All of these short stories will be published and available on Amazon as well. I'm going to promote them for free as much as I can, otherwise they'll be $.99 cents a piece (or you can just read them here for free!). All of this will lead up to the release of The Raven of Dusk: Children of the Rain in early August. For those of you have read Transcendence and have hounded me about the release of CotR, thank you :D. No seriously, you won't be disappointed. I think CotR is the best thing I've written thus far. I'm working on the third book right now as well. It is currently untitled.
To read book one in the series: The Raven of Dusk: Transcendence click here
Before I get further ahead of myself, here's the first of the origin series: "World of Dusk: The Shadow"
World of Dusk: The Shadow
It moved between the tall buildings that suffocated
the light with its massive stone walls. Jaiden had to look directly at it to
see a darker figure haunting the shadows in the absence of the moon. He saw it
every night for the last four nights on their way to the temp houses he and his
older brother slept in. They walked side by side, almost in a line with the
others that were given slips with the location of their housing.
“Ugh,” Ruben scoffed, keeping a firm grasp on his
younger brother’s hand. “It’s even smaller than last night’s.”
Ruben tried to keep walking, but Jaiden was fixated on
the figure in the alley. Each night he saw the faceless creature, it was always
somewhere different. The first night he saw it staring down at him from the top
of a building. The way the moon was cast behind it made it glow eerily like a
wingless angel coated in shadow. Since then, he’d seen it watching through a
window, then from behind one of the many desecrated statues of King Ratone.
Jaiden didn’t see it last night until he woke in the middle of the night and
stepped around the other unfound to get out of their shelter. The figure
watched him from beneath a street pole with a snuffed out flame. Its presence
puzzled him; it bore a human’s form like a shadow that escaped from someone’s
body.
He didn’t know what to make of his watcher. He thought
for certain that it would make contact, or attack him, or say something through
its absence of a face. It did none of those things. Not until he dreamed…
Jaiden smelled the ripe old man before he bumped into
him. His boney hip grazed Jaiden’s face and he nearly toppled over. “Move, boy!”
Ruben gasped and thrust his brother forward. “Jaiden,
c’mon! We need to claim our spots.” In his other hand were the two slips and
the address printed on them. He glanced worriedly at the house with cracked
stoned and boarded windows. It couldn’t have been more than a single room. The
roof was unintentionally concave on one side, threatening to soak those beneath
it on one of those rare rainy nights. “I don’t think they’ll have space for all
of us.”
Jaiden faced the line of others behind him, and the
bright, boisterous lights of one of the noble districts somewhere far away. If
Ruben was right, these people hadn’t figured it out yet. Ruben thrust him
forward before he could count the people in line. When he did, he was taken
away from his vantage point between the two tall buildings and the alley where
the shadow watched in silence. Whatever it was, he was sure he’d see it again
the moment he closed his eyes…
Ruben had trouble sleeping that night. He didn’t
usually have problems sleeping in temp houses no matter how uncomfortable the
hardwood floors were, or how boisterous the snoring was all around him. He was
used to bending in awkward angles as he and the others were cramped together,
coating the floors with members of the lost. There was no way to get a good
night’s rest while Jaiden was repeatedly kicking his back.
“No… no,” his younger brother whispered, still
dreaming. His body was contorting in bizarre directions as if he was being
electrocuted in his slumber. The others around them groaned and growled while
getting whacked in the head and sides with Jaiden’s flailing limbs.
A woman old enough to be their great-grandmother
snarled, after Jaiden clocked her in the jaw with his tiny hands, and shoved
him away.
“No!” Jaiden screamed—this time loud enough to wake
the others around them while his seizure-like movements continued. “No! Don’t
take me! Don’t let them take me!”
The old woman hissed in Ruben’s direction. “If you
don’t do something about your brother, I will throw him into the streets
myself!”
“Be quiet, woman!” came from the haughty voice of a
bearded man on the other side of her.
