by Scott Hale
But what was most feared about the Black Hour was Death, which was said to roam the land in disguise during the temporal aberration, taking the lives of those It passed as It saw fit. Vrana’s people were said to possess the ability to see through Death’s disguises, regardless of whether It was in the form of a man, beast, or inanimate object. And although its behavior and appearance would suggest otherwise, she knew the Skeleton had not been Death, even if the two did seem to share some of the same amusements.
Vrana was on the outskirts of Caldera when the sun overthrew the moon from the sky. The village sat inside a forest whose center had been cleared for fields and homes. The village had been built against a large mountain, Kistvaen, which could not be measured from any direction but behind the settlement. She had been told numerous times never to expect to use the mountain as a landmark for navigation, and it was not until she’d departed for her first trial that she understood why. Kistvaen, despite its massiveness, seemed to shrink into the land the farther one traveled from Caldera, disappearing entirely once one cleared the forest that surrounded the village.
“They think of everything,” Vrana said to herself as she pushed through Caldera’s forest, the mountain’s peak growing out of the land, as promised.
It was the field workers who saw Vrana first, and they watched her silently from behind their masks of roots as she went. They nodded at the girl with the raven’s head and then returned to the reaping.
Vrana was sore, and sharp pains bit at her legs with every plodding step, but she kept her composure. A green snake with white speckles crossed her path, stopped, and seemed to study her before slipping into a small hole in the sunbaked earth.
Her arrival was no longer a surprise.
Vrana’s mother, Adelyn, met her at the village gates, and she held her daughter so tightly Vrana had to forgo breathing for a bit. The bones of her mother’s mask, which was also a raven’s skull, shone through where feathers had been removed to celebrate her accomplishments as a warrior and a healer. Vrana envied this, and after what she had experienced, she felt she was at least entitled to have a handful of her own feathers plucked away.
“Vrana,” Adelyn said softly, releasing her daughter, “I tried not to worry, tried to remember my own trials, but I couldn’t help it. You know me. I wanted to send a party after you, to bring you back, but the elders would have none of it.” She smiled as she noticed the fullness of the satchel at Vrana’s side. “Is that it?”
Vrana nodded, loosening the trophy bag from her waist and holding it up to let the light pass through, revealing the outline of the heart. “A Corrupted’s heart,” she said. Her words fell on deaf ears as her mother’s concern became that of the cuts and scratches on Vrana’s arms and chest from the Horror of the Lake. “I’m not sure what it was, but it’s dead now,” she said. “I made a paste from blue flowers to—”
“Blue flowers?” Adelyn snorted. “After all that I’ve taught you, girl, blue flowers are the best you can do?” She ran her fingers down Vrana’s arm. “These don’t look good, Vrana.”
“It had to be done,” Vrana said, her voice pained as she thought of the boy.
“We need to disinfect these tonight,” her mother said, caressing Vrana’s shoulder. “Come, the elders are waiting for you.”
CHAPTER III
Vrana sat in silence at the center of Caldera, the heated earth burning the backs of her legs. She looked to the elders beside and before her—Anguis of the snake, Faolan of the wolf, and Nuctea of the owl—and wondered if they would catch her should she pass out. Her mother had done the best she could for her wounds given the short amount of time they had between the gates and the village circle, but it hadn’t been enough. Her mind remained unsettled, overwhelmed.
Anguis held the Corrupted heart in one hand as the speckled snake from the field passed between the fingers of the other. “You’ve done well,” he said, handing the organ to Faolan. “Did the human suffer?”
Vrana shook her head.
“Did you enjoy the hunt?”
Vrana hesitated to answer; then nodded.
“Good. You cannot do well that which you do not enjoy. But you found it difficult taking the life, did you not?”
Vrana nodded: a half-lie.
“That is also good. Those who enjoy killing lose sight of why they are doing so in the first place. Remember these words, for many have forgotten them.”
Faolan spoke next. “Why do we hunt the Corrupted, Vrana? And what did you learn of the human you killed?”
Vrana turned to Faolan and recited, “Because of what they have done and will do if permitted. Their right arms and hands are colored by their cruelty and destruction. It has become a part of their genetic code, and therefore, it has become a part of their culture and way of being. We are to keep the balance between the natural and supernatural, to establish harmony through acts of disharmony. None are exempt, not even our own.”
The elders appeared pleased by her answer, so she continued. “The man lived…” She paused for a moment. “The man lived alone. He attacked me. I think he felt threatened and knew my reason for being there. I cut him down. I don’t know if he deserved it, but I had no choice.”
Faolan handed the heart to Vrana, which felt dry and turned her stomach, who then gave it to Nuctea.
“You’ve always a choice, Vrana,” Nuctea said. “You must weigh the importance of appeasing others when their requests diverge from your own beliefs.”
“How can—” Vrana swallowed her words, but it was too late: She knew the elders would force her to continue. “How can I be myself when I am hiding behind this mask? Every day I lose myself to it.”
