The Ashes of Black Hollow

The mountain village of Black Hollow had no business existing where it did. Perched at nearly seven thousand feet above the valley floors, it clung to the rock like a wound that refused to close. Three hundred souls, give or take the winters, pressed together in stone-walled homes built low and thick against winds that could strip bark from fir trees. The Karath Range loomed above and behind in every direction — granite teeth gnawing at the sky — and the single pass that connected Black Hollow to the wider world froze solid for five months of the year. Traders came in summer, holy men came in autumn to collect tithes, and nobody came in winter unless they had no other choice. Cassian Noctaryn had lived his entire seventeen years inside those walls, and he knew every stone of it. He knew the way the morning fog pooled in the low street behind the tanner's workshop, thick as wool, burning off only after the ninth bell. He knew which sections of the outer palisade creaked in wind — the northeastern section, always, because Old Gregor had used green timber when he repaired it six years ago and nobody had bothered to fix it since. He knew where the wolves came down from the ridgeline in January, and he knew which of the village elders watered their mead at celebrations, and he knew his father's workshop by the smell of it alone — pine resin and leather and the faint iron ghost of the forge that hadn't been lit since his father's back gave out three years ago. He knew, most of all, his mother's voice. He was in the market square when the animals began to change. The morning had started clean enough — cold, as it always was this late in the season, frost still riming the cobblestones at midday, breath visible in white plumes. Cassian had been helping Marta Crane carry salt-barrels from the storehouse, an errand his mother had tasked him with when he'd been too slow rising, and he'd done it with the private resentment of a boy who felt the work was beneath him and the private shame of knowing he shouldn't feel that way. The village sustained itself by everyone doing what needed doing. He knew that. He was setting down the last barrel when the hound went for its owner. Breckan's dog — a grey wolfhound three years old and raised to heel, a patient, good-natured animal that children climbed on without complaint — lunged at Breckan without any warning, hit him in the chest and drove him to the cobblestones before two men could haul it off. The dog's eyes had been wrong. Even from forty feet, Cassian could see that: white ringing the irises, something vacant and wild behind the usual amber intelligence. Breckan sat on the ground pressing his palm against his bitten forearm and staring at his dog like a man watching a beloved thing become a stranger in real time. Nobody laughed. In a village this old, people recognized omens. Within the hour there were three more incidents. A cart-horse tried to kick through its stable wall, cracking two planks and nearly taking off its handler's hand at the wrist. A pair of ravens that had nested in the granary roof for two full summers suddenly beat themselves against the shutter-boards for twenty minutes straight, leaving blood-streaks on the wood. A litter of cats belonging to the apothecary scattered into the mountain pines and did not come back. Cassian noticed the whispers beginning to travel faster than news normally moved in Black Hollow. He found his mother in the workshop doorway that evening, standing very still. Anya Noctaryn was not a woman who stood still without reason. She was compact and quick-moving, dark-haired where Cassian had inherited his father's brown, and she had a way of occupying whatever room she was in that made people unconsciously orient toward her. She was not loud. She was not commanding in any obvious way. But she always seemed to know things slightly before others did — a trick of observation, his father said, though he said it with a fondness that implied he didn't entirely believe his own explanation. She was looking north. "The animals," Cassian said. "Yes." "Breckan's hound needed six stitches. They're saying it's a sickness." "They can say that if they like." She didn't look at him. Her eyes stayed fixed on the ridge-line above the northern palisade, where the treeline broke and the bare granite began. "Go inside and eat, Cass. I need to speak with your father." "What did you see?" She turned then, and her expression made him stop asking. Not fear, precisely — he had rarely seen fear from her, and when he had it had always been on behalf of others, never herself. What he saw was something closer to recognition. The look of a person who has been waiting for a thing and has finally seen it arrive. "Go inside," she said. "Lock the shutters." He went. His father, Edric, was already at the table when Cassian entered, and by the deliberate way Edric set down his cup and didn't reach for it again, he'd been sitting there thinking for some time. Edric was larger than his son would likely ever be — broad through the shoulder, big-handed, a man who looked like he'd been assembled for hard labor and then spent thirty years proving the design correct. His