Others were grumbling as well, and Ruben knew that he
had no choice but to wake Jaiden before the woman made good on her threat. It
was a cold autumn night. Even though the city-state of Ratone was surrounded by
deserts to the north and south, the breeze from the ocean carried all the way
into the city. They couldn’t afford to catch a cold or get sick. Jaiden was all
he had now. Their younger brother, Minnow, died of an infection the year
before. Ruben tried to get a hospital to treat him, but the doctors would only
help him if they had the money to pay for his treatment. The upper class
ignored the rest in Ratone, leaving the other 90% to suffer well below the
poverty line. Foreclosed and abandoned homes turned into homeless residences. A
nightly shelter away from the cold was all the “noble class” would provide.
As he left, carrying his dying baby brother in his
arms, he overheard a doctor say, “We’re flushing out another rat. Maybe my
property’s value will finally go up again soon.”
Minnow was dead two mornings after. He and Jaiden
cried for a week.
Ruben shook his brother awake. They couldn’t afford to
be kicked out. He couldn’t risk losing the last person he had in his life.
Jaiden’s youthful eyes opened up and he was oblivious
to the angry scowls on the faces of everyone else around him. His brother
wasn’t one to see negativity. Ruben and the other members of Ratone’s homeless
called themselves ‘the lost,’ but Jaiden said that they were ‘unfound.’ The
connotation was cute, but also naïve; two words befitting of his little
brother.
“You were tossing and yelling in your sleep again,”
Ruben whispered, trying to keep his voice down.
Jaiden frowned and looked upon his brother with watery
eyes. “I’m sorry. It was the shadows. They were after me.”
“The dark played tricks on you. You don’t see anything
in it.”
“But I do!” Jaiden was quickly shushed by someone
behind them. He blushed and spoke quieter. “But I do. They move at night as part
of the darkness. They come out where the moon and the lights can’t reach them.
They see me without having eyes and they say that they’re coming for me.”
“You had a bad dream. Go back to sleep,” Ruben
replied. Hopefully his nightmares wouldn’t continue this time. They were
happening more and more frequently. Whatever Jaiden thought he saw stuck with
him. Ruben only wished he knew what it was so that he could rebuff his
brother’s concerns.
Ruben realized that he would not be going back to
sleep some time later, long after his brother started to join the chorus of
snores all around him. He lay awake, thinking about his brother’s words only
until another reality came to mind. As uncomfortable as he was in the crowded
room full of wheezes and loud exhalations, the smells of the others were far
worse. The temp houses rarely had showers and, in the rooms as packed as they
were, the odors emitted from sweaty bodies compounded upon one another. There
was no escaping the scents of rotting fish and mold; these people were decaying
all around him.
He stood up carefully and watched his footing, doing
his best to step around the others so that he wouldn’t wake them. Ruben crossed
the room successfully and made it outside where the wafts of fresh air kissed
his skin and washed away the smells he inherited inside.
The city lights glowed orange and white and the
streets were paved in discarded trash and crumbled papers. Half of the street
poles flickered on and off like degenerating life support monitors. Abandoned
fruit stands were erected by the sidewalks on the dirt sidewalk. Vendors could
longer afford to maintain them with all the thieves running around and no one
with money to buy from them. Nothing remained in this district of Ratone—or
most of them, for that matter. People lived either on the streets or living in
mansions on the far end of town. There was no middle ground.
A girl with long silver hair made into pig tails sat beside
an older woman. Both leaned against the house, likely too late to get a seat
inside. The girl was bundled in rags that were probably given to her by the old
woman, who wore very little and let the slow gusts of wind soak her bones.
Ruben wondered if she’d survive the night, though he was certain she’d been
through this before.
“There it is again,” the girl muttered beside her.
Ruben didn’t realize that both of them were awake.
