19
Night
The women swayed to the music, which was not music at all, but the melodies of the wind falling off the mountains. If you listened close enough, Adynora said, you could even hear words.
Ravenna watched, enraptured. She couldn’t hear the music or the words. Her mother, Varinya, said the music grew louder and more demanding for those close to their time as High Priestess. Adynora was dying, and this was her last dance. Not death as the men below understood it, but First Death, which meant a passing of the veil of duty. Drystan would call it retirement, but men retired when they were close to their True Death. A Ravenwood could live a hundred years after their First Death.
Ravenna once asked her mother why there was a First Death at all, and it was not Varinya who answered but Ra
