The Calling

From the four winds they came. Many of them had been outcasts in their own clans and families. There was a thief, a number of orphans, vagabonds, pirates, slaves, fishermen, and a few murderers. But they had come, this motley crew, to the gathering. No one could quite explain it, they'd felt compelled, a voice like a whisper on the wind, and then a sudden longing to head to the center of the Four Lands. Some had traveled days, weeks, even months, but they all arrived on Midsummer's Day. Like a flock of ravens, they had come together as a band of warriors.

Elwin Ravenblack was among them. She had stolen away from onboard the ship, killed the guard with a knife she'd tucked in her boot for weeks, slit his throat from behind as he'd entered her cell to rape her. She stuffed his body in an empty feedbag, lowered it down in the water by a rope, then cut it free. May the waters take it where they would, she would soon be free. She slipped undetected from shadow to shadow onboard the ship, catlike, then lowered herself overboard, hand under hand down the anchor until she slipped quietly into the water, and swam across the bay to mainland. Her arms and legs ached from their lack of use, and her lungs burned from the exertion and salt water, but she continued on. It was a death quest, but a death she preferred to the living, waking death she had experienced the last six years.

She made it. Gasping and sobbing freely for the first time in years, Elwin Ravenblack kneeled on the shore as the tide washed over her shaking arms and legs. She would have to keep moving soon, but for now she gave herself over to the rising swell of emotions that had been captivated for years. Anger, joy, relief, and sadness and loss flooded through her body, gripping and shaking her until she felt like she would explode. She wept for her family, her childhood, the abuse the shipmates had taken out on her body, and she wept for her freedom. She could begin again, and in this place where sand and sea, air and water met, she could be whole.

The following weeks she had made her way further inland, an unspoken sense leading her to the next town, and then beyond. She'd stowed away in barns, raided pantries, and kept to the shadows, daring herself to travel only at night. The pursuit had lasted for two weeks, as she knew it would, and then had been called off. The men would return to the ships to fish, trade, or pirate other vessels. She no longer cared.

On Midsummer's morning she came to the valley, surrounded by mountains and tall pine trees, and in the center of the valley, a lake. She had traveled through the night, compelled to move faster, to not let her body rest, and as the sun rose and cast beams across the water, she found a shelter underneath the pines, and slept.

The Word and the Wind

There were words in the wind.

For those who could hear them, they spoke compellingly, softly, insistently; sometimes clear, sometimes just beyond reach, they were always there. They rustled through the leaves in autumn, blew across prairie grasses, howled over desert sands. They rattled and sighed as they left the bodies and bones of the old ones, or sparked life into the wails of newborn babies. The words were active, creative, breathing life still into the world, guided by the thought and will of the Word speaker.

The darkness was also present. It cast its clawing, fearful shadow across the lands. In it was the utter silence of the crypt, the hollow, empty places buried far below the ground in caverns where the air is stale and cold, and mountains of granite press down from above. It was the lonely, suffocating silence in the middle of the night when all one's fears come to life.

Words. Breath. Life. Silence and darkness. Death.

Few had the power to hear the words on the wind; even fewer had the power to breathe it in, focus it, comprehend it, and breathe it out again as the language of power, of growth, of life. But the words were calling Will. They had a purpose for him, and others from different places and times, but he didn't know it yet.