Chapter 62. Shadows in the Margins
Still in her training outfit that evening, and feeling a little dejected and down hearted that her advances on Sylen weren't working, she returned to the Mourhollow manor to go over more of the ancient lore and legends that Corvin let her indulge in.
It was clear he took pleasure in her interest in this subject area. These specific scrolls and tablets, as well as some newer books, were the items that tended to collect the most dust. Sitting the longest on shelves before someone accidentally reads them - that was, except for the documents that couldn't just be shared with anyone.
Thankfully, being a princess means you aren't just anyone and that learning the history of your kingdom includes learning about the horrors that hide in the world. The ones that few remembered enough to even talk about. That didn't mean they were no longer active, horrors persist in ignorance.
The Mourhollow library smelled of cedar smoke and dust, the kind of air that clung to the lungs and made every breath feel like swallowing the past. The sconces along the walls guttered in the draft, throwing long shadows across the stacks of scrolls and ancient tomes.
Sephora slipped inside as she had promised Corvin the night before, her pale eyes sharper than usual, as though some part of her feared what she might discover here.
He was already waiting at the long oak table, parchments and clay tablets spread before him like a gambler laying down his hand. His excitement was unmistakable — his pale grey eyes glowed like embers behind his spectacles.
"I thought you'd want to see more," he said, rising just enough to bow before motioning her forward. "You left last night with too many questions."
"I did." She seated herself across from him, smoothing her black skirts with fingers that trembled only slightly. With a smile that was half-mask, half-truth, she added, "You've inflicted me with your scholar's infection."
It was nice to have her around so often; in an unassuming way, he took this as a compliment. Corvin chuckled warmly. "It's incurable, I'm afraid."
He drew forward a brittle scroll, its vellum yellowed and flaking at the edges, the ink faded to the faintest scratches of black. The script was older than the High Harpy tongue she had studied, curling with half-forgotten glyphs.
"This one," he said, his tone sobering, "is dangerous to read aloud or to be kept on any of the shelves. We have copies of it hidden safely and... My family keeps it sealed most of the year. It does not describe how the Dark Ones were fought, as most do. It asks, written by one of my own ancestors… whether they could ever truly be destroyed."
At the idea of destroying Dark Ones, Sephora leaned in, firelight catching in her pale irises so that her eyes looked almost white. "What does it say?"
It was then that Corvin's expression changed — his eagerness dulled into unease. "That they were never entirely creatures of flesh. The scrolls talk about their bodies. As the body was only… a vessel for them. Destroying it, the bodies, and that even destroying bodies on mass, was only an interruption that worked because it was a continued effort." He hesitated, lowering his voice. "As long as a certain type of silence lingered and was permitted anywhere... where it was allowed to prevail in the deep and more remote places of the world, they could gather again. Slowly. Patiently. The silence was the first sign of their gathering somewhere."
The word silence seemed to strike her like a blow. Her throat went dry.
"So the Pact... our pact with the Crimson Bloodhounds may not have ended them?" she said quietly.
"Exactly." He gestured toward another stack of records, each marked with his family's sigil, the crescent moon on a scroll. "That's why the Mourhollow's keep careful accounts of any of these reported silences as well, its work no one realises that we do. It's an odd silence though, Sephora, the places where life withers and sound itself dies. Forests where no bird sings. Rivers where no water runs. Cliffs where even the wind does not breathe. Most laugh at us, call it superstition. But my father insists those silences are warnings. Echoes of an older darkness than all harpies, including raven's have forgotten how to listen to and interpret. Remnants."
Flashes from picking up the dead human, who turned out to be a werewolf, Sephora's stomach twisted. The stillness she had walked in not long before today — the eerie quiet of the ruined forest — pressed back against her memory like icy fingers.
As his eyes looked over his loyal friend, Corvin, mistaking her worried expression, he tried to ease her with a smile. "Don't look so grim. These accounts are centuries old. If there were still traces, surely we would have seen them long by now."
"Or they're waiting," she murmured, her voice barely above the crackle of the candles.
Shaking his head between disapproval and humour, Corvin laughed softly, ruffling Sephora's hair. "That's exactly the kind of tale our mothers told to keep us from wandering after dusk — waiting shadows, whispering winds. You'd have fit right in at the Mourhollow manor as a child... my older sister and I. Well, we were raised on such warnings and we live, eat, sleep, breathe, and read them."
But Sephora didn't laugh.
Instead, her fingers drifted over the edge of a clay tablet. She dared not trace the glyphs carved there, but she felt the grooves beneath her skin all the same. One symbol, half-erased by time, looked eerily like wings made of ash.
The silence pressed in on her — not the silence of the library, but the memory of that forest, where not even a wild raven, or other birds stirred. No sounds of insects...
For the first time, Sephora realised that Corvin's passion for lore — for history — might be far more dangerous and essential than he imagined. It was still a lot for Sephora to take in and yet she was at the epicenter of it. With a live werewolf in the dungeon and known where a zone of silence like what was described, lay just beyond the lands at the foot of the raven kingdom mountains.
And her own fascination was not born of idle curiosity. It was fear. Fear that what he called superstition had already begun to stir again.