He stared forward at the cracks of light that
attempted to brighten an alley between two large buildings. Jaiden was glancing
at it before, allowing for his mind to see shapes that sprang to life in his
dreams.
“They have returned to Ratone,” the elderly woman said
through clicks of clattering teeth.
Ruben approached them, hugging himself as the next
gust of wind slipped through the tiny holes in his brown rags. The girl
couldn’t have been older than his little brother, while the elderly woman may
have been as old at the stars in the sky. Several others were huddled on the
ground besides the building, all asleep. These two women were all that
remained.
“My brother thought he saw something, too,” Ruben
said, leaning beside the cold wall next to them.
“The shadows have appeared the last few nights,” the
elderly woman replied. Her face was gaunt and bore extra skin that sagged as
time’s cruelty withered her. “I wonder how many they’re taking this time.”
Ruben cocked his head. “What do you mean?”
“You are too young to remember when they were here
last. They scarce show their face in the outer world, but Ratone has always
been a popular harvesting ground for them.” The elderly woman didn’t take her
eyes off of the thin alley between the buildings that were once home to great
businesses.
Ruben stared carefully into the alley while the moon
slinked behind a pair of thick, heavy clouds. A darker, deeper shadow coated
the dirt pavement of the streets as if a large flying object hovered over them.
The alley became harder and harder to see, but he was already envisioning a
creature inching closer to the edge of it, keeping it’s claws just inches from
the last rays of light that weren’t coated in the absence of the sky light.
“A girl disappeared in the temp house I was in three
nights ago,” the bundled up girl on the other side of the old woman said to
her. “She slept right next to me. I felt a cold in my dream, and then I thought
that I saw this mass standing over me, staring down at me without a face. When
I woke, the girl was gone and not a single person saw what took her.”
“A young boy vanished from mine as well,” the old
woman said. “I gave him my space in the room, then watched him step outside in
the middle of the night. He looked to be in a trance and sleepwalked toward a
building, the same one that someone pointed at a figure inside of it earlier
that night. He never came out. A few of us inspected it the morning after, but
there was no trace of the boy or his captor. If they are here tonight, then
someone was taken last night as well.” She sighed. “I wonder how many they’ll
reap this time.”
Ruben thought about going inside. He could stay up at
night from now on and watch his brother sleep. Jaiden was having nightmares for
days and kept muttering about these creatures of nighttime. He tried to point
them out to Ruben, but Ruben never saw. He wondered if Jaiden was hallucinating.
Maybe he wasn’t getting enough food or water. Ruben could only scrounge up so
much for the both of them. There was barely any to be found as it was.
But if this girl and old woman spoke of the same
shadows, then it couldn’t be something that Jaiden had just made up. If
children were disappearing…
Both Ruben and the girl leaned in toward the old
woman, who had a straight vantage point of the alley just across the street. He
hoped that his eyes would adjust to the dark well enough to see these moving
shapes that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to see. Several minutes went by and
Ruben squinted harder, making out cracks on the inside of the walls that he
couldn’t see before, as well as the outside of a trash can that overflowed
years before. Flies would emerge from the alley and then sweep right back in,
swarming around the trash that coated so much of Ratone’s pavement. He watched
and waited for something to appear. He watched and waited; watched and waited.
His head grazed the old woman’s shoulder. He hadn’t
realized how much of her space he was invading, but, when she didn’t mind, he
placed the rest of his head on her shoulder and continued to watch for shadows
in shadows with glossy eyes. Ruben’s vision grew fuzzy and the gentle gusts
felt like they were giving him chilly, but consoling hugs.
Its face nearly touched Ruben’s nose, but Jaiden was
right: It didn’t have a face. Its head was oval-shaped, but there was only
darkness in place of its sockets, nose, and mouth. There was nothing there but
the frosty breath that tickled his cheeks, then around the back of his neck and
down his spine like a small creature with prickly icicles for legs. It towered
over him; the full size of a human being in human shape with four limbs. It
looked like the negative of a moving photograph.
