#1 : Ashes of the Skyguard

  Chapter One

  The Ash Beneath Us

  122 AF

  The wind above the Withered Glade had teeth. Sharp little bastards, cold enough to bite bone and slice beneath the seams of his armor.

  Talon Veyr flew just above the canyon’s edge, the rhythm of his wings steady but tight. Deep within, something clawed. Rage, maybe. Or guilt wearing rage like a mask. Whatever it was, it burned hot behind his sternum and tried to rise up through his throat and out his mouth in a scream that would tear feathers from the sky.

  He choked it down. Like he always did. His will was stronger than his grief. But only barely.

  There seemed to be very little activity in the Glade today. The perimeter glyphs had stopped pulsing. Even the low tremor in his bracer — the one he’d come to trust like a second heartbeat — had gone silent. No movement. No sound.

  But Talon didn’t trust quiet. Not anymore.

  He hadn’t slept since the Hollow Tree. Not really. Not fully. He had closed his eyes a few times, but the horror behind them had grown too loud. He would wake in a cold sweat with fists clenched, wings twitching, breath hot and sticky, and heart pounding like he’d just dropped from the sky.

  There were no dreams. Only echoes.

  He flew to stay ahead of them.

  The chill bit deeper as he cut through the dusk. Wind curled beneath his breastplate, whispering through the feathers where burn scars met bone. The ache in his left wing had returned — old damage, long since healed, but never right. Imperfect. Incomplete.

  He couldn’t remember exactly how it happened. Was that mercy? Or maybe that was the cost. Either way, the pain was the same.

  Below him, the Glade sprawled like a corpse in the dirt, and part of him wished he could join it. He had spent his whole life defending his homeland — its trees, its wind, its people. From his rite of passage in the southern crags to the firestorms of the Dagger Peaks, Talon Veyr had worn the oaths of the Skyguard like skin. Not out of burden, but out of pride and purpose.

  They were meant to be the protectors of memory. The last line between truth and oblivion. Wings sworn to the sky. Guardians of a world that barely even existed.

  He had chosen that life. Gladly. Willingly. He had endured the years of ascetic training, the ink of the featherbind tattoos, the weight of standing post through storms and fire and famine. He had buried friends. He had given up everything else.

  But sometimes — rarely, and always in motion — he felt the absence of something unnamed.

  Not regret. More like the distant ache of a future that had never been his. Something in his chest felt splintered and hollowed out.

  He had never let anyone close enough to break him. Not truly. Not beyond the rites and rituals, not beyond the brotherhood of blade and sky.

  But someone had reached past all that.

  Not a lover. Not a wife. Something else. Smaller. Quieter.

  And now, that part of him was gone. Torn free without warning. And no amount of discipline or flight would bring it back.

  He reached instinctively toward the knot of cloth at his side. A charm. Small. Wrapped tight in leather, bound with vine-thread. He didn’t look at it. Didn’t dare. Just brushed his knuckles against it once, to make sure it was still there.

  The last five known Skyguard flew in tight formation beside him. Blades sheathed. Wings sharp. Eyes wary beneath the sickly violet dusk.

  The sky was bruised. Purple clouds streaked with sulfur, yellow ash smeared across the horizon like an old wound torn open again. The sun had begun to vanish beneath the Dagger Peaks, its final light staining the sky a painful red.

  There had once been hundreds of their kind.

  They were the first to rise when the Fracture tore the world open. The first to burn when the fires came. The last to fall when time began to break.

  Talon had risen through the ranks on grit, precision, and sheer refusal to yield. He’d become one of the most revered captains the Skyguard had ever named.

  But being the best carried its own curse. It meant watching the others die. Not in glory. Not in songs. But in silence — cut down by machines that didn’t bleed, or burned alive by weapons no oath could stop. Brave men. Brilliant men. Valiant men, shattered in a war that could never be won.

  And now, only he and his squad remained. The last torch of the Skyguard, flickering against the wind. They were but a breath away from slipping from reality into memory. From memory into myth. And from myth into nothing.

  He should be mourning that. The fall of an order. The vanishing of a creed carved in sky and bone.

  But something else was gone now.

  Something smaller. Quieter. Closer.

  And beneath it all — silence.

  Not the stillness of peace.

  The kind that follows ruin. The kind that waits for someone who is no longer coming.

  Kaela.

  The name tasted like blood on the rim of a chalice. He had sworn he wouldn’t say it aloud again. Not until he knew for sure. Not until the sky told him how it ended.

