How fortunate for him that his pursuers chose to arrive under the cover of night. Eli counted his blessings when he had them, and this made him believe that his luck from three nights ago had continued to trail him on his mission.

He couldn’t have asked for a better set-up. 

“Easy now, everyone. Let me get a look at what they’ve tossed our way,” Eli murmured. The shadows around him bristled with discontent. He laughed, low and gentle, and skimmed his fingers through the dark pool collecting on his right. A small wave crested then crashed, sending ripples through the shadows there, and when Eli pulled his fingers away, they dripped with inky black. “The fact that they’re here means we’ve got a hound with a rather keen nose on our tails.”

Which was a strange thing considering the rather vocal distaste the empire had for all things best rendered obsolete. Namely, any and all who could be classified as a Shadowscrawler. Those who dyed their magic with shadow, who walked into the unknown corners of the world, made friends with demons and monsters and bound themselves with pacts to the enemies of mankind. 

A terribly uninformed position to take. 

To say that dealing with shadow held no inherent danger would be a complete and total lie. But to Eli's knowledge, it held no more danger than the other known lines of magic did. After all, harm could be dealt with any sort of magical ability, whether fire or light, shadow or earth, water or wind. Each held their own power and their own dire consequences if that power ran amok. Saying that one set of magic was safer and thus better than another was pure arrogance. It all boiled down to how well the user knew their art.

Eli understood the shadows the same way he understood how dry the heat burned on the borders of the Blackened Desert, how his heart kept time with every beat. Some things needed to be experienced to be fully comprehended. Not just in the magnitude of their potential horrors but in the full breadth of their existence, from the smallest of graces to the mundane push through the everyday. To define something simply because of the fear it inspired was no better than cutting off your own hand for all the wrong it might possibly do. 

Lack of understanding. That would kill the world before the gods ever did. 

“Do you think it’s too quiet?” Eli asked with a glance to his right. The shadow pool there gurgled. “No, that’s not an invitation to start something. I’d like it to stay quiet for a bit longer, but that lot is quite dull for a hunting party. No talking at all. Just eating and drinking.”

Most of the city had fallen asleep hours ago. Only the taverns and inns still spilled light out into the streets from their windows. When Eli glanced over the rooftops, however, those places were few and far between tonight. He had positioned himself not too far from the largest of Syehnäki’s inns, the most likely stop for an imperial hunting team. Given the hour, the chances of it having room and food ready for anything larger than a single passing traveler had been the greatest. The five horses sheltering beneath the inn’s temporary run-in shed, each still saddled with fresh mud flecking their hocks, provided Eli with all the information he needed. 

He had guessed right. 

A wooden sign hung over the inn’s door with a large multi-tusked boar charging across it. Beneath its hooves, sprawling like ragged undergrowth, was the inn’s name painted in a bold wine-red: The Raging Boar. Eli had stopped in on his first pass through the city for a drink and a warm meal. While he had dined, he had spent his time drawing words and symbols in the shadows that flickered across the table, waking the hearth-dwellers, creatures who lounged in the warmth of inns and homes, feeding on the stories told around it. 

The hearth-dwellers weren’t inclined toward mischief. Happy enough to repeat the stories they heard, they embellished them as they felt best and passed them from one hearth to another amongst themselves, where occasionally they might whisper their own versions into the ears of those who had fallen asleep or were too drunk to remember who had told them the story in the first place but proved all too happy to repeat it. They whispered to him now through the shadows, chittering about one tale or another, and painted a rather vivid, if somewhat inaccurate, scene inside The Raging Boar.

“Yes, that’s all very well and good, but you’ve already told me about the evening’s menu and the fight that broke out. And how did we go from two drunken brawlers to a whole party of mercenaries trashing the place? I thought all was quiet tonight, and you lot were impossibly bored…” Eli turned his gaze up to the sky and began counting the stars. Aside from the night watch, the gates had held their silence after the hunting party’s passing. Five then after him? Not the worst to be dealt with as far as numbers went. Could have been better, though. “Is someone really arguing with the innkeeper’s wife? I thought she went to bed an hour ago.”

Beside him, the shadow pool suddenly stilled, its surface slick and dark, as innocuously treacherous in its unspoken danger as the ice-glazed roadways of the Glasterkka in winter. Eli recognized it for what it meant and immediately shifted his attention to the shadows beside him. 

“You can’t just say you lost one of them and go silent on me!” His voice registered barely above a whisper, but the frustration within it was clearly evident. Eli clicked his tongue. “See if I regale you after I’ve finished this adventure…”

Silence still. 

Eli’s mouth pulled tight. He rolled himself up to his feet, then sunk into a crouch and peered over the side of the roof. Below him, the streets remained emptied of life. The inn sat eight buildings down and around the corner, with its main door opening onto one of Syehnäki’s main thoroughfares. Not something he could directly see, but the firelight still burned a soft orange inside and threw a recognizable glow against the blanket of night draped across the street.

Without the hearth-dwellers’ constant chatter, the world around him felt strangely quiet. A far cry from the type of quiet he had been hoping to keep. This sort you could slit throats on, and none would be the wiser for hours to come. 

“Take flight and bind your visions to mine,” Eli murmured as he ran his fingers through the pool of shadow. From the darkness, a small bird pulled itself free, no bigger than Eli’s palm, black in body with grey-and-white splotches drizzled across its wings. It tipped its head as it looked at Eli, then shook itself, feathers puffing up and doubling its size, before launching itself up toward the night sky. 

As the bird darted in the inn’s direction, Eli wrote across the air above the shadow pool. Closed for the night. The pool began to rapidly shrink as if the roof had developed a sense of thirst and, suddenly starved for drink, slurped up all the moisture it could. Eli stood and started to make his way toward the other end of the building. 

Images of rooftops flitted through his mind. 

He dropped down to a balcony. 

The front of the inn flashed before him. Door open. Light still streaming through the windows. A table full of four men dressed in dark green, half-empty plates and cups before them. The door shut. Outside it, a man. Tall, with hair dark enough to rival the deepest of night’s dreams. Not dressed like the others but in colors more muted, a forest floor and not the trees crowding it. Lightly armored and road-ready. His hand rested on the hilt of his sword, his grip comfortable. He scanned the street — first left, then right — with no evidence of concern. 

Eli didn’t think he looked drunk, but he knew some people simply needed fresh air after the stifling warmth of a tavern’s main floor. He blinked, clearing his mind for a moment, and swung himself over the balcony’s side railing. With one hand gripping the wrought iron, he leaned out and wrote across the night air with his other one. Wrap me in silence and stir no dreams with my passing. He dropped to the alleyway below, soundless. 

More of the inn. Another image bullied its way to the forefront of his thoughts. The same man again, but his attention was now fixed on the stabling area. Eli frowned as his vision blurred like rainwater splashed across a windowpane. He shook his head. The image cleared.

“No…nononono…That can’t be right.”

From the shadows of the stable, a large wolf peeled itself free from the darkness. It trotted over to the man, who slunk the fingers of his free hand into the wolf’s thick fur. Black as Death’s own funeral. Violet eyes that glowed like the gates of the underworld.

Heräkuom.

The Death-Woken. 

His heart stumbled in his chest. 

The man turned his gaze to the sky, pinpointing the star-winged sparrow Eli had sent on reconnaissance. Dark hair. Green eyes. Too green. Walking with death. 

Everything went dark inside Eli’s head.

“Fuck…”  

The emperor had sent his one and only blood knight to hunt Eli down. 

He didn’t wait. Eli took off at a run.