Author's note:
Dear Reader,
Earthborn was conceived in Croatian. While carefully rendered into English, I've deliberately preserved the rhythm and sentence flow of my native language, which I deem essential to the story's voice, texture, and atmospheric pacing.
Please read it not as a standard English novel, but as a story told in its own unique voice, from another shore.
If you're drawn to narratives that explore identity, prejudice, and the cost of love across impossible divides, you've come to the right place.
Thank you for giving it a chance.
If the story moves you, a small comment or rating helps more than you can imagine.
I see every message and I appreciate you.
~~~~~
Principality of Astochia
The peninsular state of Sechvennat of Win'Tarra
The sea battered the cliffs beneath the white palace like a blue-gray breath of the ocean. Eirran carried that pulse in his bones. Six years on these bluffs, listening to waves tell stories he'd never wanted to hear. A mere fragment of his long life; hardly more than a heartbeat. And yet...
He stood on the highest terrace, cold marble seeping into his bare feet. The morning sun caught in his pearlescent hair, a hallmark of his race, each strand gleaming as though sculpted from moonlight. His face remained smooth, timeless; a deception his kind bore for centuries, their true age betrayed only by the greying of feathers, the fading of shine. A beautiful lie, convincing to all but those who knew him too well.
A hundred winters had passed over Eirran, but the last ten had carved the deepest grooves into his being. Invisible to the eye, perhaps, but evident in the stern set of his jaw, the hardness in his gaze, in the silvery frost gathering at the very tips of his flight feathers.
On the outside, he was flawless.
An Ilar. A son of the High House, a venn. The Prince of Astochia.
He wore a silk lliath, a traditional Ilari garb, cut so precisely it seemed to flow in a single piece, without seam or stitch. Silver thread embroidered the fabric, catching the Astochian sun as it shimmered. His wings; once ragged, once broken by rage and grief, now shone with a polished brilliance, every feather gleaming like cut diamond. He stood as the perfect image of Ilar nobility. Exactly what he had been born, and trained, to embody.
Inside... he was a ruin.
"My lord?"
The voice drew him back from the dark. He turned, with practiced dignity, and saw Keth waiting in the archway. The human servant stood at attention, though he kept his eyes averted.
"What is it?"
"A messenger from Win'Tarra." Keth stepped forward, offering a scroll. "It bears the seal of the Fifth House."
Eirran's fingers tightened. His wings gave a faint, involuntary shudder. That treacherous reaction only angered him further. Eight years. Eight years since he'd left those towers behind, since he'd turned his back on everything he had ever been.
The scroll felt cold and dry in his hand. On it, two crossed flaming arrows glared up at him from the red wax seal. He broke it clean in half.
He found only five words inside. Written in the hand of the man who had once taught him his letters.
Come home. I am dying.
Eirran's stomach knotted. He had not expected to feel anything. He thought every emotion tied to that man had rotted away in a Selavetian dungeon, alongside the last remnants of his own soul. But still...
"My lord?" Keth ventured. "The news...?"
"My father is dying." The words left his lips raw, his voice betraying a crack he despised.
Keth said nothing. He didn't need to. Everyone in Astochia knew Eirran's story. Story of the woman who had perished in chains, of the child he had never held.
"Prepare my white lliath," Eirran ordered, his tone sharp, final.
Keth bowed and withdrew, leaving him with the sea, the wind, and the cursed scroll.
Eirran's gaze drifted to the horizon. Somewhere beyond the endless blue, Win'Tarra waited -with its white towers, sharp lies, and the father who, after six years of silence, now wanted to die in his presence.
Rhais had many flaws, but sentimentality wasn't one of them. So the question remained.
Why now? What could possibly matter enough to summon him back?
His wings shifted, catching the sun in a vision of perfect, untouchable white.
And still, Eirran knew the truth: he was only a man on a cliff, staring into the void.