bad back had reduced him to lighter work in recent years but it hadn't diminished him. He still filled the doorway when he stood in it. "Sit," his father said. "What's happening?" "I said sit." Cassian sat. Edric folded his hands on the table. The fire in the hearth was low, throwing amber light that stretched the shadows long across the plank floor. Outside, the wind had picked up — that high, thin mountain whine that meant it was moving fast above them rather than across the village, which usually meant clear weather, but tonight it had an odd harmonic in it that made the back of Cassian's neck prickle. "I need you to hear something," Edric said, "and I need you to hear it carefully, and I need you not to ask questions until I'm finished." "All right." "If something happens tonight — if something comes — you run. Do you hear me? You don't help your mother and you don't help me, and you don't stop for anything you left behind. You take the northern trail to the ridgeback and then east toward the Halvern pass. You know that route." "Dad—" "You know it." "Yes. But—" "No." The word came out flat and final. Not harsh — Edric was not a harsh man — but absolute in the way of a man stating a physical law. "There is no argument you can make that changes what I'm telling you. You run. You keep running. You trust nobody you don't already know, and even some of those you treat carefully. You understand?" Cassian stared at him. "What are you expecting to come?" Edric looked at the door. Then back at his son. "Riders." "Black Hollow doesn't—" "Black-armored riders," his father said quietly. "Six of them, at minimum. Probably more. They will be asking questions about us specifically. About our family." Something settled cold in Cassian's stomach. "Why?" Edric was quiet for a moment. The fire crackled. Outside, a dog somewhere in the village began to bark — then two more, and then abruptly all three went silent in a way that was somehow worse than the barking. "Because of who we are," his father said. "Who you are." "We're nobody. We're—" "I know what we look like. I chose that. I made us look like nobody on purpose, for a long time, and I was good at it." He met Cassian's eyes, and the thing Cassian saw there wasn't sorrow or regret exactly, but it had elements of both — the face of a man who made a calculated choice years ago and is watching the bill come due. "I wasn't good enough." His mother came through the door then, and she had the pendant in her hand. Cassian had seen it before — or rather he'd caught glimpses of it over the years, a flash of black against pale skin when her collar shifted, the brief impression of something geometric and old. She'd always covered it before he could get a good look. Now she held it in her open palm: a flat disc of black stone the size of a large coin, hung on a cord of braided silver thread. Carved into its surface were symbols he didn't recognize — angular, precise, like letters but from no alphabet he'd encountered. She crossed to him and closed his fingers around it. Her hand was cold. He could feel her trembling, which was the most frightening thing he'd experienced in seventeen years of living, because she never trembled. "Listen to me," she said. "Not your father. Me." "I'm listening." "This pendant has been passed down inside our family for two hundred years. I need you to wear it, close to your skin, and I need you to never let them find it on you. If they take you, swallow it if you have to. Do you understand? It cannot fall into their hands." "Who is they?" "The Veilbound." The word meant nothing to him. He said so. "They will," she said. "I'm sorry that it has to be this way — that we couldn't tell you sooner, that we built our lives here the way we did and kept you from—" She stopped. Steadied. "There are things about yourself that you don't know yet. Things that are in you, that have always been in you. Those things are going to emerge whether we manage it or not, and the Veilbound know this, which is why they're coming. When they emerge—" A sound split the night outside. Not a scream — something lower and more wrong than a scream, a sound like many voices pressed together into a single exhalation, sourceless and close. The dogs that had gone silent didn't start again. The wind died completely, and the sudden stillness was its own kind of alarm. Edric was on his feet. "Now," he said. Cassian's mother pulled him toward the back of the workshop, toward the small door that opened onto the alley behind. Her grip on his arm was iron. He could hear something happening out in the village — not shouting yet, but the rapid shuffle-thump of boots on cobblestone, of doors hitting walls, of the sounds a place made when it was waking up wrong in the middle of the night. Then the first screaming started. It came from the northern end of the village, and it was immediately plural. Cassian turned to look and his mother yanked him hard enough to stumble. The alley door was open, cold air rushing in, and she pushed him through it. "The pendant," she said. "Remember what I told you." "Come with me—" "I can't." She said it with such certainty that arguing with it felt like arguing with weather. "Your