Ruben couldn’t move in its presence. He tried to
remember the old woman’s words about the reaping or the recruiting—or both. He
couldn’t leave his brother behind. It couldn’t be him that disappeared tonight.
The shadow’s face was replaced with a fabric like
rough, unshaven hair that scratched the tip of his nose while vacant eyes
inspected him. He half-expected to hear a grumble or growl—or perhaps even
words! But nothing emerged from this being; nothing but thoughts Ruben felt his
own mind tell him. If he was next, he would never see his brother again.
“She is gone,” were the first words he heard as he
came to. He picked his head up from the old woman’s shoulder and squinted his
eyes as Hela brightened the buildings around them. He must have fallen asleep
out there. That figure staring at him was all just a dream.
But then he noticed that the woman’s other shoulder
was vacant. There was no girl still sleeping against the outside of the house.
Something happened in the middle of the night, and Ruben could only draw one
possible conclusion.
“They took her,” The old woman said, more drop to hear
herself speak than to convey the news. “They scooped her right from my shoulder
as we slept. They made her vanish from our world.”
“Vanish--”
“She is gone,” the woman snapped. “She is gone... I
had only known her for a day, but I promised I’d keep her safe.” Her words rang
with sadness, but her eyes bore little more than stoicism. He gathered that
she’d endured too much in life to be phased by the disappearance of a girl she
barely knew.
“Jaiden!” he gasped. Ruben shot up from the wall and
spun toward the temp house, where he thrust the door open and caused a pair of
men next to it to jolt and wake in the sudden blast of light Ruben let in with
him. Beyond their scorning looks and contorted bodies, Ruben cast his eyes
around the room in search of a boy half everyone’s size. He came to a quick
relief when he stood Jaiden on his back in the room’s center, sound asleep and
snoring as loudly as the drooling elderly man next to him.
Ruben shut the door before the two woken man could
protest, then let out an uncontrollable yawn. He didn’t get enough sleep the
night before. How could he, while he joined two women in staring into the empty
space where a creature one resided.
“I saw it come toward us,” the old woman said, all but
yawning herself. “It emerged the moment I grew tired. It stood on two hind legs
and had a man’s walk. It approached you and then… then I slept.” She grimaced,
looking at where the girl had sat beside her, just hours before. “Jefra is now
for their harvest.”
Ruben had so many questions that it was difficult for
him to think of which one to ask first. “W… w… what are they?”
“Help me up, boy. My bones are not what they used to
be.”
Ruben rushed to her aid and clasped onto one of her
hands. The flesh had left her some time ago, and she was more bones than human.
The old woman winced as he helped her to her feet. Her joints grinded more than
a vehicle in desperate need of an oil change but, when she reached her feet,
she didn’t topple over and break into a thousand pieces. Even nearing a natural
death, she was stronger than she looked.
“I helped you, now tell me,” Ruben demanded. “What are
these things? Why have they been taking kids—and why didn’t they take me? I saw
one last night. It was closer to me than you are now.”
“How old are you, boy?”
Ruben had to think of the answer. He and his brothers
had lost their parents some time ago and with his parents went the ability to
tell the day and the times. He could only take his best guess, give or take a
year. “I am eight.”
“Then you are too old,” she replied.
“Too old for what?”
“They do not prefer those with clear memories of our
world. These creatures prefer youth that knows nothing more than what can be
taught to them.”
Ruben frowned, recalling Jaiden’s nightmares and the
reason for why he was awakened in the middle of the night. “My brother has seen
these things, too. He says that they are shadows. He screams ‘don’t take me’ in
his dreams, and when he’s been able to see them for almost a week now.”
