#1 : Ashes of the Skyguard

  Chapter Two

  The Wings That Fell

  Silence.

  Not the peaceful kind. The other kind. The kind that listens. The kind that waits for you to move first.

  Talon Veyr awoke inside what remained of an old Skyguard chapel, lost to fire. Or to time. Or both.

  His ribs burned. His wings screamed. Every breath scraped his lungs like ribbons of thorns. Rain dripped through the collapsed roof in slow, uneven rhythms. Not enough to soothe. Just enough to soak the cold deeper into his skin.

  He didn’t move at first. Just stared upward, through a jagged hole in the rafters. He watched as smoke twisted through the rain like ghosts unsure which way was up.

  And then the ghosts began to speak.

  “Captain, I –”

  The scream hit him again. Too real. Too fresh.

  Wing-Three’s voice, cut open mid-transmission. The gurgle. The static. The drop.

  “Soryn, on your six!”

  Too late.

  He saw it again — Soryn spiraling through the storm like a broken bird, blood streaking the air behind him.

  Another veering left. The shimmer. The trap. Gone.

  He blinked, trying to will the ruined chapel into something else — anything else. But his vision didn’t betray him.

  He was really here. Really broken. Really defeated.

  And his ribs still burned.

  How many had there been? Four? Six? He couldn’t be sure. They moved like one body, split across time. Fast. Perfect. Wrong. Built for precision. For death.

  He had seen his share of monsters. And heard stories of worse. The things that Voss made in his dark laboratories — war machines with memories. Constructs that didn’t just kill, but erased.

  And they had erased the Skyguard.

  He felt the impact again. The force. The silence. The light.

  He remembered twisting — wings failing — sky spinning — and something inside him snapping that hadn’t stopped since.

  They were dead. All of them. And yet, here he was, alive.

  Talon took a deep breath, and scanned his surroundings. His mind still worked with tactical reflex, even if he was now captain of nothing.

  The old Skyguard chapel was a skeleton.

  Its bones were charred beams and shattered glass. Its spine, a cracked arch of stone barely holding the structure upright. Where mosaics once sang with color, only scorch marks remained. Stained halos where saints used to stand.

  Skyguard scripture had been etched into the walls. Words of duty. Sacrifice. Memory. Now they were smeared by smoke, half-melted, unreadable.

  At the far end of the ruined chapel, an altar stood crooked, half-swallowed by collapse and charred to the bone. Its stone face, blackened by old fire, still bore the faint echo of the Skyguard sigil. The mark of the featherbind: two wings outstretched, joined at the center by a broken circle of light.

  A symbol of protection.

  Now it was smeared with blood.

  A tarnished censer swayed above him, suspended from a half-burned beam. It still smoldered faintly, bitter incense curling into the air like the aftertaste of regret.

  The scent hurt his nostrils.

  And his soul.

  Some part of him remembered this place. Or wanted to.

  He sat up slowly, bracing himself against the cold, cracked stone. The floor around him was scattered with broken glass, shredded feathers, and ash-soaked debris. A sharp pain bloomed in his side. He reached down, fingers brushing dried blood crusted around a ragged tear just below the ribs. From the ache, it had to be hours old.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  His left wing had been bound in scorched linen, the wrap tight and secure. His work, most likely. Though he didn’t remember doing it.

  His blade was beside him. He was glad for that.

  Unsure how long he’d been unconscious — or why the memory of waking and tending to his own wounds felt like someone else’s dream — he flexed his fingers one at a time, testing for damage. Breathing hurt. Movement was worse.

  Then he noticed a soot-stained stone barely three feet away, just beyond his reach. Four names had been etched into it, rough and uneven.

  His own hand had carved them.

  Just below, a single letter S — shallow and hesitant — scratched into the stone with the last of his strength before his body gave out.

  Talon traced each name with his fingertips, the motion soft, deliberate. He hadn’t just led these men — he had carried pieces of them inside him. That’s what it meant to be their captain. To love them, not as comrades, but as burdens you never put down.

  He reached for his dagger, the blade dulled at the edge but sharp where it counted, and pressed the tip into stone. Slowly, he carved.

  Soryn Thalor.

  His oldest. His most loyal. The one who had followed him through fire, into blood-soaked battles, and down into the deepest, darkest places where even light would not dare go.

  The loss hollowed him. Took something sacred that would never grow back.

  He exhaled slowly, then braced one hand against the cracked floor. His arm trembled as he shifted his weight — not from fear, but from the cost of motion.

  His ribs screamed. His left wing dragged, still half-dead from the fall. Every inch forward was a negotiation between duty and pain.

  But still, he moved. Crawled. Dragged. A worn and tattered body pushed to its limit, and then beyond.