father and I will give you time. You take the north trail. Go." He didn't go. He stood in the alley, two feet from the door, and he watched through the gap as something moved past the mouth of the alley toward the main square. It was large — he registered that first. Larger than any animal he knew, moving on four limbs in a loping gait that was wrong in some way he couldn't immediately name, as though the joints bent in directions they shouldn't. It was black in the moonlight, and not with the color of fur or hide but with the flat, absorptive darkness of a thing that swallowed light rather than reflected it. He heard his father bellow from inside the workshop. He heard impact. Heavy, structural — the sound of something large hitting something solid. He ran. Not away. Toward the front of the workshop, around the outside wall, into the market square where the torches were still burning, where he could see — where he had to see, because he couldn't make himself go north without knowing. The square was chaos. Three of the creatures were visible, and they were wrong in every detail. They moved with a terrible fluid efficiency, not the mindless thrashing of animals but something directed and purposeful. Villagers fled or fought or died; he saw old Wenrick from the glassblower's shop go down and not rise, and he saw two men with hunting spears driving one of the creatures back with the mechanical terror of men who have decided they would rather die attacking than die running. The black-armored riders were already through the gate. Six of them. His father had been right about the number. They rode dark horses that shared something of the creatures' quality — that same absorptive darkness, that same wrongness of gait. The riders themselves were encased in black plate armor without sigil or marking, their faces hidden behind smooth visored helms, and they moved through the chaos of the square with an unsettling calm, as though the screaming and dying around them were weather conditions rather than catastrophe. One of them pointed. Pointed at Cassian. He ran. He was seventeen and he'd spent his entire life at altitude, and he was fast. He hit the north trail at full sprint while behind him he heard one of the riders call something out in a language he didn't know. He ran up through the treeline, up into the cold dark where the pines closed in and the torchlight of the burning village shrank to a glow, and he ran until his lungs were shredding and his legs were liquid and he still ran because stopping meant listening and listening meant hearing whatever was happening down there more clearly than he could bear. He made it three hundred feet up the trail before the two shapes separated from the dark on either side of him. They were smaller than the creatures in the square — faster. They flanked him with that same precise, directed motion, cutting off the path, and he slid to a stop on loose scree and nearly fell and righted himself and stood there panting in the darkness with a thing on either side that was watching him with eyes that burned dull red like embers seen through smoke. He thought: I'm going to die here. He thought: My mother gave me something and told me to protect it. He thought, inexplicably: The shadows. He didn't know where that thought came from. It arrived fully formed, the way solutions sometimes did in the moment before sleep — not a plan but a certainty, a recognition of something that had been present all along and was only now becoming visible. The shadows around him. The way they fell between the trees, deep and various, moonlight cutting sharp angles through the branches overhead. He had always — not feared them, exactly. But been aware of them. Noticed them the way you noticed something at the edge of vision, a thing that moved when you weren't looking directly at it. Now, in the extremity of terror and grief and the sharp animal panic of a creature that understands it is about to die, he stopped not-looking. The shadows moved. They came to him like water responding to a slope — not flowing but sliding, gathering, pulling together out of the spaces between the trees with a naturalness that horrified him even as he felt it as an extension of himself. As arms. As fingers. The creatures on either side of him scrambled back, and he saw that — saw them flinch from something he was producing, something he was doing without any understanding of how he was doing it. The shadows became hands. Talons. Things made of pure darkness and the negative space between light sources, assembled into shapes that had no right to cohere and yet cohered absolutely, and then they came down, and the sounds the creatures made were brief. Cassian stood in the silence after and looked at what was left and felt nothing except the cold mountain wind and the distant sound of his village burning. He put his mother's pendant on. He ran north. Below him, Black Hollow burned against the sky like a coal not yet ready to go dark, throwing sparks into the clean night air, and he ran and didn't look back and told himself he wasn't listening for voices he would never hear again, though he was, and never stopped, all through the long descent into dark.