“We are not human, though physically it would seem otherwise,” Nuctea said as she set the heart on the ground before her. “You took the head from that wretched raven because it was yours to take. This heart, too, was meant to be here today. All of these things you’ve done of your own volition, with pride and respect. You wonder at your identity, and it is through these trials, whether you choose to complete them and how you complete them, that who you are, not who you wish to be, will become clear. One trial remains.”
Vrana ripped off the raven’s head, dropped it to the floor, and collapsed upon her bed. She buried her face into the blankets and inhaled the perfect, immutable smell of home. She was no longer an idea, a harbinger, a murderer; just an eighteen-year-old girl too tired to speak and in desperate need of a bath.
“I’m proud of you,” her mother said as she entered the room with a spoon and wooden bowl.
“No, please, just let me lie here,” Vrana said, her voice muffled by the bedding.
Adelyn laughed and took a seat beside her daughter. “Shut it, tough girl.” She dipped the spoon into the bowl and pressed it to Vrana’s lips. “Rest when you’re full.”
Vrana opened her eyes to a dream of a place that appeared to have no beginning or end. Great, thick, blood-spattered curtains billowed around her, offering startling glimpses of the vague shapes moving through the milling fog beyond. The air here weighed heavily in her lungs and soured her mouth.
Is this truly a dream? Vrana’s toes tingled as the slate-colored ground liquefied, plunging her knee-deep into dark waters. She spun around in place, looking for an escape from the seamless gray Void. This isn’t a dream, she thought, pinching and scratching and willing herself to wake, this is happening right now.
A faint sound entered the Void like wind creeping through a small crack. Where there had been nothing now stood a woman dressed in flowing rags, the rigid husk of a hollowed-out infant in her clawed hands. Her skin was pale, semi-translucent, and her hair long, thick, and oily. Her face had hints of a beauty lost, of a beauty stolen, and the wicked, chapped-lipped smile she wore suggested she’d given up trying to find it some time ago.
The woman cocked her head, stared at Vrana with mild intrigue, and moved her lips without speaking. Immediately, the paralyzing pain of Vrana’s scars from the Horror of the Lake resur
faced. Blood flooded the Raven’s mouth as she gnawed uncontrollably at her tongue. The woman, the Witch, levitated forward as the Void contracted around them.
Vrana closed her eyes and waited for Death. This time she would know It when she saw It.
But Death didn’t come. Instead her pet crow, Blix, was the one to wake her, with a tapping on her forehead that any other day would have sent Vrana into a rage. Now, however, she threw her arms around the bird as it cawed and beat its wings against her perspiring body and thanked him.
She had found Blix when she was three, at the bottom of a tree, fallen from a nest emptied by an avian pestilence. Vrana thought the crow was a raven and brought it with blushing cheeks to her mother, to please her. Adelyn laughed sweetly at the gesture, and together the two had nursed the malnourished chick back to health. And he had been annoying her ever since.
“You can tell me now, or you can tell me later, but the longer you wait, the more irritating I’ll get,” Vrana’s mother said playfully from the doorway. “You think you don’t need my help anymore, but at the end of the day, girl, you’re only eighteen.”
Vrana released Blix, who nibbled her ear before flying off into another room. “I didn’t even say anything.”
Her mother grinned and disappeared into the darkness of the house. “You didn’t have to.”
Vrana sat on her bed for some time afterwards, trying to make sense of what had happened to her. Dreams were supposed to be images cobbled together from fragments of memories, fears, and expectations. The gray Void had been none of those things, and the very real pain she felt from the wounds of the Horror of the Lake suggested they were to blame for what she’d seen there.
It was night when Vrana decided to heed her mother’s request. She descended into the basement where she knew Adelyn would be, diligently tending to the nocturnal plant life that grew there. Black sprites with purple luminescence circled the vegetation and minerals protruding from the walls and floor, their origin just as much as a mystery as their intentions. Vrana’s father had taken an interest in the creatures and took what he had learned of them to his grave.
“I didn’t sleep well after the second trial either,” Adelyn said from the back of the basement, “but I think that’s the point.” She moved forward, becoming clearer with every passing second, as Vrana’s eyes adjusted to the dark. “That’s not what you’re worried about, is it? At least, not entirely, right?”
Vrana shook her head. There was no use in feigning a smile or telling a lie: her mother’s vision in the dark was impeccable, and her ears knew all too well her daughter’s voice when it twisted the truth. But with one trial remaining, she couldn’t tell Adelyn about the boy—her words carried far too much weight with the elders, and Vrana had no intention of being labeled a traitor—so she told her mother everything else instead.
“The Black Hour?” Adelyn ripped a handful of roots from a stone and slipped them into a bowl. She cleared her throat and looked the other way. “Are you sure?”
Vrana nodded, stepped aside as a several sprites rushed past her and crammed themselves into the hole where the roots had been. “Yeah,” she said, her hand instinctively reaching for the key, which was now on her bedroom floor. “I didn’t realize it’d even happened until it was over.”
A sprite hummed about her mother’s head, tugging on her hair. “Your father wasn’t enough?”
“Mom,” Vrana started, stopping before she uttered something that she didn’t even believe herself. Her father had been researching the Black Hour when he disappeared years ago. She didn’t need a body to figure out what’d happened to him.