The old woman’s eyes grew as white as a bed of snow. “I
had a brother once, many years ago. We shared a room in a home just a little
larger than this one. He would toss and turn in the presence of the moon with
closed eyes and gasps full of anxiety and fear. I woke up to his screams for three
days, and then, on the fourth night, I stayed awake and kept my eyes barely
open while he slept peacefully. I thought his string of dreams was over, but
then a saw the shadow reach from our closed window. It let the frost in with it
and slipped into the room with its long sable limbs. It didn’t make a sound as
his slid its body under the barely open window. Not even the floor creaked
beneath its feet. It glided over to my brother’s bed. I tried to scream, but I felt
as though all sound was taken from between my lips and I watched as my brother
was lifted from his bed and whisked away in the dead of night. I could do
nothing but watch, dazed as if I’d been dreaming about it.” A hundred years of
sorrow cast a shadow under her baggy eyes. “The neighbors said that my mother’s
screams were heard from one end of Ratone to the other that morning. She’d been
inconsolable for months, and eventually her grief caused her to take her life.
My father made me never speak of it again. He would hear nothing of shadows, or
even acknowledge that my brother ever existed.”
Ruben’s mouth fell open a little, but no words could
come through them.
“I saw him once again nearly thirty years ago. I
couldn’t see his face in the shadows, but I knew that it was him. I watched him
take a child, just as he’d been taken. And now another has been recruited
whilst fast asleep on my shoulder… I doubt that they are done. Their harvests
are sporadic. Sometimes just one will be taken, other sometimes it could be
several weeks’ worth of children. We’ll never know until they disappear again.”
“Why do they take children?” Ruben asked. “What are
they?”
The woman’s old white eyes glowed in the light of Hela
in the sky. The rays cast upon her traced each wrinkle of her skin as if a
toddler drew on her face, but her expression was anything but friendly. Her
attention was quickly drawn over his shoulder.
“They are demons,” Jaiden’s mousy voice said behind
him. Ruben frowned when he turned around to see his brother standing just
outside of the door. He couldn’t imagine what he could be thinking if he’d
heard the old woman’s story. How long had he been out there listening to them?
“Jaiden—”
“They came out of the shadows again,” he said. “I saw
them in my mind. It was a little girl this time—my age, I think. It took her
deep into the shadows, where the darkness all merges together. It will come
again tonight.”
“Yes,” the old woman said. “And tonight it will come
for you.”
“Hey!” Ruben exclaimed, but Jaiden’s gasp demanded
more of his attention than the old woman as she sauntered away, down the
streets and around the piles of trash. He turned to his little brother, whose
eyes welled up with tears. If Jaiden were to cry, he wasn’t sure if he could
keep it together. He was still reeling from last night’s disappearance and the
nonchalance of the old woman. Only one person in this world truly mattered to
him anymore.
Jaiden hugged him tight. Ruben kissed his little
brother on the top of the forehead as he whimpered and dampened his shirt.
“I don’t want them to take me,” Jaiden grumbled.
“Don’t let them take me…”
Ruben’s best idea was for them to walk as far away as
possible. They couldn’t go to the authorities because he knew that no one would
care about them. Serenity Seekers had more than once proved to be just as
useful as Ratone’s doctors. If they walked out of the city-state itself, then
maybe the shadows wouldn’t follow them. They were plenty of other “lost”
children to harvest, or recruit, or whatever that old woman was griping on
about.
Hela didn’t escape through the clouds that day. The
skies were cast in gray and the surrounding houses paled to browns and whites,
having lost their vibrant colors long ago. Ruben wasn’t sad to cross the
borders of the city of Ratone itself and step out onto the desert sands. They
were cool on their bare feet without the heat to catch their grains afire.
Ruben knew of several nearby towns just beyond the city. He hoped that they
could reach one of them in a day, though he didn’t know how many miles away
they were.
The two spent most of the day in silence, both lost in
their own minds, their feet digging into the grains as they climbed up and down
the ever-changing landscape that the winds formed for them. They kept walking
straight but, as the day wore on, Ruben couldn’t help but wonder if they were
going around in circles. Everything in this vast desert looked the same. Every
time they stopped to rest or pee, he knew that they were at risk of changing course—especially
without Hela to guide them.
