A Black Feather in the Snow

Korax woke to the sound of falling snow.

It was a soft, constant hush against the tent canvas, a high-mountain whisper that had wormed its way into his dreams and dragged him up from them. The fire outside had burned down to embers; Apollo’s occasional snort sounded louder than the crackle of flame.

He pushed himself up and ducked out into the cold night.

The camp was a small island of life in a sea of white and dark. Three tents with his men sleeping in uneven heaps with cloaks pulled over their heads, chasing scraps of warmth. One low fire with a tired night-watchman passed out beside it. The mountain pass stretched on either side, a narrow shelf carved into the rock, snowbanks rising on the upslope, a steep plunge into blackness below.

Above, the sky was clear. With stars staring like watchful eyes.

Snowflakes drifted from no visible cloud and caught in Korax’s beard. He brushed them away and crossed to where Apollo stood tethered near the edge of the small fire’s light.

The black stallion watched the darkness, ears pricked, muscles tense. Snow peppered his mane and back like tiny constellations.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” Korax murmured.

Apollo flicked an ear back at the sound of his voice, but his attention stayed on the path ahead.

Korax followed his gaze.

The mountain path curved up and away to the north, a pale ribbon along the cliff. Nothing alive moved there. Just the soft, relentless falling of snow that had no right to be falling under a clear sky.

Apollo blew out a slow breath and shifted his weight, as if telling Korax to look closer.

A single black feather lay on the snow at his boots.

It was long, glossy, and unruffled, as if freshly dropped from a bird’s wing. No snow had settled on it. It seemed to lie a fraction above the surface, not quite touching the world.

Korax looked around. No branches overhead. No cliff ledges close enough for a roosting raven. The only bird he’d seen had been a distant speck wheeling in the valley below, hours ago.

The camp was as he’d left it. If someone had walked into the circle of their little world to place the feather and leave again, they’d done it without leaving footprints.

“Could be nothing,” he muttered. “Could be something saying hello.”

He reached down and picked it up.

It was cold. The sharp cold of high places and deep wells. It bit gently at his fingers, then eased. The quill was smooth under his thumb, the barbs perfectly aligned. When he turned it, the starlight along its surface bent wrong.

Apollo snorted, tossing his head, breath pluming.

“Did you see this being dropped?” Korax asked.

The horse stared at the feather for a long moment, then stamped once and shook himself all over, as if shedding invisible cobwebs.

The knight slid the feather into an inner pocket of his cloak and felt the cold of it settle above his heart like a stone.

Delete

They reached the monastery at noon.

It clung to the side of the mountain with stone walls built directly into the cliff, narrow windows staring out over the valley. Prayer flags fluttered from its parapets, their colors faded by wind and sun. A single bell hung over the gate to the courtyard.

Snow still fell over the path, but the air within the monastery’s courtyard was dry. The flakes stopped just above the outer wall, as if they hit an invisible roof and slid away.

A nun met them at the gate, a lean woman in simple robes, her head shaved, her eyes bright and alert.

“Travelers from the Lowlands,” she said. Her gaze lingered on Korax’s stag-clasp and then on the scroll-case at his belt. “You have something for us, sir knight?”

“A report on the thin places between here and the Shattered Marches,” Korax said. “Names, locations, behavior. My Duke thought your order might want to add them to your records.”

“We keep all accounts of the Seven Realms,” she said. “We’re always eager for more.” She stepped aside. “Come. Warm yourselves. We can offer stew and a dry place. Your horse may share our courtyard.”

Apollo was led away by a novice nun with soft hands and better horse sense than most men Korax knew. In the abbey, he could see monks and nuns in worn robes moving quietly about their duties. They were scholars and contemplatives.

The men went inside to eat and warm themselves. Korax found himself seated in a small study lined with shelves, across from an old monk with a carefully patched robe.

“Brother Ilyas,” the monk introduced himself. “Archivist.”