  The thought crossed his mind that he didn’t know how much he had left. Then another thought followed, quiet, final:

  It didn’t matter. He still had more to do.

  Talon reached the altar and pulled himself to one knee. Not in prayer. Not in surrender. But reverence.

  And for a moment, he let it hold him.

  That’s when he heard it.

  A crow’s call split the stillness — sharp, clean, too clear for the dead air that strangled the chapel.

  Talon’s eyes lifted. Slow. Reluctant.

  The bird landed on the jagged frame of a shattered window high above the altar. It didn’t flutter. It didn’t caw again. It simply arrived, like it was supposed to be there all along, watching.

  Its feathers shimmered in the cold gray light, slick as wet obsidian. Threaded through the black were faint glints of bronze, subtle as dying embers.

  Skyguard lore spoke of crows. Some said they were omens, harbingers of death. Others said they were messengers from the old world, drawn to the souls of the stubborn dead.

  Talon had never believed in either.

  And yet, this one watched him. With its black eyes that couldn’t blink. It almost seemed wise, knowing — but not judgemental. Just present, like it had seen this before, and was waiting to see it again.

  Talon felt something shift — not in the air, but in himself. A pull. A thread in his chest drawn taut.

  Then it spoke.

  The crow’s beak didn’t move. But the voice emerged all the same.

  Low. Measured. And familiar.

  “Still alive, are you?”

  Talon froze.

  The voice didn’t echo in the chapel. But it did echo inside of him.

  The crow tilted its head. One eye caught the light. And for an instant, Talon saw the soul behind it.

  Velien.

  Not human. And not beast.

  Something older. Natural. Protective.

  Omniscient.

  “She is still breathing, Guardian.”

  For a moment, Talon didn’t understand. His mind was still full of falling wings and blood in the sky. Of names whispered too late. Of brothers dying one by one.

  But then —

  She.

  The word pierced the haze. Not a name. Not yet. But a direction. A weight. A memory.

  And with it came the ache. Sharp. Immediate. Irrefutable.

  Kaela.

  The mission hadn’t died with the others. He’d buried it, briefly, beneath too many bodies. But now, it was clawing its way back to the surface.

  “Beneath the altar,” the crow said, pulling Talon’s focus back into the room. “That’s where it begins.”

  And then, with those words still hanging in the air like a fog too thick to breathe, the crow was gone — wings slicing the dark, vanishing into the night.

  Talon turned back to the altar. The featherbind sigil — worn, cracked, half-swallowed by soot — took on new meaning now. Not just a relic, but a beacon. Guiding him to something long hidden. Long waiting.

  Beneath the altar.

  His fingers traced the stone’s fractured edge, feeling for weakness. Searching. Reaching. Ready to tear it apart if he had to.

  After a moment, he found it. A loosened stone, fractured by time. He dug at it with his fingertips, prying gently until it finally gave way and came free.

  That’s where it begins.

  In the shallow hollow where the stone had rested, wrapped in dust and untouched for centuries, lay a folded map. Its corners were scorched, its ink faded, but still legible.

  Beside it, a medallion. Skyguard. Worn smooth by time and fire.

  And tucked beneath its chain was a narrow strip of parchment.

  A single name scratched in rust-colored ink, as if written in blood that had dried a lifetime ago:

  Kaela.

  There were words scrawled on the back. Jagged. Hurried. But unmistakable. Talon flipped it over, and read.

  “The girl is not the flame. She is the mirror.”

  Beneath the words was a symbol, the mark of Velien. A glyph shaped in broken loops and fire-script — the old sigil of flame, memory, and burden.

  Talon stared at it longer than he needed to.

  He thought of his fallen brothers, their names freshly carved by a shaking hand. He wanted to stay in that grief. To let it anchor him, and justify the rage boiling in his chest.

  But he couldn’t.

  There would be time to mourn later. Time to hunt. To make it right.

  But not now. Soryn’s ghost could wait.

  Kaela couldn’t. She needed him.

  And he would not fail her again.

  Talon didn’t rise so much as force himself upward. Every muscle screamed. Each rib felt like shattered glass grinding against itself.

  But he moved.

  Because she was still breathing.

  And that changed everything.

  His knees buckled as he stood, breath shaking. One hand braced against the altar, the other pressed to his ribs. He dragged his weight forward. Not with grace, but with the kind of strength born only from memory and mission.

  “Drel veken shar ai’lor,” he whispered.

  The sky remembers what we forget.

  He wasn’t ready. Not in body. Not in spirit.

  But Kaela didn’t have the luxury of waiting for a whole man.

  So he would go as he was — broken, bloodstained, and burning with the memory of too many names.

  He reached for the map. Folded it with trembling fingers. Clutched the medallion like it was the last truth he had left.

  And then, without ceremony and without a prayer, Talon Veyr turned toward the storm.