It wasn’t long before Jaiden was fatigued, having no
food or water all day. He took a seat in the sand at the base of a dune while
another, much larger dune, was up ahead. His clothes were drenched in sweat and
his lips were chapped to the point of bleeding.
Ruben no longer had any idea where they were. Leaving
Ratone was a horrible idea. And nighttime was coming. If the shadows came for
them, they would have nowhere to hide.
His little brother started to cry again, licking his
tears as they came close enough for his lips to catch. “I don’t want them to
take me… I don’t wanna go…”
Ruben frowned and cast his eyes on the darkening sky.
It was too late to get anywhere now—even back into the city. Their best bet
would be to climb the tall dune in front of them and look around for the lights
of Ratone to guide their way. They wouldn’t last more than another day in the
desert, especially if the clouds went away. He began to climb the dune, but
Jaiden wasn’t following.
His little brother remained planted at the base of the
dune with his legs crossed and his face in his hands, continuing to sob. Jaiden
wasn’t going to be getting up anytime soon.
Ruben returned to him and wrapped his arms around him
tight, getting a quick flashback of how he held Minnow before he died, and then
of how their mother held all three of them before she faced the same fate. That
seemed like so long ago, back when they had a house and a full family.
Everything went wrong these last few years.
“It’s going to be okay,” Ruben said, but he knew he
didn’t sound convincing. “We’re going to be okay.”
Jaiden’s voice was barely audible through his tears.
“Can I… can I see it again?”
Ruben nodded and withdrew from his pocket the other
token he had left of their old life: a wrinkled picture of their family during
Minnow’s first birthday. It was blurry and accidentally dampened a couple of
times, but they could still make out baby Minnow’s bright-eyed grin and lit up
face while their mother smiled with her arms around all three of them. It was
one of the last happy days they had before an air shuttle crashed through their
mother’s bedroom. It took less than two days before their house was raided for
all of their valuables, leaving them with nothing but a picture to remember
things by.
They lay in the sand, with Jaiden in Ruben’s arms, as
they stared at the picture and didn’t say a word. The sand caressed and cradled
their backs while they lie there and Jaiden slinked under Ruben’s shoulder.
They stared at the picture for as long as they could, before Ruben’s arm was
too tired to hold it up, while the white clouds darkened as the moon took to
the sky.
Jaiden’s thrashing woke Ruben up in a panic.
“No, don’t let them! I don’t want to go!”
“Jaiden!” Ruben said, shaking him awake again.
His little brother gasped for air, then opened his
eyes, going from dreaming to fully alert in less than a second.
Ruben hugged and held him as tight as he could. “It’s
okay, little brother. It’s okay. It was just a dream… only a dream.”
Jaiden wasn’t responding. Ruben heard him breathe just
fine, but he could sense that his brother’s attention wasn’t on Ruben cradling
him. And then he felt his heart begin to race, and Jaiden wasn’t hugging him
back. He looked into his brother’s eyes and saw the reflection of a figure in
them.
Ruben spun around and saw it peering down at them from
the top of the dune, cancelling out the swirls of blackened clouds behind it. Then
another appeared beside it. And a third. And a fourth.
“They’ve come for me,” Jaiden whispered, looking too
petrified to move.
The creatures leapt from the dune and came hurdling
toward them like a cascade of demons that danced on the top of the grains they
propelled down. They were so quick that Ruben barely saw their feet move as the
faceless creatures grew larger and closer like shadows trying to reclaim their
human forms.
“Jaiden—run!” Ruben grabbed for his brother’s hand and
leapt to his feet. He started to run but was jerked back when he saw that
Jaiden had yet to move. He was too enamored with the creatures racing toward
him, threatening to consume him in their shadows.
