Dawn came in iron and ash.
Rhaen Tal'Sorin tasted it on his tongue as he breathed the cold in—metallic, dry, the way it always was on training mornings. The world was still half-shadowed, hills a dark line against a paling sky, the distant murk of the Shattered Expanse a bruise on the horizon.
"Again."
His father's voice cut through the stillness, flat as stone.
Rhaen tightened his grip on the practice spear. His palms were already raw; splinters bit into old calluses. He set his feet in the packed dirt of the yard, rolled his shoulders once, and lunged.
The spear's shaft slid forward in a smooth, practiced thrust toward his father's chest.
Varos Tal'Sorin didn't move much. He never did. Just a half-step to the side and the lazy turn of his wrist—and suddenly Rhaen's spear was caught, twisted, and the butt of Varos's own staff snapped up into Rhaen's ribs.
Pain flared sharp. Rhaen grunted, stumbled, caught himself before his knee hit the dirt.
"Again," Varos said.
Rhaen sucked in a breath, jaw tight. "I was centered that time."
"You were fast," Varos said. "You were not present."
He released the spear and stepped back, bare feet silent on the ground. Varos was a broad shadow in the morning gray, black hair bound back, dark eyes unreadable. Onyxborn to the bone—like every man and woman in the village—but where others smiled or laughed, Varos held himself like carved obsidian: polished, unyielding, cold.
Rhaen ground his teeth and reset his stance.
He knew the forms. Knew them so well they haunted his sleep. Thrust, sweep, step, twist. The First Path. The Second. The Third. The Guard of Ash, the Break of Stone. Hours and hours, every day, under that same flat gaze. Other boys hunted, or slept, or lay on rooftops staring at the clouds.
Rhaen had splinters and bruises and a father who never once said he was proud.
He exhaled slowly. Let the world narrow to the feel of wood in his hands, to the weight of his body, to the faint scuff of his father's heel as Varos settled into his own stance.
Then he attacked.
This time he led with a feint to the shoulder, twisted low, and drove the shaft toward Varos's knee. Varos shifted, the block coming down with the same irritating ease—
—but before it landed, something in Rhaen's skull prickled. A thin, needling pressure, like the moment before lightning strikes. The world seemed to thicken, sound dropping away.
He didn't think.
His feet moved.
He abandoned the strike mid-motion, letting the shaft slide, turning his wrists. Varos's staff whistled past where Rhaen's leg should've been, a hard blur of wood. Rhaen's own spear snapped up, tip driving for his father's throat.
Varos stopped it an inch from his skin with an open palm.
They froze there, breath misting in the chill air. The spear's point trembled. Rhaen's chest heaved.
What was that?
The tingling faded. Time resumed its normal weight. His heart hammered so hard he felt it in his gums.
Varos's fingers tightened briefly around the shaft, then released.
"Better," he said.
That was all.
The spear dropped to Rhaen's side. "You almost missed," he pushed, because if he didn't say something he was going to start shaking.
"I did miss."
Varos walked past him, the end of his staff tapping once on the packed earth. "You stepped before you knew you needed to. That is the beginning of awareness."
"The beginning of what?" Rhaen asked.
Varos didn't answer. He rarely did, not when the questions brushed up against the old things.
Instead he tossed a waterskin toward Rhaen without turning. Rhaen caught it reflexively, uncapped it, and drank greedily. The water was cold enough to sting his teeth.
The sky was brightening now, strips of pale color tearing through the gray. The training yard sat on a rise above the rest of the village—a flattened strip of hard earth marked by old, weather-worn stones carved with symbols Rhaen had never learned. They circled the yard like silent watchers. Some said they'd been there longer than the village itself.
Rhaen wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "You ever going to tell me what those mean?" he asked, nodding toward the stones.
"No," Varos said.
Rhaen snorted softly. "Thought so."
He threw the spear down beside the others—bundles of worn shafts and blunted blades stacked neatly against the fence. Below, the village was stirring. Thin columns of smoke rose as cookfires were coaxed to life. Figures moved between low houses of timber and stone, dark shapes against the first light.
"Again at dusk," Varos said.
Typical. "There's patrol, chores, and hauling with Torren," Rhaen said. "You want me upright for dusk, you could at least pretend I'm not made of iron."
Varos's lips twitched. Not a smile, not really. Just the faintest shift, as if some long-forgotten muscle remembered how.
"If you were made of iron, boy," he said, "you'd have broken by now."
That was as close to kindness as he ever got.
Rhaen shrugged like it didn't matter, even as a small, stupid warmth curled in his chest. "Fine," he muttered. "Dusk, then."
He slung the waterskin over his shoulder and started down the worn path toward the village.
Behind him, Varos stayed where he was, watching the horizon where the land dipped and the distant, jagged haze of the Shattered Expanse sat in silence.
