fiction by cecilia rose dillon

Excerpts from “Dawn of the Red Death”

Prologue

Far below the jagged cliffs of the Shattered Coast, the Sanctuary of the Torrem stood in bleak defiance of its age, clinging from within heavy rounded walls to an improbable lump of sea-battered sandstone no man was ever intended to occupy. At the compound’s center, cushioned by circular layers of newer structures and ancient mulberry shrubs, the great tower of the Torrem erupted from the southernmost cliffs with all the majesty of a splinter wedged into a giant’s heel. In its original state of being, the tower had been a meek and slight structure of blonde stone, built to mimic its surroundings for reasons long since forgotten, but additions made by its more recent inhabitants had brought an end to its secrecy. Gaudy colored glass had been installed in its windows in order to more effectively filter book-damaging light, and great granite walls had been wrapped around its premises in an unfortunate attempt to provide protection to a structure which had, until this occupancy, been under no threat.

The men of the Torrem were foolish, plagued by a paranoia handed down to them through the ages by the very forefathers who had made the decision to occupy this remote scrap of rock. A sacrifice made by the learned followers of the long-silent god, a Ia Alí. Little could grow on the island itself, save for the carefully maintained mulberry trees which had stood around the base of the tower since its discovery. The compound was flanked by a scattering of farmland on the green of the nearby mainland, though those that tended to it were kept well out of the compound itself.

Only the devout could reside in the halls of the Torrem where the order maintained a vast catalog of hoarded knowledge in the form of books. While the acquisition and storage of knowledge was of paramount concern within the Torrem, the monks were still creatures of flesh and blood and, as such, still had to be fed, housed, guarded, and clothed. Those who did not deal in the learning of science, language, art, or any of the classical scholarly pursuits still found spiritual release within trades which could be applied to the corporeal needs of the residents. Each department answered in turn to their own masters whose knowledge and skill were renowned, none more so than the illustrious Mother Superior Mori whose oversight of the Torrem’s major source of income—worm silk fed by her meticulously maintained mulberry orchard—had bolstered the compound’s wealth when visitors and their donations had begun to wane.

Visitors and hopeful postulates with enough wealth and connections might—through nefarious and often rather expensive means—happen across a suitable text that had not already been absorbed into the massive library’s holdings. Otherwise those who might wish to tour the facilities were only allowed entry to the outer ring of the compound with the expenditure of sufficient coin. It was a law which had remained unfinchingly maintained until the rule of the current Abbot who had, against his better judgment, made certain allowances for the sake of research. Allowances which now sat across from his desk, piously stooped and fidgeting in mock-guilt as they attempted to evade punishment for yet another infraction of the Torrem’s rules.

Once upon a time both the current Abbot and his youngest brother had been two of the Torrem’s brightest stars, now all that remained to support the weight of his undeservedly inflated ego were the unending expectations of continued excellence which his order had imposed upon each of his predecessors in turn. While those who worked beneath him tirelessly learned and preserved the information of the wide world in honor of their patron deity, it was his biadu—his sacred duty to refine their gathered knowledge into new writings which could be shared with the masses and logged into the order’s stacks as evidence of their continued service to mankind on behalf of their god.

A tome was expected of him every ten years, a deadline which had become more and more pressing with each occurrence of its passing. For all his diligence and for all the labor of those talented and devout folk who worked beneath him, there simply seemed to be nothing left of particular interest which he could write about. In an age of reduced contact with the old gods, the gradual flow of prospective postulants which the Torrem had enjoyed since the days of its establishment had gradually slowed to a steady drip. Of those interested few could even be considered astute or trustworthy enough to take up the mantle of a Seeker who could journey about the Nécara¹ collecting information that was not as easily acquired in the form of stolen texts yanked from the skeletal hands of the long buried, or accounts taken directly from those whose knowledge existed within an oral tradition and as such required help in having their thoughts and beliefs properly catalogued.

On the day his brother, Harel—one of only three still living Seekers—had arrived home to the Torrem’s keep with a fussy flame-haired elvish infant in hand and a declaration that he meant to keep her, the Abbot had five years remaining on a text he had only barely managed to start that year. She was, as far as either man was aware, the first elven child to be seen in nearly five hundred years, making Harel’s argument that the girl’s unusual heritage made her an ideal subject of study impossible to discount. Six years later, the Abbot had been presented with a similar argument for yet another prospective niece, this one gold and glimmering and brimming with the potential of a distinguished—if disappointingly human—bloodline, whom he had welcomed eagerly. After all, even if the firrst still managed to prove herself useful, a second prodigy only meant more fodder for his next work.

At the time, the Abbot had thought himself blessed by the gods for such a sudden influx of inspiration, but his faith in the pair of miracles had cooled greatly as passing years piled weighted doubts upon the promise he had once seen in at least the elder of the two girls.

