The raven came at the hour when shadows eat their masters.
Aelric counted his breaths to stay conscious—eleven since the last rat had scurried over his boot. Moonlight bled through the ruins' cracked dome, painting his frostbitten fingers the color of grave lichen. Three days. Maybe four. Time curled like smoke here in the corpse of Voryn Hall, where his ancestors had once bargained with things that wore night as skin.
His trembling hand found the obsidian shard beneath his tunic. Six years since Mother's plague-blackened fingers pressed it into his palm, her final words clotting in a throatful of blood: "When the raven brings winter's first frost..." The rest had dissolved into wet coughing. Now the relic's edges bit into his palm, its carved sigils humming a tune his bones remembered.
It struck without sound.
Black talons pierced his shoulder, colder than the iron chains binding the hall's fallen gods. The raven's eyes were twin abysses, its breath reeking of funeral pyres and something disturbingly maternal—honeysuckle and bloodroot, like the poultices Mother used to smear on his childhood fevers. Before he could scream, the mist tore open.
"An interesting trinket."
The voice unspooled from darkness itself. A man emerged, robes swallowing the moonlight, sleeves embroidered with three ravens consuming each other's tails. Aelric's throat tightened. That symbol had glittered on the daggers that carved his family's screams into a winter night four years past.
"Name." The command left frost on Aelric's lips.
"They called you Ashspire once." The stranger's chuckle rattled like dice in a gambler's cup. A skeletal finger emerged, pointing at the obsidian shard. "Your mother's final jest. She gifted you a key... to your own mausoleum."
Moonlight shifted. The raven sigils on the man's robes writhed, their rotation reversing. Aelric's shadow jerked violently against the wall—no, not his shadow. The silhouette had too many joints, fingers ending in hooked talons.
"Give it," the stranger breathed, "and I'll teach you to carve lies into truth's flesh."
Something warm trickled down Aelric's wrist. His blood froze mid-fall, forming a jagged black crystal that shattered against stone. The sound echoed wrong, like glass breaking underwater.
When the obsidian left his grasp, winter exploded in his veins.
Agony etched luminous sigils across his vision. His traitorous shadow lunged at the wall, clawing at ancient glyphs carved by long-dead hands. The raven shrieked as Aelric's left palm ignited—the relic's markings now burned beneath his flesh, pulsing.
"Fascinating." The stranger caught a still-forming black ice crystal, his fingertip blistering where it touched. "You retained the covenant's echo. How... predictably sentimental."
A wolf's howl pierced the night—then choked into gurgling silence. The last note hung, too melodic for any beast.
The stranger dissolved into a storm of feathers, his parting words carving themselves into Aelric's mind: "Seek the Boundary Stone when the Bloodmoon hangs lowest."
Alone, Aelric examined his cursed hand. The glowing sigil mirrored the relic's patterns, but deeper shadows swirled beneath—a chrysalis of living darkness. As he stood, his shadow lingered on the wall, clawing at a glyph now oozing black sludge. The symbol matched the one etched on his mother's empty tomb.
Moonlight fractured.
Where his frozen blood had fallen, the black ice crystals were growing. One had formed a perfect miniature raven, its beak parted mid-screech.
In the forest beyond the ruins, something with too many joints began to laugh.