Rhaen didn't see the way his father's hand flexed once on the staff. Or the way his jaw tightened, as if facing a memory.
⸻
The village of the Onyxborn didn't look like the kind of place legends were born.
It was a cluster of low, square houses, built close together against the wind. Stone foundations, dark timber walls, roofs shingled in overlapping slate or thatch. Straight lines. Clean yards. No decorations, no painted banners, no carved beasts on doorways like the hillfolk to the south favored.
Onyxborn didn't waste effort on pretty.
They moved with purpose. Even in the early light, everyone he passed was doing something—hauling water, chopping wood, repairing harness, mending boots. Children ran errands with baskets twice their size, bare feet thumping in the dust. Older boys and girls came in from the night watch along the northern ridges, eyes bleary but steps steady.
They all shared the same look; Rhaen had grown up surrounded by it and never thought it strange.
Dark skin, like sun-warmed earth or burnished bronze. Hair as black as wet ink. Eyes darker still—jet black, people said, sometimes catching the light like polished stone. To outsiders, Rhaen had heard, it made them look dangerous.
To Rhaen, it just looked like home.
"Rhaen!" a voice called.
He turned as Torren loped up beside him, broad-shouldered, a little taller, a chunk of flatbread clamped between his teeth. Torren's hair was loose around his face, a wild dark mane. His black eyes crinkled at the corners as he grinned.
"You lived," Torren said around the bread. "That's disappointing. I was hoping to have your boots."
"Morning to you too," Rhaen said. "You can have them when I'm done wearing them."
"That'll be never," Torren said. "You cling to your things like a clutch-mother."
Rhaen eyed the chewed heel of Torren's boot and snorted. "At least mine still have soles."
They fell into step together between houses. Someone passed them a strip of dried venison and Rhaen took it with a nod, teeth already aching for food. Training always left him hollow.
"How many beatings today?" Torren asked.
"Lost count," Rhaen said.
"Good. Means you're learning." Torren mimicked Varos's voice, deep and flat: "'Pain is proof you're still alive, boy.'"
Rhaen rolled his eyes. "That sounded more like Elder Jhetta with a throat infection."
Torren laughed, loud and light. A few heads turned. The Onyxborn weren't unfriendly, exactly, but everything about them seemed muted, like laughter and shouting were luxuries they didn't quite trust.
Rhaen sometimes wondered if that heaviness was normal. If other villages, other tribes, felt less like they were carrying ghosts on their shoulders.
Down by the central well, old women drew water with arms still roped in muscle. A pair of hunters checked the fletching on their arrows. Beyond the last row of houses, the land dropped gently into low, scrubby hills that rolled for a few days' walk before roughening into broken rock and twisted gullies—the first fingers of the Expanse.
On clear days, you could see the true edge of it far off. Today, a faint haze hung there, turning the horizon into a smeared line between land and sky.
Torren followed his gaze, chewing. "Looks like smoke," he said.
"It always looks like smoke," Rhaen said.
"Not always." Torren squinted. "It's thicker today."
Rhaen shrugged, though he kept staring a heartbeat longer. The prickling sensation from the training yard brushed lightly over his neck and was gone before he could grasp it.
He shook it off. "You helping your father with the northern fence or are you lazing with me today?"
"Hauling," Torren said with a grimace. "He says we need more timber from the west stand before the rainy season. What about you?"
"Hauling," Rhaen echoed. "Varos says idle hands get soft."
"Varos says breathing wrong gets you killed," Torren said. "Your father should marry my father and leave us all alone."
Rhaen snorted. The image of their two stone-faced fathers sharing a house was ridiculous enough to make him grin.
The grin faded as they turned a corner and passed the old cairn.
It sat just outside the main path, a low stack of dark stones marked with a single strip of white paint along the top. People went around it without looking directly at it, as if acknowledging it might invite something small and unwanted into their day.
Rhaen's eyes lingered on it. Twelve stones, one for each year since his mother's death. Varos added another every autumn with quiet hands. He never spoke about her.
Rhaen had been six when she died. He remembered her laugh more than her face. The way she'd touch his hair as if it were the most fascinating thing in the world.
The village had been a little less heavy then. Or maybe that was just the way a child remembered it.
"You coming?" Torren asked, already a few paces ahead.
Rhaen tore his gaze away from the cairn. "Yeah."
They spent the next few hours doing exactly what Varos had appointed to ruin his shoulders: hauling.
Timber from the west stand, hauled by hand-sledge back toward the village to dry. The Onyxborn didn't trust the thin, wiry trees that grew closer to the Expanse. They said the earth there wasn't right, that roots grew in directions roots weren't meant to grow.
By midmorning the sun was up and hot enough to slick Rhaen's back with sweat. His muscles burned pleasantly, the way they did after a good fight, and for a little while he forgot about his father's staff cracking into his ribs.