  He beat his wings — scarred and mottled with old burns — harder than necessary. Just once. Just to feel the strain. Just to keep from remembering the way she —

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  No.

  He called on his will again. The will that was stronger than guilt. Stronger than fear. Stronger than loss. It had been his weapon. His armor. The thing he wore when all else had burned away. The will of a Skyguard captain who had suffered every kind of pain. Every kind of loss. And still — endured.

  Talon's eyes, storm-gray and sharp, flicked constantly between the ridgelines and the broken tree canopy below. There was no beauty in this flight. Not anymore.

  “Steady,” he called over the channel. Voice clipped. Controlled.

  There was a brief, weightless moment where he almost let himself hope the land below would look better than he remembered.

  It didn’t.

  The tree trunks were twisted like things that had burned alive trying to reach the sky. Some had fallen, sheared in half by flamewinds or relic shockwaves. Others stood hollow and steaming, their bark blackened and cracked like bone.

  No birds. No insects. No life. Just the wind, and the dead, and not much in between.

  Beneath them, the earth looked like it had tried to crawl out of its own skin. Their homeland stretched for miles — once a living forest, now a fossil of one. Scars ran across the land like rivers — deep gouges in the soil where the fire had burned so hot it melted the stone. In the deeper channels, glass caught the sunlight in fractured shards. What was left of the river had changed course entirely, weaving sluggish and toxic between the ash banks.

  He didn’t hate this place for what it was.

  He hated it for what it used to be — and what it could never be again.

  And yet, if you knew where to look — and you looked very closely — you’d see that green had begun to return. Clumps of moss clung to the base of a ruined column. A vine curled stubbornly around a felled branch. And at the edge of one scorched ravine, Talon caught the faint shimmer of skyblossoms pushing through the soot.

  Not many.

  But enough to hurt.

  Because he remembered the one she had tried to give him.

  “Drel veken shar ai’lor.”

  The words came soft across the channel. Spoken in the ancient Skyguard tongue. Symbolic. Poetic. Beautiful.

  And — forbidden.

  Talon’s head snapped back. His voice cut like bladepoint. “You know that tongue is outlawed.”

  He slowed the rhythm of his wings, letting his second-in-command drift closer. Soryn Thalor — older, leaner, with pale gray eyes and midnight wings — slid into formation beside him, calm and grinning behind a cracked visor.

  “Captain, c’mon,” Soryn said. “No one’s listening.”

  Talon cut him a look. Voice low. Flat.

  “Let’s not give Tyrillon an excuse to burn what’s left.”

  The silence that followed wasn’t long.

  But it was long enough to mean something.

  They both looked ahead to the curling black smoke on the horizon.

  Soryn’s voice came quieter now. Weighted.

  “We both know that’s not what you’re really worried about right now.”

  Talon didn’t answer. He shifted slightly in the current, adjusting for turbulence. His left wing was really aching now, deep and sharp. Wouldn't be long until he would have to rest it. He wasn't the guardian he once was. So many breaks. So many burns. He was stitched together by twine and spite.

  He scanned the ground beneath them, taking in the scarred belly of a sleeping god. Massive, burned, and half-forgotten. Once, the Withered Glade had shimmered with rivers of light and wind chimes spun from living vineglass. Now, it looked like it had survived its own funeral.

  Soryn hovered beside him a moment longer. Then his voice came again across the channel. Not in defiance. More like absolution.

  “Drel veken shar ai’lor. The sky remembers what we forget.”

  Talon felt something tighten in his chest. Not grief. Not rage. Something older.

  Like homesickness for a place that may never have existed.

  He looked over at Soryn and gave him a small, reverent nod.

  And that's when the wind changed.

  Talon felt it first — just a shift, subtle, like walking into a room where someone had died the day before and the air hadn’t moved since. There was a ripple in the current that shouldn't be there. The others didn’t notice. Not yet. But his gut tightened.

  He raised two fingers, signaling for half-formation descent. The wing obeyed without question, dipping lower over the Glade, hugging the canyon’s edge. Beneath them, the land was no longer dead, but restless.

  “Something’s here,” Talon warned. “Stay sharp.”

  Below, the trees had begun to move wrong. Not with the wind, but with intention. Like they were leaning in to listen. Ash swirled in little upward spirals, caught in air that didn’t know which direction to blow.

  Soryn adjusted his altitude beside him, his voice low. “Captain, you smell that?”

  He did.

  Ozone. Oil. Burned metal.

  Black Spine tech.

  “Left flank, expand five meters,” Talon commanded. “Right, hold. Weapons ready.”

