Shadows of Power and Black Marks

The days blended into a weary cycle of cold, filth, and aching muscles. Sora ceased trying to count the number of night cycles (which he assumed were days) that passed since his imprisonment. Time in the Castle of Shadows was fluid and stifling, stretching into interminable hours of backbreaking labor and shrinking into brief spells of fitful, chilled sleep in his cell. His once lean but muscular physique was now a topographic map of bruises, scrapes, and dull, persistent pains. His hands were perpetually chapped and raw, and a nervous thinness was starting to outline his cheekbones and jaw.

He continued performing most of his duties in the huge, hazy scullery and kitchens, or errands in the corridors and the interior courtyards. Kenji remained his ubiquitous taskmaster, his silent, menacing figure appearing at unscheduled times to impart new directions or just to stare at him with that impossible-to-read regard that promised nothing. He wasn't one to talk much, and when he did, it was sharp commands or menacing threats of uselessness and its consequences.

On one quite gray and chilly morning, after scrubbing at the mud-and-food-scrap-stained flagstones in the kennel area of the castle for hours, it was there that Kenji discovered him.

"You. Come," he grunted, without preamble. He pointed to a stack of empty wooden buckets. "The refuse and old bandages need clearing from the secondary guard post by the West Arch. Take them to the incineration pit behind the armories. And be quick about it. They don't like trash piling up."

Sora nodded silently, hefting the ungainly buckets. Any task that took him from the kennels or the kitchens was, in perverse ways, a respite, but each step down the castle's dark, circuitous corridors was a reminder of his confinement. He followed Kenji's stern commands, stumbling down unfamiliar corridors, into the functional, martial interior of the fortress.

The second gate at West Arch was less imposing than the main gate but just as secure. It consisted of a small stone hut built into the back wall, with close to the ground arrow slits and a wooden door reinforced with metal. Right next to the door, under the roof of stone that offered little protection from the steady drizzle that fell, was a pile of refuse: blood-stained rags and some dark, greasy substance, torn leather scraps, pieces of broken pot, and miscellaneous unidentified filth.

As Sora picked scrupulously up the garbage, tossing it into the buckets, aware of the curious glances of the guards in and out of the post, his eyes remained on one of them leaning against the stone wall, his conical hat off and on the ground at his feet. He was young, barely in his twentes, black, close-cut hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and dampness. He was drinking from a leather skin, his head back, his powerful, bronzed throat bare.

And then it was there. The mark.

It was the first time he had ever seen it so clearly, so close. A complex, jet-black tat covered the left side of his neck, from just below the ear to near the collarbone. It wasn't simplistic or crude. It consisted of unbelievably fine, sharp lines, interwoven in complex, angular patterns that seemed to imply stylized talons, pointed feathers, or possibly shards of broken-up obsidian. It was dark and heavy and seemed to suck in the little light there was, and there was something unsettled, something almost unnatural, about the precision and the blackness.

He'd seen it on Kenji, but never close-up. It wasn't tribal decoration; it looked more like some sort of brand, some deliberate, indelible mark seared into the skin. A chill worked down the spine of Sora. He experienced a gut-level horror coupled with a strange, dark fascination. Why did all of Vayne's best soldiers bear it?

The guard dropped his waterskin, saw Sora looking, and scowled. He gave her a chilly warning glare. What business is it of yours, worm?" he growled, his voice husky. "Mind your trash and stay away." Sora dropped his eyes immediately, his neck burning with shame and terror. He mumbled an inaudible apology and went back to filling the buckets quickly, not even daring to look at the guard once more. As he worked, though, he strained his ears to hear. Two more guards were at the post and were talking quietly by the entrance. Their voices were low and gravelly, but for the odd burst of sound, Sora caught snippets of their conversation.

"Fouling the watch at the south tower. Negligent. Nearly let one of the Mire Clan scavengers close in last night," growled one of the guards, his tone thick with contempt." He will be punished. Cannot be so careless. One must be like a Crow, eyes and ears open, not a blind mole," another declared, his voice stern and tolerating no dissent. The word "Crow" was used with specific significance, not as a name, but as a code, a standard that demanded perpetual watchfulness and deadly precision.

The first guard nodded. "Well put, Kael. A lesson there. Weakness sometimes needs to be cleansed to preserve the strength of the nest."

"Crow." "Nest." The terms echoed in the back of his mind as Sora hefted the now-filled, heavy buckets. It wasn't just the call the guards used in battle. It was what they called themselves, drawn to that dark, ominous mark on their throat and the iron grip Vayne held over them. He was a stranger, a strange little gear amid this dark, killing fraternity.

He headed down the armorer's corridor, tracking the acrid smell of forge fumes and hammered metal. The corridor funneled him down a vaulted, arched passage. Passing down it, he overheard a muffled grunt from off in the alcove to his side, where the reserve gear was stored. He halted automatically, half-sheltered behind a stone pillar. Two guards stood beside a third, who was seated on the overturned crate in the alcove, cradling his forearm. He sported a vicious, deep cut, open to the eye: the deep, crimson slash that seemed to cut to the bone. It must have been picked up at training or in combat. Blood dripped onto the stone floor and made a spreading, dark stain.

One of the guards on duty snarled something that was obviously a reprimand for lack of alertness. Then, to Sora's utter astonishment, he placed his bare hand directly over his wounded partner's open wound. Sora prepared himself to hear a second cry of pain under the pressure, but the wounded guard remained silent, his jaw tightly clenched. The guard who placed his hand on the wound closed his eyes for a brief instant, and Sora could have sworn he saw a very brief, barely visible glimmer or tremor in the air above the hand, something like the waviness of the air over hot pavement on the morning after a hot day, but without the heat. It faded in less than a second. When he took his hand away, the bleeding was all but over. The wound remained open and dirty-looking, but the edges were curiously dry, as if the bleeding hadn't merely been staunched naturally.

"Stand up, fool," growled the guard who had 'cured' the other. "Off to get that stitched up properly. Luckily, it wasn't an artery. Be more careful next time." The injured guard nodded, white as chalk but already stumbling to his feet, and hobbled away down the corridor, leaving the pair of them in solitude. Sora froze behind the pillar, his heartbeat in his throat. A trick of the flickering torchlight? Some sort of bizarre ointment spread in a rush that he hadn't noticed? No. He had seen the hand over the wound, the pause, the instant halt of the blood that followed. It was. impossible. Magic. The word came to his mind, foreign and unsettling. He'd seen it in novels, watched it in movies and video games. It wasn't real, though. It was before his eyes, done with no hesitation, as if it were routine, something they did every day.

He forced himself to walk, get on with it, towards the incineration pit before he was caught sneaking. The image was seared into his retinas anyway: the hand across the wound, the blood stopping. Another layer of the Crows' unnatural resilience, their cultish self-control, the blood dots at their throats, the stifling air of the castle. This wasn't just brutal and bloody; it was actively contrary to the natural laws he was used to. It operated on other laws, laws of things that could not be done.

He emptied the buckets into the reeking pit at the rear of the armories, where a smoldering blaze charred bones and rotting trash with thick black fumes. Walking back through the cold, damp corridors, a new layer of despair settled over him. He was not merely confined by a cruel fortress, but entrapped by a nonsensical world, a world in which men could apparently halt wounds with a touch and bore mysterious brands as tokens of predatory instincts. Escape in his mind seemed farther off, more unreal, in the light of this strange and terrifying reality. The image of the black mark, snake-like and deadly, danced in his mind, reminding him of all he didn't understand and all he feared in his new hellish world.