20.05.2024 – 22.30 UTC +04.00

  Ramin glared at me.

  “No plane is going anywhere Nis?. We have to wait,” he said and waved, showing me the crowd around us. We were sitting at the seats next to the pillar with the screens showing all the gates and the status of flights. People were gathering only to see a bright red DELAYED next to their flight’s number and throw a fit.

  Ramin was equally annoyed. He held our two illegal boarding passes in his hand.

  A woman in a flowered shirt started fighting with an airport clerk. I tried to ignore her bickering, as more and more people raised their voice around us.

  “Can’t you see?” Ramin said, “all flights are delayed for at least a couple of hours due to a…”

  “A storm. I get it, Ramin, I saw it,” I interrupted him, and lowered my voice, “I was outside, and they were too. They are riding this storm and about to come here. We need to leave this place, we thought we could get away, but we can’t.”

  I stood up, prompting him to stand up as well. He was at a loss of words, as he raised his hands and showed around us. The crowd around us grew larger as more and more gates were canceling boarding.

  “Where do we go? We just passed security,” he complained and sighed. He tried to stretch his arm, as he stood up.

  “I really feel terrible, I am in no condition to run. I am tired maybe, but my shoulder hurts after the hit earlier today.”

  I grabbed him and gently turned him around.

  “Let me see,” I said. I pulled his shirt a bit, just so that I could see his shoulder. Black blood was pooling where he had previously been hit. “There is blood again. The wound opened.”

  “That’s not possible, it must be just leftover or something.”

  “No.”

  I remembered my Farsight, how it was abruptly stopped. It looked like mirrors shattering and obstructing my Cursed vision.

  “Deflectors,” I said and turned Ramin towards where I was looking at. Silver mirrors, handcrafted and stylized with Latin letters on their edges.

  “That’s new,” he said.

  “There are many. Installed on the roofs. They weaken us,” I told him. For the first time in a while, I saw him turn pale as white paper. I tried to guess what was going through his mind, but if I felt vulnerable once, he must have felt that ten times. His Curse was to heal his wounds, and now he was incapable of doing that.

  “What do we do?” He asked.

  “Do you have more money?” I asked him, and he nodded.

  “Let’s go find supplies.”

  We pushed through the crowd, towards the closest shop. There was a big line at the cashier, but we rushed through the small shop. It was a mini market confectionary, one of the many shops inside the airport, where you could simply walk in from the boarding area. “Get a couple of lighters,” I told him pointing to the cigarette corner direction. “And some tobacco too.”

  I went towards the food section. There were only snacks in this aisle. I needed something with a dust form – besides sand, salt, sugar, and perhaps flour could work. Implements like this could enhance my warding Curse. But I was in an airport.

  Imishli Sugar, I saw a small vial with white powder in it, sold in a premium package. I grabbed ten of them, all that was left. Some tourists would be disappointed not to have their piece of premium sugar from Azerbaijan from this shop.

  I bumped into Ramin. He was holding a basket with a couple of lighters and some cheap tobacco. I threw the sugar vials into the basket, grabbed the tobacco plastic bag, opened it, took a few patches, and placed it in my mouth.

  He grimaced as I munched on it.

  “It calms the nerves,” I explained. “Let’s go.”

  We stood in the queue, which was moving ominously slowly.

  “I definitely don’t have enough money for all that.”

  “Listen,” I said ignoring him. “I do not know how much time we have before they raze this place. If they are bringing so many with them, this will be a warzone. They have ways to break the deflectors, and when they do, I have to act immediately.”

  “You are scaring me. All this for us two? Why do they care?”

  I was about to tell him to shut up when I thought about what he just asked. This did feel unnecessarily dramatic, even for Starling. This was something else.

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  “And they shouldn’t even know we are here, right? I know they have seers, but why would they be looking here? Why wait to attack this airport and not through our whole bus ride?”

  He had read my mind. But it did not matter. I saw the glass shaking in the fridge behind the cashier. Only for just a tiny bit, but I needed no other warning.

  “Stand behind me!” I yelled to everyone in the queue, as I turned towards the entrance of the shop. People got startled by my command, but they obeyed, as they saw me grab the vase of sugar, open it, and hurl it around at the door of the shop. White powder covered the floor and lined the entrance.

  “Are you nuts?” I heard someone yell – and I bet I looked nuts, but that would be only for a passing second. I grabbed a second vase, and as I did, the lights went out. Not just of the store, but the entire boarding area’s lights snuffed out one after the other.

  “Stand behind me!” I commanded again, and scared customers rushed behind me.

  Reveal yourself! A woman’s voice echoed through the airport, and as it did, everyone’s heads turned around and up, scared. I raised the sugar vase ready to hurl it around at the right moment.

  “Oh shit,” Ramin said, recognizing the voice as much as I did.

