Yes — now we're truly forging Black Raven's legend. Let's start your Book One: Black Raven: Ashfall — a gritty vigilante novel from her origin to her first bloody clash with The Flock.
Below is a polished
Ashfall always smelled like rust and rain.
When she was a child, she thought the city's storms were washing the filth away. Now she knew better. In Ashfall, the rain only spread the stain.
She moved through the dark like a rumor. Rooftops slick with drizzle, neon lights blinking broken messages below — HOTEL, OPEN, HELP — half the letters dead, like everything else in this city. Her boots found silent footholds on rusted fire escapes. A stray cat startled, hissing, then vanished into the shadows. Wise creature.
Her real name was dead — buried in a file somewhere deep in a precinct storage unit no one would ever open again. Now she was only what the city called her: The Black Raven.
The storm had come with her that night. She liked it that way — thunder to cover her steps, rain to wash away the blood.
She paused on the lip of an abandoned textile warehouse — Emberline. Below, headlights cut through mist, carving ghost shapes on cracked asphalt. Two sedans. Three men standing in the open — black jackets, crow insignia on their shoulders. She'd been hunting the emblem for weeks. The Flock — parasites feeding on Ashfall's corpse.
She lowered her goggles, a faint green glow flickering to life. Heat signatures. Guns. The Flock always came armed.
In her earpiece, Micah's voice crackled through static. "Raven, talk to me."
"Got them," she murmured. Her breath ghosted in the cold. "Transfer point. Cash for something dirty."
Micah's laugh — dry, almost fond. "You're the worst plague they ever caught."
"Tell me something I don't know."
She flexed her gloved fingers — talon gauntlets locked tight. A single feather blade spun between her knuckles, balanced perfectly. She watched one of the men light a cigarette, bright flare of flame a perfect target.
In Ashfall, crows ruled the rooftops. But sometimes — the sky belonged to something darker.
She leapt.
Years ago, she'd seen her mother die in an alley two blocks from here.
A mugging gone wrong — that's what the papers wrote. Her mother's purse stolen, her body left in the rain while city lights blinked their indifference. She remembered standing over that body — small, powerless, cold seeping into her bones.
She remembered the police — promises that never mattered. She remembered the man who came back, years later, wearing a badge he'd bought from dirty hands. He laughed when he saw her at the group home — told her the city was no place for orphans. She'd smiled then, but inside her chest a small, black feather had begun to grow.
The system chewed her up — halfway homes, locked doors, fists and silence. But she learned. She watched. She stole secrets and traded them for freedom. She learned to fight when fists failed. She learned to disappear when fists weren't enough.
By seventeen, she'd vanished off the books. By twenty, she was a rumor — a shadow moving through Ashfall's veins. She stole from pushers and pimps. She left crooked cops in alleys with broken jaws and feather blades lodged in their car tires. Every mark whispered the same name to the next coward: Raven.
She found Micah in an underground data den — the only clean hacker left in a city built on dirty wires. He patched her wounds and built her wings — drones that could hunt rats in sewers and kings in penthouses. Together they stitched a new shape from rage and ruin: The Black Raven.
Now she crouched above The Flock's latest filth — men who laughed like the one who killed her mother. Men who thought they were untouchable because they'd never heard their own bones break.
A feather blade dropped from her fingers, spinning into the dark. It landed in the puddle between them with a tiny plink — a whisper of death.
One of the thugs turned, confused. He looked up — eyes wide.
The last thing he saw was the winged shadow dropping from the storm above him.