They worked alongside others—men and women, a few older youths. No one complained. Complaining wasn't forbidden, exactly. It just wasn't done.
At midday, they rested under a leaning boulder, passing around a waterskin and a pouch of salted berries. Conversation stayed practical—repairs, schedules, the stubborn goat that kept escaping the high pen.
It wasn't until they started back, dragging the last of the day's loads, that something shifted.
The forest went quiet.
They were crossing a small clearing, nothing special, just a break in the trees where pale grass grew in thin patches. Rhaen had trudged this same path a hundred times. He knew the usual sounds—the creak of branches, the distant caw of crows, the chitter of small things in the brush.
Now, all at once, it was as if someone had pulled a blanket over the world.
No birds.
No insects.
Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
Rhaen stopped without meaning to.
The sled rope went taut in his hands. Torren stumbled a step before catching himself. "What?" he whispered, as if the hush demanded it.
Rhaen's heart had started to beat faster, though he couldn't have said why. The prickling at the base of his skull was back, stronger now, spreading across his shoulders like cold fingers.
He let the rope slip from his grasp, pulse thudding in his ears. The trees at the edge of the clearing looked…wrong. Not in any obvious way. They were just trees—dark trunks, sparse leaves, bark split by old scars—but the spaces between them felt too narrow, too deep.
Varos's voice came back to him, unbidden.
If the world goes quiet, boy, you listen. The land speaks louder in silence than it does in sound.
"Rhaen?" Torren said. "You seeing something?"
Rhaen narrowed his eyes, scanning the treeline. For a heartbeat—just one—he thought he saw movement between the trunks. A shape too big to be a deer, too sinuous to be a man. A flash of something pale and ridged.
Then the feeling crested.
The world tilted, not physically but in the way of awareness. His senses stretched. He could feel the exact position of Torren at his shoulder, the flex of his fingers on the rope, the catch in his breath. He could feel the sway of branches, the weight of the clouds above, the way the air pressed heavier near the ground.
There. Left. Behind that knot of rock and roots.
He shifted his weight, barely, bringing his center of balance under him. His hand found the haft of the hatchet at his belt without looking.
The sensation hung there, knife-sharp and electric—
—and then the sky split with sound.
A flock of dark birds exploded from the treeline all at once, a thick, ragged swarm that wheeled overhead in panicked formation. They cried out hoarsely, their voices tearing through the silence like claws.
Torren flinched, swearing. "Ark's breath—! Stupid birds—"
The pressure in Rhaen's head broke like a wave. He sucked in a long breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
The forest noises began to seep back in—rustles, creaks, distant calls. The world righted itself.
The space where he'd felt something was empty now. Only trees. Only shadow.
Only.
He kept his hand on the hatchet a moment longer.
"You going to stand there all day?" Torren asked, forcing a laugh. "Or are we hauling this log back so your father can find new ways to hurt you?"
Rhaen glanced at him, then back at the trees.
He almost told Torren what he'd felt.
But the words stuck. He could already hear the village's answer in his father's voice: You imagined it. You were tired. Stay present.
"Yeah," Rhaen said instead. "Let's move."
He took up the rope again. As they trudged on, he kept his senses stretched as far as he could, chasing that sharp, clear awareness.
It didn't come back.
⸻
By the time they reached the village, the sun had dipped, staining the sky with bruised purple. Smoke rose from cookfires, carrying the smell of stew and baking flatbread. Voices drifted low, steady. The day's work filing itself away in aching muscles and quiet talk.
Rhaen's arms felt like lead. His ribs still smarted from the morning's training. He wanted nothing more than to fall face-first onto his pallet and sleep until the next century.
Instead he headed back up the slope toward the training yard.
Varos would be waiting. Varos was always waiting.
As he climbed, he glanced back once, over the roofs, over the hills, toward the distant smudge of the Shattered Expanse.
Storm clouds were gathering there. Not the usual rolling gray of rainstorms, but a dark, churning mass that seemed to hang too low, too still.
The sight made that same quiet prickling crawl along his spine.
He told himself it was nothing. Old stones, old storms, old stories. The world had always been this way, broken and strange at the edges.
Still, as he stepped into the yard and saw his father standing in the center, staff in hand, black eyes turned toward that same distant haze, Rhaen felt something settle in his chest.
Like the pause before a blade falls.
Varos turned as Rhaen approached. "You're late," he said.
Rhaen opened his mouth to argue, then shut it. The words seemed small against the weight of the sky.
He picked up a practice spear.
"Again?" he asked.
"Again," Varos said.
And as Rhaen stepped forward, spear raised, the first low rumble of thunder rolled over the hills from the direction of the Shattered Expanse.
This is the first chapter of my book Onyxborn! Hope you enjoy!