The air blistered and bubbled, like flesh held to a flame, until at last the glamour burst to reveal a shape, red and writhing, like a mass of coiled muscle.It turned its great beaked head.A thousand eyes.Yellow pupils with irises as black as night fixed upon him.
the Grey Lady said, her voice muted by awe—or fear.
Llewyn wondered.
The raven fiend blinked its thousand eyes.Visions flitted through Llewyn’s mind like terrible, biting flies.Blood.Chains.The screams of children.Bodies contorting, pulling against their bonds as they changed, transformed into the fiend’s servants.
Llewyn thought of crows.Hundreds of them.Watching him now, from the branches at the edge of the clearing.A waking nightmare that mingled with his own memories—a rough hand on his shoulder, pulling him away from his mother’s last embrace.Later, the taste of raw iron, the scrape of wood against his bleeding skin, the pinch of silver on his thumb.
He, too, had been given away.Transformed.Made a servant…
Llewyn shut his eyes.When he opened them, the fiend’s glamour had returned.He stared at the space above the altar.It still watched him, he knew.He hoped it was old and powerful enough to consider him little threat.
the Grey Lady said.
Llewyn touched his ring.The images still stung, even in recollection.While she studied them, he studied the stone, if only to give his mind an anchor to the present and chase away the horrors of long-buried memory.The stone was ordinary enough.Simple granite, all of a single piece, notable only for its unusual shape and location.Not stained with blood, as he felt it should have been.
The coal of anger, buried deep within him, flared hot.
Llewyn asked.
He carried a myriad of thinly cut faceted stones in his saddlebags.Good for trade in an emergency; better for binding lesser spirits, drawing them out of the deep places of the world or the remnants left behind by the First Folk.But nothing sufficient to hold the raven fiend.
the Grey Lady said.
Llewyn swept his gaze once more over the stone.Memories bubbled up, unbidden, stirred by the glimpses of horror the fiend had forced into his mind.
A gwyddien had come to his village—as deep in the Greenwood as Nyth Fran—and demanded a child.The village’s part of an old agreement, she had said.Llewyn’s parents had been blessed with six children, and he, the youngest, had been often sickly.They had given him, not even weeping while he wailed until his voice was raw, to be buried in the roots of a ghostwood tree.
One of many such transactions all throughout the world, it seemed.
He had been too young to save himself.Too young to prevent those who were supposed to keep him safe from trading away his future.But he could stop any more payments being made here, in Nyth Fran, to that horror on the altar.
The Alderman’s Daughter
YC 1181
Enough argumentation.Enough theorising.
After so many years it does naught but sicken me.
I tell you this.All I know of ‘good’ and ‘evil’—those nebulous, unwieldy words—can be captured in a single sentence:
somewhere a child is dying, and those who might save it do nothing.
The Musings of Architect Aeluwe Eneban, approx.YBC200
Dusk settled over the village as Llewyn returned to the inn.He took the arm of one of the tumblers—the ram-horned youth—and demanded Afanan forcefully enough for the words to pierce the Grey Lady’s shroud.The boy darted up the stairs while Llewyn ordered an ale and dropped into a seat in the corner of the room, toying with the last faceted stone in his pocket.Afanan had what he needed, he was sure.But would she be willing to part with it, without bargaining for the opportunity to seize the fiend’s power for herself?
The troupers began a show of pipe and drum while a pair of youths, including the cat-eyed girl, spun cartwheels across the makeshift stage.A gaggle of children squealed and clapped their hands at the antics—Siwan, the alderman’s daughter, most ebullient among them.