“Jaiden!”
The second command knocked some sense back into his
brother. He blinked and quickly spun around, fighting to get to his feet.
Hand-in-hand, the two raced across the desert toward the dune they’d gone gown
while the shadow creatures bolted towards the bottom of the sand tower they
came from. Ruben pulled Jaiden along and made great strides that Jaiden
struggled to match with his shorter, stubby legs. He felt Jaiden’s grasp weaken
and suddenly his little brother slipped and fell to his hands and knees on the
dirt.
Ruben spun around and made a desperate grab for his
hand. Jaiden reconnected, but as he did Ruben looked on helplessly and the
creatures were quickly coming upon them. Their shadows were painting the sands
at their feet and starting to eclipse Ruben and Jaiden’s own. They couldn’t
give up. They had to keep running!
The sand reached up and clawed as their feet. Each
step was a battle to remain on top of the sinking grains as they came to the
next dune. Ruben shoved his feet into the sandy hills and made footholds that
his brother could follow. He nearly fell forward, so with his free hand and
buried into the dune he scaled it furiously as Jaiden’s hand grew sweaty in his
palms. He didn’t dare turn back to see how close the shadows were. They didn’t
even make a sound!
He was almost able to see the top of the dune. He
tightened his grip on Jaiden’s hand as his brother panted and moaned. Then—
“No! No!”
Ruben was jerked backward and spun around as Jaiden’s
hand slipped from his grip. He gasped as he watched his brother slip backwards
into the arms of one of the shadows, and then the others began to cover him.
“Ruben! Help!”
Ruben didn’t think before he jumped toward them, his
limbs outstretched as if he was falling from the sky. He flew down onto the
shadows and felt one of their hands grab at his shirt. He caught a quick
glimpse of Jaiden’s terrified eyes before he was thrown forward again, and then
he went from flying to falling further and further down the dune as the shadows
completely restrained Jaiden from reaching out toward him. The usually soft
sand felt like a million tiny rocks as Ruben crashed onto them and his vision
grew blurry. He could still hear the screams for his name, but they grew
further away and quieter.
Minutes later, he was the only thing left in the
desert. Him, and the picture beside him of the family that once wrapped their
arms around him.
Many years later…
They sat in their usual seats in the Decision Room. He
looked at Mont-Blanc to his left, then Jayla to his right. Both of them sat at
their triangular desks while he placed his hands on his long, sleek one that
took up nearly the entire wall while the mural of the Raven was placed
prominently behind him.
“You’re looking morose today,” Mont-Blanc said in his
haughty voice. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” he lied, but they didn’t need to know that
things weren’t. “Jayla, you are certain that we need more children?”
Jayla nodded, but was far from smiling. He wondered if
she was feeling the same way that morning.
“It is the only way to keep our
numbers up. Our soldiers grow older by the day, and our harvesters and our
staff are getting weak. When we find the child of mixed breed, he’s going to
need us to be at our best.”
“I know that I don’t need to remind you how essential
it is, for the whole world, that we keep our numbers up,” Mont-Blanc sneered.
“No leader of the Ravens of Dusk has ever allowed our ranks to slip this low.”
“Yes, I know,” he replied with a sigh. “But… does it
have to be Ratone?”
“Yes,” Jayla and Mont-Blanc replied in unison.
Mont-Blanc went on, “It is the easiest place for us to
take children. We’ll be doing most of them a favor. They already consider
themselves children of the lost.”
Those words caused his unintentional grimace. “Do it
then.”
Mont-Blanc and Jayla obliged and left him to his
lonesome in the massive room that he’d earned the right to sit at the helm of.
However, no amount of power could keep him from the memories that never stopped
haunting him. He wondered how many of the new recruits would feel the same way
that he had when he first joined their ranks. But those weren’t thoughts that
he was allowed to have anymore. After all, they weren’t stealing children of
the lost. They were finding children that were going unfound…
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