Korax handed over the scroll-case. Ilyas broke the seal with reverence, skimming the contents with quick, practiced eyes. He smiled once, sharply, at a particularly well-drawn map.

“Your Duke’s scribe is improving,” he said. “Someone has been teaching them the proper way to mark Veil-tears versus Realm-ripples.”

“I nag them,”

“It serves us all.” Ilyas rolled the map carefully and set it aside. “Is that all you bring us this winter?”

Korax hesitated, then reached into his cloak and drew out the strange black feather.

Ilyas’ expression stilled.

He didn’t reach for it. He just looked, his gaze sharpening, the lines around his mouth going taut.

“Where did that come from?” he asked.

“In the night,” Korax said. “No tracks. No bird. Just… there, by my boot. It felt wrong to ignore it.”

“You did not hear wings?” Ilyas asked.

“No.”

“And when you picked it up?”

“Cold,” Korax said. “Colder than the air was. Feels like it’s still falling, even when I’m holding it.”

Ilyas nodded slowly, as if something had just lined up in his mind.

“We have records of such things,” he said. “We call them Marks of Notice.”

“Notice from what?”

Ilyas folded his hands in his lap.

“This world is not passive,” he said. “You know this. Thin places ripple. Tears widen or heal… On rare occasions, something beyond our Seven Realms chooses to acknowledge a particular soul. It cannot always give them much in this world, bound by laws we don’t know. But it can send a token. A feather. A stone. A small thing.”

“That sounds like a claim,” Korax said.

“Sometimes,” Ilyas said. “Sometimes it is a warning. Sometimes a test. The texts disagree.” His voice was faint and humorless. “Scholars are rarely granted answers.”

He held out a hand and asked, “May I?”

Korax hesitated, then placed the feather gently in his palm.

The old monk inhaled quickly as the cold bit him, too. He turned the feather, watching how the light along it warbled.

“We have seen one close cousin to this,” he murmured. “A falling shard of stone the color of midnight, no frost on it though it landed on a drift. A young wizard from the high observatory on Mount Llywelyn took it to study. People say he listens to the sky too much for his own good.”

Korax thought of Greybeard the Mystic, and the terrible things he listened to, also. “Is your young wizard still here?” he asked.

“Not today,” Ilyas said. “He passed through last week, staff in hand, muttering to himself about seams in the winter sky. He comes and goes.”

He looked back down at the feather.

“Have you used it yet?” he asked.

“Used it?” Korax repeated. “I wasn’t aware it did anything but look ominous.”

“They usually do more,” Ilyas said. “But are rarely free.”

Before Korax could ask what that meant, a shout went up from the courtyard below.

Then Apollo neighing, shrill and furious.

Then a sound like stone being dragged over stone, and the faint, unmistakable chill that came when the world briefly did not know where its edges were.

Ilyas closed his eyes.

“You brought company,” he said.

By the time Korax reached the abbey, his men were already in motion. Swords cleared scabbards. Bows at the ready. A pair of monks and a nun tried to herd the elders toward the inner sanctum, where bells were already singing a low, urgent note. Others seized the dusty ceremonial spears from the walls and stood behind the soldiers, not as fighters, but unwilling to abandon their home.

The air at the far end of the courtyard shimmered like glass flexing under heat.

A crack appeared in the empty space above the flagstones, perfectly vertical. A strange green light bled from it. Shadows lengthened unnaturally around it.

Something pushed through.

It was tall and thin, its limbs long, its body wrapped in what might have been cloth or skin or the memory of both. Its face was something deformed, with two dark eyes and an elongated jaw full of teeth arranged with intent. Behind it came three smaller shapes, moving with a predatory grace, wolves made of ink, edges constantly blurring, paws not quite touching the ground.

“A Veil Sentinel,” Korax said under his breath. “And shadow-walkers. Here.”

This high up, in a monastery that studied the Realms but rarely touched them, it felt wrong. A battlefield in a library.

