The Ravens Gift
CAELIRA
“Stop,” I tried to whisper, but the word dissolved.
And then, as suddenly as it began, the light snapped back, collapsing into itself and leaving only the hush of rain against the roof.
I stood there shaking, my hand faintly smoking, breath tearing in and out of me. The cabin returned piece by piece. The storm was only rain again, but the air still felt marked.
As if something remained.
A shadow shifted beyond the shutter just as a caw came from outside.
My head snapped toward the shutter. A shadow took form at the window. A raven there, feathers slick with rain. Its eyes glowed like banked embers, watching me without blinking. Something glinted in its beak. With a slow tilt of its head and dropped the offering onto the wood.
A shard of stormglass, black as obsidian, humming faintly. When it struck the wood, it rang, a single pure note that shivered down my spine.
I had heard stories of stormglass. They said it was born where lightning struck the bones of the old world, where the sky cracked something buried deep enough to remember it.
I remembered another line from those same half-forgotten tales, something the village elders used to murmur whenever thunder rolled across the mountains.
Long ago the first storm split the sky and struck the bones of the earth, awakening the power sleeping beneath the world.
The raven’s gaze lingered a heartbeat longer, and then it was gone. Only the shard remained, its hum syncing with the pulse in my scorched hand. I didn’t pick it up. Not yet. Because for the first time, I feared that if I did… the storm wouldn’t just claim me, it would never let me go.
The raven’s shadow had long since vanished into the storm, but the silence it left behind was heavier than thunder. My cabin seemed too small, too close, the walls pressing in around me as though they’d watched me betray some secret I hadn’t meant to tell.
I forced myself back to the table, back to the safety of parchment and ink, but my hand would not steady. Fingers still trembled from where the storm had touched me, as if the lightning had not left but settled inside my skin, coiled and waiting.
I pressed my palm flat against the wood to anchor myself. Only when I lifted it again did I see what I had done. The table bore my mark, veins of silver-white etched into the grain, branching outward like a frozen bolt of lightning. They glowed faintly, the way embers glow after fire, alive though no flame remained.
My breath caught. I brushed trembling fingers over the grooves. They were warm, humming and they pulsed with my heartbeat.
“No,” I whispered to myself.
“That isn’t me. It can’t be.”
But the wood disagreed, it thrummed beneath my touch, matching my pulse until I couldn’t tell where I ended and the storm began. The storm had not just followed me.
It had claimed me.
I stared until my eyes watered. The glow didn’t fade. It pulsed, soft, soft, then stronger, keeping time with the thunder under my ribs. I flattened my hand there again, as if I could press it back into the wood, swallow the evidence whole. Except, it answered me.
The light quickened, bright as breath caught mid-gasp. I snatched my hand away and the veins stilled, dimming to a phantom shine.
“Stop,” I whispered to the room, to the mark, to myself.
My gaze snagged on the windowsill. The shard lay where the raven had dropped it, the stormglass, black as deep water, edges catching the light in a way that wasn’t reflection so much as hunger.
I had meant to throw it out, to forget it. But when my palm burned, the shard brightened, not much, just a faint shimmer, like a star gasping to life in the wrong sky.
The stormglass was answering me.
I fetched a cloth and wrapped it, but the glow leaked through linen, staining the weave with ghost-light. My throat tightened, Verdant healers would call it poison, the council would call it omen. I called it dangerous.
Yet when I lifted the hearthboard and slid the shard into the hollow, the burn in my hand eased, soothed as though the glass had drunk the storm from my veins.
For a moment, I thought I heard wings, raven-wings, beating just once overhead. Then silence. The cabin exhaled as if relieved.
