For a moment I couldn’t see. Couldn’t hear. Couldn’t feel anything except the Raven King’s arm around my waist and the solidity of the steed beneath us.
The mist was frigid, proper cold, deep cold, the kind that settled into bone and stayed there.
I exhaled. The sound wasn’t performance.
Relief.
We emerged on the other side, and his lands spread before us like a monochrome painting.
No more color. The sky hung low, heavy with clouds that pressed down on the peaks of distant mountains.
The sun hid somewhere behind that blanket, its light diffused into a pale glow that cast no shadows.
The ground was stone and dead grass, dull brown and frost-touched. Trees dotted the landscape, but they were skeletal things, branches bare and black, reaching toward the sky like the fingers of drowning men.
In the distance, mountains rose in jagged peaks. Snow capped their summits, white against charcoal, and something about their shapes made my chest ache.
They were beautiful, empty and dead.
A bird called out overhead with a hoarse croak, nothing like the musical songbirds of the human lands, before landing on my shoulder.
The raven was huge. Bigger than any raven had a right to be. Its feathers were black as a moonless sky, glossy and sleek, each one perfect.
Its beak was a curved blade that could take out an eye.
And when it turned its head to look at me, there was an intelligence in its gaze that went far beyond animal.
It knew things. This bird. It had seen things that mortal minds weren’t meant to comprehend.
I held very still.
“Greetings, little bride.”
The voice didn’t come from the bird’s throat. It came from somewhere else, perhaps inside my head or from the air itself.
Rust and gravel, scraping against my thoughts like claws on stone.
My heart, false and petal-fueled, stuttered and skipped.
“Welcome home, sister.”
The raven preened my hair, running its beak through the pale gold strands like a mother grooming a child. Gentle. Proprietary.
“Cold meat. Good meat.” A sound that might have been a laugh. “We have waited for you.”
Cold meat.
Sister.
It knew. The bird knew what I was. Could smell the grave on me, the absence, the void where a living soul should be.
And it wasn’t afraid, wasn’t disgusted, wasn’t backing away with its feathers ruffled in alarm.
It was welcoming me.
Like I was one of them. Like I belonged to the carrion and the cold and the endless sky.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Could only sit rigid in the Raven King’s arms while his messenger bird preened my hair and whispered secrets into my mind that no living thing should hear.
