butterfly wings with a dragon eye..."
"What ? Why??" I snapped, because even stone had a hollow where curiosity lived.
His head tipped. For a second his blind eyes were not blind. There was light behind them, thin as a thread. "Find her," he said plainly. "Find her before its too late ." Then he vanished like mist.
Vanished. No trick, no rope. One breath --gone. I stood alone in a place that suddenly felt too wide for my shoulders.
Anger bubbled up, hot and useless. I spat into the gutter.
"Whoever you are..." I shouted into the dark, to the empty air, to the silence that had swallowed him.
"Keep your fu***ng riddles..."
But riddles are ugly things that glide into you and stay. I did not sleep the rest of the night.
The night passed slowly.
I told myself I didn't care. I told myself I would ignore it.
But his words gnawed at me through the night.
When morning came, I walked to the University gates..
The place where people shape their futures. For me, it was just another prison with prettier walls.
Crowds of newcomers swarmed the entrance, eyes bright with nervous dreams.
That's when I saw her.
A green eyes girl stepped through the gate, quiet but trembling...still she didn't stumble or shrink but froze there some seconds...Then she walked as though the noise around her didn't touch her...
Something about her presence stopped me cold.
I turned away quickly, heading toward the academic halls. But my eyes… they betrayed me.
In the garden, where newcomers gathered, she stood again. Sun light spilled over her, making her look both unreal and unshakably real...
And then---
A flash of crimson.
I froze.
A thread, thin and glowing red, unspooled from my ring finger. It stretched across the space between us, alive, humming, until it tied itself to her hand.
Her ring finger.
The thread pulsed once, faint but undeniable, then vanished into nothing.
My chest clenched. My breath caught.
The blind man's words roared back. You will have a purpose of living soon.
"No," I muttered, fists trembling. "Not me. Not ever."
But I couldn't erase the sight. That red thread burned itself into my mind, a chain I never asked for.
She stood there, unaware, surrounded by strangers yet separate from them all the same.
And for the first time in years, I felt fear.
Not of death.
Of fate....