I haven't updated here in a while! Between college work and beginning a new draft of my gothic romantasy, it's completely slipped my mind. But I wanted to post the full prologue I wrote a couple weeks ago. It hasn't undergone editing yet - editing is my own personal seventh hell - but hopefully some time away from it will give me a fresh perspective on what needs to be changed. That being said, I did edit while writing, so hopefully it isn't wholly untamed. If anyone has any feedback, I'd love to hear it - I'm always aiming to improve! 

Esme 🩷 

Prologue

For the first time in an eon, I wasn’t being torn to death by the triad of crows. 

Dreams within dreams were common knowledge. Supposedly you were meant to pinch the inside of your wrist, hard, and wait three seconds to determine which layer of dreams you inhabited. If you were thrust back into reality, yes, you had freefell into the vacuum of eternal, starry dreaming. But if you stood in your dreamscape waiting anxiously, seconds ticking by, the answer was no. 

So a couple things occurred to me as seconds slugged by and that shot of pain faded: This was a dream, singular. The crows were not picking at my organs like I was an open buffet, and finally - why in Mor’s name weren’t they? 

A glance from around the torso of an oak tree told me the reason. After a hundred and eighty four nights and six grueling months, they’d finally tired of me. Replaced me. 

A fallen damsel - that’s what my replacement resembled, an arm stretched above her head as if she’d fainted dramatically, the fabric of her gown a brilliant crimson- 

No, not fabric. Blood. Blood, leaking freely from a dozen open wounds, drenched her gown all the way from its swooping neckline to ruffled skirts. Nausea rose in my throat at the one stretched across the length of her pale stomach, end to end. And as I stared in frozen horror, Baldfeather - named in remembrance of the time I’d torn out a clump of his feathers - plunged his beak deep into the wound’s flesh. It emerged dripping red. 

I couldn’t leave her there. The conviction clanged through me with equal amounts of resolve and dread. Wouldn’t leave her there. And before I even registered it, there I was, creeping through the underbrush on cat-soft feet. 

By some torturous mercy of the gods, the crows were too absorbed in their entertainment to notice my approach. Monocle fed a stringy vein into his beak, the vessel penduluming back and forth, back and forth before vanishing into the fleshy maw of his mouth. 

Five feet. Two feet. One foot, and I could grab her wrist and run- 

Sable snapped his depthless onyx eyes to mine. My arm froze mid-stretch. 

His talons unclenched inch by harrowing inch from the girl’s rust-red ankle. Taunting me with the prospect of attempting an escape. But I’d learnt the futility of running long ago.

I schooled my face into icy neutrality. If they planned to kill me, I refused to give them the satisfaction of my fear. 

Aryx, River. Aryx, River. The words, the names, were a mantra; the one thing the crows could never take from me no matter the amount of torture they inflicted. 

Sable unfurled his wings, readying for flight, and I clenched my fists into tight balls. He could attack me all he wanted, but I wouldn’t go quietly. 

But he soared past me, a lance of cold air grazing my ear as he went. His two brethren followed without hesitation. 

I shut away my nagging confusion. Perhaps fortune had taken pity on me at last. Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter now, for the girl was breathing in shallow pants. I fell to my knees beside her, pressed two fingers against the side of her slender throat. Her pulse strained weakly beneath my fingertips, a warbly piano playing its final song. 

A quick glance to the sky revealed the crows as long gone. For now. But there was time enough to try to help her, to do something of worth before they inevitably remembered the sweet taste of human flesh. 

“Can you hear me?” I asked a tad stupidly. 

No response. The wind rippled the lacy veil shrouding her face, black as a moonless night, black as a crow’s eyes. 

The act felt intrusive but…I tugged the veil back from her face anyway. Strip after strip of pale skin came into view. 

Until years later, I would’ve denied knowing what waited for me under the guise of that shroud. But a part of me, hidden and secret even to myself, understood exactly whose face it was my hands were revealing in that moment. My own.

Flinching backwards was a matter of instinct. 

Cheekbones sharp as the finest blade. Dark brown eyes. Thin colourless lips under a crooked bridge of a nose. There was no mistaking who it was. A fleeting glance in the mirror every couple of months kept the unfortunate visage of my face firmly cemented in my mind. 

The daemon’s eyes flew open with such sudden force I stumbled backwards, falling on my ass before I could plant my hands on the ground. 

She twisted her head to face me fully. “Reyna,” she croaked out.