“I’m sorry.” Adelyn slacked her shoulders as she made a conscious effort to relax. “Is that what you were dreaming about? The Skeleton? I could hear you from the kitchen, calling out in your sleep. It wasn’t real, Vrana. You won’t see him again.”
“I know,” Vrana said, nodding, accepting that she would get no more out of her mother on the matter of the Black Hour. “It’s these,” she continued, pointing to the grotesque marks all over her body, “from that thing in the lake. I dreamt…”
When Vrana finished describing the details of her nightmare, Adelyn said, “I’ll ask the watchers if they’ve ever seen such a creature,” and began to busy herself at the workbench. “Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves,” she added, doing the opposite as her voice deepened with concern. “The dream may have been caused by toxins still in your bloodstream.”
Vrana ran her hand over the tender cuts and darkening bruises. “I don’t know. It felt like something else. I’m just…” She shrugged. “I’m just tired; seeing things that probably aren’t there. I need a day to myself. It’s been nonstop since graduation.”
Adelyn sighed, twisted a Night Eye’s stem until it snapped, and poured its white blood into a vial. To the extract she added shavings of Snare and Solace and watched as the vial glowed vibrantly, like fresh snow catching midday sun. The sight never failed to stir Vrana’s heart with wonderment. She approached her mother to take the vial and instead received a hug, which comforted her more than any potion ever could.
“This will help you sleep.” Adelyn handed Vrana the vial. “You won’t dream, won’t feel much better in the morning, but at least you’ll sleep.” She paused for a moment and held her daughter’s face. “I’m proud of you. Others would’ve fallen apart.” She stroked the Raven’s cheeks, softly wiping away a tear there. “I know your father is proud, too, wherever he may be.”
CHAPTER IV
And sleep Vrana did. It was late in the afternoon when her body showed signs of life, and this was only because Blix had been treading across her face out of boredom. She didn’t dream, nor did she feel fully recovered, but it would be enough to see her through the day.
The raven’s head waited for Vrana on the opposite side of the room, with her ax beside it. As her eyes ran down the blood-encrusted blade, she found it remarkable how quickly her mind had adjusted to the killing of the man. Even her feelings toward the boy felt diminished—a slight sense of discomfort where once a nagging pang had been. She shook her head as though the act would physically rid her of the memories, donned her guise and gear, and left the house.
A side effect of her mother’s potion was an increased sensitivity to the sun. Vrana had forgotten this, had not noticed this in the darkened den that was her room, but was soon reminded when she pulled open the front door. Searing light flooded her mask; her eyes begged for the comforts of blindness.
“Fucking mother fuck,” she yelled. She fell against the doorway, clawing at her eyes like a holy man who’d seen the face of god. “Son of a bitch,” she hissed, groaning as she heard the laughter of children erupt around her.
When her vision returned, she sought out the blacksmith, Bjørn; even if it hadn’t, she still could have found him by the sound of his hammer striking the anvil. He was a man of muscle and scarred flesh, hands hardened from his work, body browned from the sun. A large bear’s head sat atop his shoulders, and it was through its gaping mouth that he watched the world quietly, contemplatively. It was said that Death met Bjørn on a forest road once, nodded at his moonlit silhouette, and stepped out of the way.
Then again, Death had never been around to tell Its side of the tale.
“I sharpen blades, girl, not clean them,” he said, eying the filth on the ax.
“Why haven’t you let your mask go to bone?” Vrana asked, grinning.
Bjørn grumbled, ripped the ax from her hand, and doused it in the barrel of water beside him. “I’ll take warmth and protection over that any day. Don’t goad me, girl. Yours looks a little too big for your body.”
“I’m growing into it,” Vrana said through her teeth.
Bjørn grunted. “Come back later. I don’t like the look of this ax anymore.”
Vrana cocked her head. “You’re the one who made it. What if I need it?”
“You won’t. Go accept your third trial and leave me alone.”
Vr
ana’s head became dizzied, and her stomach fell into a pit of nervousness. “From whom? When was this decided?”
“While you were away chasing Corrupted and fighting with thorn bushes,” Bjørn said, amused with himself. “He’s waiting for you in the Archive.”
Vrana sighed, shook her head. “Isn’t he always?”
The Archive was a circular building with a dome-shaped roof that had been built at the foot of Kistvaen. Inside, information from various cultures and time periods was collected and catalogued by genre, subject, and author. Inside, the learned and the patient could find philosophical treatises, scientific journals, religious dogmas, various lexicons, media and fashion trends, pieces of art, musical compositions, and governmental laws and statutes from the Old World. If one were trusted and had good cause, one was then granted access to one of the three collapsible tunnels hidden in the Archive that led underground, under the mountain, to a safeguarded chamber. There, the original documents and works of art were held, as well as blueprints for advanced technology and weaponry, containers of viral bodies, and any other horror that had been imagined by man and brought forth into the world.
It was these remnants of ancient civilizations that Vrana’s village, Vrana’s species as a whole, was built upon, with each past discovery and revelation measured and integrated depending upon its usefulness, as well as its destructiveness.