Apollo screamed from the far side of the courtyard, yanking at his lead rope. The stallion’s eyes rolled white, but he planted his hooves and refused to bolt, blowing clouds of steam at the tear as if he could drive it back with breath alone.

The feather burned cold in Korax’s pocket.

The Sentinel moved forward, slow and sure. The shadow-walkers fanned out, slipping along the walls, looking for weak points. Wherever they stepped, the snow refused to settle, swirling away.

“Positions!” Korax shouted. “Bows! Pikes! Don’t let them flank!”

His men scrambled into place, forming a rough line between the tear and the monastery’s inner doors. The monks and nuns, to their credit, did not panic; their voices rose in a low, steady hymn that named each of the Seven Realms in order, grounding themselves and the courtyard in the litany.

The Sentinel’s long face turned toward Korax.

It tilted its head, curious, then slowly, its form blurred.

For a moment, Korax saw himself reflected in a smooth surface of Veil-skin. Not as he was, but as something else might see him: a thin figure on a cliff of time, threads running from his chest pulled taut.

The feather in his pocket pulsed.

“Sir!” one of his men shouted. “Orders?”

Korax didn’t answer because in that moment, when the Sentinel’s attention fixed on him, he felt something slip. The air around him thickened. His men’s breathing sounded farther away. Even Apollo’s frantic whinny grew muffled.

It was like being at the center of a lens.

The feather’s cold spread through his ribs and around his shoulders, down his arms. The world at the edges of his vision dimmed. The only things perfectly clear were the tear, the Sentinel, and the feather-shaped piece of night in his hand when he drew it out.

“Korax!” a voice shouted.

It came from very far away.

He realized, abruptly, that for everyone else in the courtyard, he might no longer be there.

One of the shadow-walkers ran straight past him, jaws gaping, eyes burning with void-light, and didn’t even flinch as it brushed his cloak. Its gaze slid over him, unseeing, as though his outline had been cut from the scene.

Only Apollo’s gaze followed. The stallion’s head swung, tracking an invisible point in the air. When Korax took a step, Apollo snorted and stepped too, ears pinned on the exact space Korax occupied. The horse’s dark eyes fixed on him with a fierce, steady recognition that made Korax feel very solid.

The feather’s chill steadied, holding him in that gap.

“Well,” Korax muttered. “There’s the gift.”

The Sentinel moved toward his men, who were braced and terrified.

He tucked the feather into his fist and stepped forward.

The air resisted a little, like pushing through deep water, then yielded. He passed within arm’s reach of the nearest shadow-walker. Its edges lapped at him, cold and insubstantial. It didn’t react.

He reached the Sentinel’s flank.

Up close, its form was worse. Its “cloth” writhed with patterns from other skies, its limbs slightly out of joint with the world. Its presence pressed against his bones, trying to find a shape they would fit.

He drew his sword, the steel whispering in this muffled space.

No spell he knew would seal the tear, not alone, not without preparation. But sometimes, he’d learned, you didn’t need to cure the sickness outright. Sometimes you just needed to sever a vein feeding it.

He looked back.

At the edges of the tear, faint lines of light ran like cords into the monastery courtyard, hooking into shadow and stone. One tethered itself to the Sentinel’s spine, anchoring it in place.

Korax stepped behind the creature, raising his blade. The feather’s cold wrapped his wrist, guiding his hand just enough to make the angle right.

He swung.

The sword bit through the glowing cord with a sensation like cutting tough, wet rope. Light flared, then went abruptly dark. The Sentinel staggered, its form warping. The shadow-walkers yelped, flickering, suddenly less solid.

For an instant, the muffling sheen around Korax thinned. Sound crashed back in: shouts, the clash of steel, the monks’ hymn slamming into him like a wave, Apollo’s squeal as he kicked a shadow-walker that suddenly noticed the steed on its flank.

The Sentinel looked at Korax with a specific annoyance.