  Something shimmered just ahead, like heat radiating from a sun-scorched stone. It wasn’t movement. It was distortion.

  A ripple in the atmosphere — metallic and slow — gently peeled apart the space between breaths.

  Then the shimmer became a scar. It folded back the layers of air, slow and deliberate, opening a wound that bled with color.

  Talon tapped the channel rune on his bracer. “Wing-Three, report. Visuals?”

  The radio was silent. Until it wasn’t.

  A burst of static came loud, jagged, alive with distortion.

  Then: “Captain, I —”

  Cut off by a scream, sharp with panic. Torn wide open.

  Talon’s blood iced over.

  He jerked his head around just in time to see the shimmer — vertical, wrong, pulsing. Waves of light radiated from its core like a heartbeat, and a thunderous roar split through their airspace.

  “Break!” he shouted. “Full scatter!”

  And then the sky tore open.

  It appeared in a flash of blue light, looking like something born sideways. Tall and wrong-limbed, its joints bent backward like it had once seen a human body and decided to imitate it out of spite. Its skin, if it could be called that, was stretched too tight over its frame.

  Where a face might’ve been, there was only a mirrored plate. It was polished to a shine, reflecting the final expression of its prey before the kill.

  A fan of segmented tendrils spread wide from its back, each ending in crystal-barbed claws that vibrated in sync — like they were listening. Or remembering.

  Beneath its protruding rib cage, a faint blue light shimmered with the beauty of pure hate. Its skeletal form appeared malnourished, yet bulged with lean, terrifying muscle.

  And it moved like it had no bones. It folded through the air — faster than sound — and when it struck, it didn’t tear. It entered. Seamlessly. Like a needle through fabric.

  Talon had seen a lot of things built in Voss’s shadow. But this one? This one had no shadow of its own.

  The beast struck Wing-Three dead-on, spearing him mid-chest before he could even veer. Feathers and blood sprayed across the current.

  Another garbled scream broke across the channel. For half a second, the man's momentum kept him in the air, arms twitching, wings locked. But then his body pitched forward, and he dropped out of the sky like a stone.

  A second Skyguard shouted a curse at the beast, and veered left. The air rippled beside him. Another shimmer. Another trap. He vanished mid-cry, sliced from the air like a branch pruned.

  The beasts turned, hungry for more. Their metallic faces scanned the area, each locking on to one of Talon's valiant Skyguard warriors. And with the precision of machines — not hunters, not soldiers, but weapons — they annihilated their targets.

  Talon dove hard, wings pinned, scanning for Soryn.

  where is he where is he where—

  There.

  Soryn had banked sharply, blades drawn, trying to flank the creature, but another ripple opened behind him.

  “Soryn, on your six!” Talon screamed.

  Too late.

  A second construct emerged, with black-veined flesh and a mirror of fear for a face. It moved like a wasp, all joint and lurch and hunger. It struck Soryn from behind, straight through the shoulder. Soryn’s wings faltered.

  And gravity did the rest.

  He tumbled. One wing flared, the other went limp. He spiraled toward the Glade below, blood trailing like the tail of a comet.

  Talon swore, banking hard, wind howling in his ears. He sliced through the current, angling to intercept. Another second, and he might’ve caught him.

  But that's when a third beast erupted from the sky, cutting him off. It folded into an unnatural ripple in the air current, appearing directly in Talon’s path.

  A blur of curved limbs and gnashing iron. He twisted, barely dodging the first strike, his blade carving sparks off its plated forearm. The thing screamed — a chorus of voices, stitched together — and lunged again.

  Its arms snapped like broken clockwork, every movement out of sync but horrifyingly fast. Its head turned the wrong way. Backwards. Talon caught his own reflection in its face — twisted, terrified, yet painfully real.

  He dropped, flipped, slashed upward. Steel met sinew.

  One arm gone. The monster howled and recoiled.

  Talon surged past it, wings screaming in the wind. Below him, the trees came into focus. Then the stone; then Soryn’s body, crumpled in a heap, shattered.

  Hold on, Soryn. Just hold —

  That was when the construct hit him from behind. No warning. No sound. Just impact.

  Blinding. His vision flashed white, then smeared red. Pain bloomed across his ribs, then vanished, replaced by something colder. He felt himself twisting in the air, spinning, wings failing to find purchase. Altitude died beneath him.

  He heard someone scream his name. Or maybe he imagined it. Maybe it was the wind. Had to be.

  They all were dead.

  The sky spun. His breath left him. And then —

  Black.