The sundered seal

Every child in Dawnhollow was told the story of the abyss before they were old enough to understand why it was told.

It was told by grandmothers over cooling soup, and by fathers who smelled of woodsmoke and tired labour, and by old men on the market steps who liked to watch a young face go pale. The story always began the same way. Long ago, before the first stone of the first settlement was laid, there had been a great hole in the world, so deep that no lantern could find its floor. Things lived at the bottom of that hole. They had wings the width of barns and teeth the length of a man's arm, and they spoke in voices that made the ground tremble. A seal of old magic had been set across the opening, and the seal held, and so the things below remained only a story.

The children always asked whether the story was true. The grown folk always smiled and said that it was only a myth, and that myths were for keeping bad dreams in order. Then they would glance, just briefly, towards the north, where the mountains stood black against the sky and where no one in Dawnhollow had ever travelled.

On the morning this tale begins, the settlement woke to a mist so thick that the watchmen on the eastern wall could not see their own hands.

Dawnhollow sat in a shallow valley, cupped between low green hills like water held in a palm. It was not a large place. Perhaps four thousand souls lived within its timber walls, in houses of grey stone roofed with dark slate, along streets that curled around the central square like the rings of a tree. A river called the Wren ran through the south of it, turning the great wheel of the mill. In the square stood the Hall of Rank, a squat circular building where every child was brought on their twelfth birthday to have their gift measured.

That measuring was the great sorting of the world. Nearly everyone who walked into the Hall walked out again at the first rank, which the people called Dormant. A Dormant person could feel a faint warmth in their palms when they concentrated, or coax a candle flame a little brighter, or soothe a frightened animal with a touch. It was a small gift, a kindly gift, and it did not grow. A Dormant man would die as a Dormant man, and so would his sons, and so would their sons, and the people of Dawnhollow had made their peace with it long ago. They farmed and wove and mended, and they were content enough.

Very few were measured at the second rank. These were the Awakened, and the difference between them and the rest was plain to anyone who watched. An Awakened man or woman could shape their power with intent. They could bend flame, call water out of the earth, or harden their skin against a blade. Most remarkably of all, they could fly. The sight of an Awakened leader rising from the ground, cloak snapping in the wind, was the closest thing most of the settlement ever saw to a miracle. By custom, and by necessity, the Awakened led. Every settlement across the known lands had one such leader, sometimes two, and Dawnhollow had been fortunate to have the same family hold that duty for three generations.

That family lived in the largest house on the Hill of Lanterns, and on this foggy morning, two of its children were arguing in the courtyard.

"You are cheating," said Lyra.

"I am not cheating," said Kaelen. "I am being clever."

"Being clever with your feet planted is cheating, Kaelen. The rule was that neither of us touches the ground."

Kaelen looked down. His boots were, undeniably, resting on the flagstones. He had drifted lower during the last exchange without noticing, as he often did when he was concentrating on something else, and the stubborn fact of the floor under him was difficult to deny.

His sister hung in the air three feet above him, arms folded, dark hair lifting slightly in the breeze her own power stirred. She had been born eleven minutes before him, which she mentioned whenever it was useful. They were twins, twenty-one years old that very season, and they looked so alike that strangers sometimes mistook them for one another until one of them spoke. They shared the same sharp brow and the same quick grey eyes, though Lyra's gaze rested on things like a hawk's and Kaelen's tended to wander towards whatever puzzle had most recently caught him.

"I was distracted," Kaelen admitted.

"By what?"

"The mist." He tilted his head back and squinted into the white. "It is wrong, Lyra. Fog does not smell of iron."

She opened her mouth to tease him and then, unexpectedly, closed it. She breathed in slowly. There was something there, faint but undeniable, a coppery tang beneath the damp, the smell of a forge that had been left burning too long.

"It is probably the smiths," she said at last. But her voice had lost its edge.

What neither of them knew, and what no one in Dawnhollow could have known, was that the smell had nothing to do with the smiths.

Far to the north, beyond the black mountains that the grandmothers glanced towards, the ground had begun to shiver. It was not a quake, not yet. It was a slow and deliberate trembling, as though something enormous were stirring in its sleep. Birds had abandoned the high crags days ago. The last shepherd who had grazed his goats near those slopes had come down muttering about dreams, about voices speaking in languages he did not know, and nobody had paid him much attention.

And far beyond even that, in a place with no name on any map, a man stood at the edge of a vast pit and smiled.

His name was Veyrath. He was neither young nor old, neither handsome nor ugly, and he was dressed in plain grey like a clerk. Anyone passing him on the road would have forgotten his face within the hour. He had planned it that way. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, looking down into a darkness that had not seen light since before the first human tongue had learned to speak, and the darkness looked back at him with a patience that was almost fond.

"Soon," he said softly, to no one, or to everyone below. "Be patient a little longer."

Then he turned and walked away, and the mist crept south.

In Dawnhollow, the morning wore on.

By the time the sun had burned a pale hole through the fog, the twins had abandoned their game and gone down the hill into the town. Their father, Dorran, had summoned them to the Hall of Rank for the weekly council. He was a broad, weathered man in his fifties, Awakened these thirty years, with a grey-streaked beard and the calm, unhurried manner of someone who had settled a thousand disputes about boundary fences and stolen chickens. He was waiting for them on the Hall steps, and he did not smile as they approached.

"You smelled it too," he said, before either of them could speak.

"The iron," said Kaelen.

"The iron." Dorran nodded slowly. "Three of the watchmen have come to me this morning. Two of the mill workers. A woman from the lower market who says her cat will not stop staring at the northern wall." He rubbed his jaw. "Individually, these are nothing. Together, they trouble me."

"Should we send riders?" Lyra asked.

"Riders would take four days to reach the mountains and four to return." Dorran looked at his daughter, and something proud and worried crossed his face in the same moment. "No. For now, we watch. I want the wall doubled by nightfall. And I want the two of you close to the house."

"Father," said Kaelen carefully, "you are frightened."

Dorran was quiet for a moment. Around them, the square went about its ordinary business. A baker argued with a carter. Children chased a stray dog around the well. An old woman sat on a stool with her knitting, and nearby, a boy of about seven had stopped to stare up at the Awakened family with open, uncomplicated admiration.

"I am not frightened," Dorran said finally. "I am careful. There is a difference, and one day I hope you will both know it as well as I do."

He turned and went inside. The twins stood a moment longer on the steps.

"Do you think it is the story?" Lyra said, very quietly. "The abyss. Do you think any of it is true?"

Kaelen considered the question honestly, as he considered all questions. He thought of the iron in the mist and the shepherd's strange dreams and the way the watchmen had been speaking in lowered voices all week. He thought of the old stories, of the wings the width of barns, and of the seal that had held for longer than anyone could remember.

"I think," he said slowly, "that every myth began as something someone was afraid to say plainly."

Lyra said nothing. After a while she took his hand, as she had when they were small, and together they climbed the steps into the Hall.

Behind them, unnoticed, the little boy in the square was still staring up at the northern sky. He frowned. Then he tugged his mother's sleeve and said, in the matter-of-fact voice that only very young children possess, "Mama, why is the sky bleeding?"

His mother laughed, and told him not to be silly, and led him away to buy bread.

But high above the northern hills, where the mist had thinned, a single thread of dark crimson was spreading slowly across the clouds, like ink dropped into clear water. It was beautiful, in its way. It was also the first sign that the world was about to change.