  Okay then, the voice echoed through the area, and as she did, everything shattered. The windows that lined the airport, the doors out of tempered glass, glass bottles around the airport, and the mirrors of the deflectors at the ceiling. Everyone screamed in fear and started running around.

  “Stand in my ward!” I yelled and finally threw the next vase of sugar. I knew my eyes ignited in light when using my Curse, but this time, I also saw the sugar light up in golden green. It was the only source of light inside the dark airport. The sugar grains did not fall guided by gravity but flew and lined the divide of the small shop with the rest of the airport. The sugar I had previously thrown raised itself in the same golden green and met the sugar grains creating a wall of shiny dust between the small shop and the rest of the airport. I tried to will the wall to expand, but this was as far as I could ward.

  “I am sorry,” I whispered, and then I yelled, “Don’t move an inch.” Everyone inside the shop thankfully listened to me.

  For a moment, people outside my ward started running as glass fell. Unfortunately, the glass was not simply heading for the floor.

  Glass parts flew around the dark and crowded room. Cutting and piercing through, looking for a target, any target. Horrified screams from inside the airport reached us, but the glasses could not. All the glasses that were hurled towards the shop met my warded wall of dust and turned into dust themselves after a golden flash, only enhancing my protection.

  This only lasted a few seconds, enough for hundreds of people to lie dead and wounded on the floor or if they are lucky enough, find cover. The only group of people standing were the ones in my ward.

  “Listen to me and we shall survive,” I told them quietly as I turned. Behind me the dust stood still in the air, lining my ward. A few nodded and some stood still. “Find lighters, candles, any open flame. And light them.”

  Ramin made to move, but the rest didn’t, petrified at what they had just witnessed.

  “Open flames now!” I yelled, and people started running. There must have been around thirty people in this shop, and I am sure given what Azeris believed about Cursed people, they would rather not listen to me. But all of them did.

  I looked back at the pile of bodies through the boarding area, only momentarily lit by the lightning storm outside the airport. Most of everyone outside of my ward was dead. I could not save everyone, but I would save as much as I could.

  Ironically, the moment I made this decision, starlings landed in the airport, through the shattered windows. As they did, they turned into humans with Starling masks, dark figures far from where we were.

  “Hurry!” I yelled. We were warded from other curses, but not hidden to the eye. I needed light.

  People were lighting aromatic candles and lighters throughout the store. Ramin handed one to me as well. I breathed in.

  “Stay lit only for us,” I said. The flames flickered weakly before turning green one by one, as my whisper reached them. They were not only our only light source but a conduit of my warding Curse and all standing between us and Starling’s threatening posse.

  “Stay lit only for us,” Ramin repeated. It didn’t help really, but I smiled at him.

  The sugar and glass dust wall in front of us turned invisible to the eye, as we should have now as well from anyone standing outside the store.

  “This should work,” I said calmly to the crowd, “as long as we all stay silent.” My statement was unnecessary, with or without a warding Curse. Everyone was holding their breath as the men and women in dark clothes and starling masks scoured through the bodies outside the store.

  “Who, I wonder, are they looking for?” An annoying, nonchalant man’s voice broke the silence, only a minute after it had started.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. A man holding a tiny candle walked through the crowd, approaching me. He was tall enough for me to ask myself how I hadn’t noticed him before. His short hair ended in a long braid, and he was wearing a long leather jacket.

  An invisible hand caressed my lungs and stole my breath, as the events of that fateful night flashed through my mind’s eye. That night, I was warding a field in the northern parts of Oghuz, as my ex-coven was raiding for a long-lost artifact.

  --Reach for the bow, Starling.

  A past whisper.

  --I repeat, abandon wards, Starling.

  Another one, a whisper of warning from the leader of the Coven now hunting me down. It was a ridicule then as much as it was now.

  Something was unsealing my memories. The whispers and omens of that night were returning, but the more they returned the less they made sense. Why was my coven hunting me if all I had done was protect them? Why was I placed in an enchanted prison where a Shadow was kept for years?

  Why was the man that broke my ward that night here in Q?b?l? Airport, with us, inside my ward?

  “Why are you here?” I asked. The man did not respond.

  A man yelled somewhere inside the airport:

  “Break the witches!”

  The man with the braid, Ramin, myself, and everyone else in the store couldn’t but watch in silent awe the scene outside the store.

  Brown leaves appeared out of thin air and started falling, as in autumn’s fall, into the field of scattered glass shards and bodies. Their fall was slow, and among the leaves, men and women appeared right out of thin air, chanting Curses at the Starlings.

  A fight was breaking out.

  The man with the braid snapped his fingers, and as he did, all the sound from the battle outside vanished, successfully grabbing my attention again. People inside the ward scurried back to the edges of the shop, leaving space between me and the man.

  “Why are you here?” He asked back and chuckled, “You were supposed to escape, not run back into trouble.”

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