I started. She knew my name- 

“I know a great many things,” she continued, voice thin, reedy. Unlike anything I’d ever uttered in my nineteen years of existence. “I know your mother died when you were eleven.” My blood froze over in my veins. “I know you have a crescent-shaped scar on your wrist. I know you have two brothers-”

                                                                                                             

“This is a dream,” I muttered, more to myself than to the thing beside me. “You’re just a spawn of my overworked imagination.”

                                        

She smiled an ironic, sardonic smile. “Is that what you believe? That you…” Her eyes appeared to fog over. “Just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it’s not real.” 

The statement hovered in the chill air, a tangible thing that seemed to possess its own secret, invisible heartbeat in the space between realities. 

“I know your family is drowning in the current of poverty,” she said, voice surprisingly steady. “I know how you can help them, save them, sweet Reyna.” 

“How.” Not quite a question, not quite a command. 

“A realm cursed with drowning solitude and immortal winter 

Cursed with creatures ; wicked, base, bitter 

Speak their name

And speak your last.”

Dark eyes bore into mine. Waiting. It was that gaze, so still that I may as well have been peering into the face of a black, inscrutable mirror, that clicked her words into place in my head. I vaguely remembered that rhyme as one of countless veiled in the pages between tales of silver knights and virtuous maidens. 

A hysterical laugh bubbled at the seam of my lips. “Cailleach, you mean?” 

Ludicrous. You’d have to be a fool to even entertain the thought of venturing there ; either that, or in possession of a death wish. Cailleach was the home to the deadliest species on The West Continent. Witches. Beautiful, powerful, and known for their taste for human hearts. 

“Sacrifice myself to them? Is that your suggestion?” I despised the weakness, the caution lacing those words. As if the daemon were a mistress to be heeded and I her compliant servant. 

“An offer.” 

The forest went silent. The rustle of leaves died. Even the wind quieted. 

“You know the one I mean.” She whispered. “The one that drags you from sleep in the darkest hours of night and leaves you in a cold sweat. The one that plagues your waking thoughts.” 

My heart thundered. “What are you?”

The scar of her lips angled upwards. “A friend.” 

“Bullshit.” 

The daemon attempted a laugh and was humbled into a fit of hoarse, wracking coughs. Streams of blood oozed from between her teeth, and ran down the jut of her chin.

“Intelligent girl,” she rasped between two successive coughs. “Intelligent indeed to not take my word at face value. But I swear by the old gods that you can.” 

I glanced at the gash Baldfeather had split open in the heart of her stomach, the ruby red liquid trickling from it without end. There was no surviving that. 

I felt it then: Death, present and physical as much as a silver veil of fog was, smelling of decay and dust and rotting things. The stench was more familiar to me than my own face. 

No harm, I decided. It did no harm to at least listen to the daemon’s suggestion. It wasn’t like I was under an obligation to heed it. 

So as a fawn hurtles in the direction of the roaring river in order to escape its pursuing band of wolves, so too did I lean over the daemon and listen to the suggestion she claimed would save my family from the curse we call poverty. 

By the time she’d taken her final breath my mind was in a whirl. The silence pressed in on me like a second skin. Waiting out the dream secluded in the forest in case the crows returned…that seemed like my safest bet for the time being. 

But a flash of onyx caught the corner of my eye as I made to stand. My heart leaped into the base of my throat as my traitorous eyes shifted and moved- 

It wasn’t a crow. My heartbeat pounded embarrassingly loud in my ears, and I let out a wry laugh. Stupid, inane fear. 

A closer look revealed the tip of a black dagger peeking out from underneath a wave of tulle.  

I reached out and traced a solitary finger down the plane of onyx, its smoothness eventually giving way to ridges that felt like the engravings of whorls and swirls. 

I pulled the weapon free, and my jaw dropped as I saw its design in full, unrestrained splendour. Unfurling dragon wings sprouted from its hilt, gleaming with veins of iridescent silver. Wisps of what appeared to be personified night and death curled around the blade. Something within me, long slumbering, seemed to stir at that inky, pulsing power. Like calls to like. 

I had an innate, visceral sense that the trajectory of the world had been heading in one firm direction and that it now paused. Reconsidered. Waited with bated breath. And then the feeling evaporated quickly as it had come, and I remembered who I was: a girl with no education, no prospects, no nothing. 

I angled the dagger down at the motionless body, right above the heart. All I could see, all I could focus on were those hideous features. The features that had defined my entire existence. My lips pulled back in a snarl. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe over that rage. And although the daemon was dead - although she had to be - I could have sworn she cracked open an eye as I plunged that dagger clean into her heart.