Its face rippled. A hand like sharp sticks reached toward him.

The feather flared, freezing his grip to the hilt. The world smeared sideways.

Korax found himself standing five paces to the left, heart racing, sword mid-swing. The Sentinel’s reaching hand closed on empty air where he’d been.

“Not just invisibility, then,” He laughed once, breathless. “All right.”

He moved again. The feather’s magic didn’t yank him; it nudged him, warping space just enough that each time a limb or a snapping jaw should have connected, they missed by inches.

He darted in and severed another tether on the Sentinel.

The tear in the air shuddered. Its edges frayed, trying to collapse and hold at the same time.

“Now!” he shouted, hoping his voice carried both in and out of this odd limbo. “Arrows!”

His men loosed. From their perspective, the shadow-walkers simply staggered and slowed at random moments, their movements no longer smooth. The arrows found more purchase. Monk and nun spears braced against lunges that no longer arrived with impossible timing.

One by one, the smaller creatures fell apart, dissolving into smears of darkness that evaporated on the flagstones.

The Sentinel, unanchored and outnumbered, made a sound like a mountain groaning.

The tear behind it flickered.

Korax stepped close again, raised his sword, and drove it into the point where the thing’s tethered spine was. He felt resistance, then a horrible, yielding give.

Light surged around the blade, racing up its length to his hand. The feather in his fist drank it, its cold spiking to pain.

The Sentinel convulsed, its form collapsing inward, wrapping around the steel and then shrinking, until there was nothing left but a crack in the air that snapped shut like a slammed door.

Korax stood in the center of the courtyard, panting, his sword steaming.

Apollo trotted toward him, blowing hard, bumping Korax’s arm with deliberate force. The stallion’s breath warmed Korax’s cheek, grounding him more firmly than any hymn.

“Next time,” Korax wheezed, patting Apollo’s neck, “we invite fewer guests.”

Brother Ilyas stepped forward slowly, eyes wide.

“You used it,” he said. “The Mark. You stepped sideways.”

“I stepped where I needed to be,” Korax said. He opened his hand.

The feather lay in his palm.

It had turned a deep, impossible shade of purple, like the space between stars. Its edges frayed slightly, a few barbs missing, as though some invisible beak had plucked at it.

“It helped you,” Ilyas said. “This is what the records suggest they do. They pull you out of the usual rules, for a price.”

“What price?” Korax asked.

Ilyas looked at him over the feather.

“Being seen,” he said softly. “By whatever sent it. You answered its first gesture. Now it knows you are willing to use what it offers.”

Korax closed his fingers around the feather again.

“So I should throw it into the nearest fire,” he said.

“That is one answer,” Ilyas said. “The other is to keep it and use it again if the need is great enough, knowing that each time you do, the thread between you and the other side grows thicker. A rope that can pull you up or down.”

“You monks and your comforting clarity,” Korax snorted.

“We only tell the possibilities,” Ilyas said.

Delete

Later, when his men slept, and the monastery settled into the soft rhythm of night prayers, Korax stood alone on the outer wall. Snow still fell, but only outside the walls; inside, the air was clear.

The feather lay in his palm, faintly pulsing, as if remembering the shape of the tear, the feel of being between. If he listened, he could almost hear something at the edge of it: not a voice, not yet, but attention.

He thought of the lives it had helped save that day.

He thought of the mark it might have left on him in return.

Korax closed his fist around the feather, hard, until its quill bit his skin.

Then he lifted his hand toward the small brazier burning at his side.

The flames shifted in the draft from his movement, reaching.

He held there for a moment, long enough for the heat to sear his knuckles, long enough for the cold in the feather to bite deeper, each pulling in opposite directions.

Below, Apollo stamped and blew in his stall, as if sensing his indecision.

“Roads or loops,” Korax muttered. “Gifts or hooks.”

When he finally moved his hand, the decision he made belonged to him alone.