On this day, the Abbot’s patience was wearing even thinner than usual. After all, the pair had been warned, hadn’t they? They had been warned countless times and yet they still attempted treachery at every turn for their sinister and frequently insubordinate purposes. Their foster father’s devotion to his work meant that he had been of little actual help during their upbringing, although the girls doted on him. Love and respect for one man, though, was not enough to ensure their behavior during the Seeker’s many long absences, meaning that the inconvenience of providing both education and discipline were largely inflicted upon the Abbot himself, and then over the years largely delegated at random to any of a dozen or so others who took to the details of the children’s care with far more aplomb than the Abbot had ever managed.

Of the many tutors and laborers assigned to their needs, it was Mother Superior Mori herself who had eventually undertaken the younger sister Aster’s interest in weaving and spellcraft, proving the girl’s worth to all within the instant of the decision, and eventually going so far as to connect her with those illusive and socially inept keepers of the Torrem’s Special Collection when her thirst for knowledge had outgrown even Mother Mori’s vast selection of skills. The elder girl—Cait—had in turn been taken in by the captain of the guard, Valkenna Saltsong, whose compassion, discipline, and encouragement had fed her already rabid propensity for action and turned it into a tool which could be used to soothe the girl’s tumultuous temper and mind, despite doing little to impress the Abbot’s exclusive interest in the famed magical prowess of her race.

All was secondary to the task which the Abbot insisted was the most appropriate method for the girls to expand their minds while earning them the room and board they did not pay for through worship: the task of reading. Not the lofty honor of consuming text for the sake of memorization and preservation, but the menial task of skimming submitted works and taking word counts to ensure the content was worth the time of those more qualified who would put the texts to closer study before coming to a final decision as the hopeful entrant awaited news in the visitors’ housing. It was a task given to only the lowliest of postulates, a task that was considered by all who had recently undertaken it to be most odious. However, while postulates eventually graduated out of the service and moved into a more specialized field, Cait and Aster had themselves been left to the task year after year, quite accidentally becoming the resident experts on all new information that passed through the Reading Room, whether deemed “useful” or otherwise.

In fact, after some time the pair had decided that they really had a better grasp of what “useful” should be considered to be. Cait’s love of fiction and Aster’s love of theoretical text had long worn on those stodgy Elders whose duty it was to maintain the historical integrity of the Torrem’s catalog.

Insisting, as always, that nothing other than the proven and the known was worthy of the hoard which festered with an endless lurking hunger, desperately waiting to be sated by itself at long last.

————
1 Literally “Known World”, now the proper name for the continent.

Chapter One: Trapped

The surface of the Abbot’s desk shuddered as he dropped the stack of incriminating evidence onto it with a flourish of irate gusto.

“Why, pray tell, did the two of you feel the need to mark all of these books”—he gestured to the pile of eight or so recently published novels, and Cait registered passively that at least six of them had been from Aster’s designated morning stack—“As desirable? Not only are they fiction, which, as you well know, is only accepted under very specific circumstances, but we already possess each of them. Not to mention that—”

He continued to rave, glaring down at the two of them as they sat, heads bowed, on the other side of his expansive mahogany desk. The familiar vein which so often seemed to adorn his forehead in Cait’s presence began to throb as neither rushed to answer him. Cait wasn’t quite sure what to say to appease him. She attempted to glare at her younger sister from the corner of her eye, wishing (as she often did) that they’d managed to figure out telepathy so that these little miscommunications were easier to manage.

Aster, for her part, did her best to squirm and look as if she felt guilty, but Cait knew her too well to be fooled by her younger sister’s piously widened fuchsia eyes and anxious twisting of golden locks around her finger. Cait watched as Aster’s mouth screwed up to the side for a moment in disappointment. There had been a plan somewhere here, Cait guessed, and her shoulders slouched as her mind raced through the usual options before landing on one that seemed most likely.

“Sorry, we just saw the people who brought them at the Halfway House—” Cait began.

“—And they seemed like the sort of people who should be let in!” Aster finished feebly, her usual liar’s aplomb unable to give the weak excuse much in the way of believability. She seemed genuinely crestfallen, and—for a moment—Cait began to worry she had forgotten some planned heist or the like. She racked her brain, trying to sort her thoughts into neat, categorized stacks as the monks had been trying to teach her to do for the past twenty-one years of her life, but came up with nothing.

“Yeah,” she agreed, ducking her head further and twisting her small, pale hands together in an attempt to compliment her most beloved cohort’s contrition. “They seemed genuinely pious, and we hoped an exception could be made.”

The Abbot sighed and reached to soothe his throbbing brow with one aged hand. “You know that is not how it works, and don’t call the guest lodgings that! Whoever is encouraging it needs to be dealt with. . . .” he grumbled and refocused himself on the irritation at hand. “These excuses may have turned my head when you were toddlers, but you’re more than capable of upholding the standards of the Torrem at this point in your lives.” He paused, his teeth audibly grinding as he attempted to rein in his temper. “Additionally, you act as if I would not have noticed the fact that these applicants were around your age.”

Cait’s brows flattened over her eyes like two bloody gashes as her head snapped to the side, allowing her to openly glare at Aster.

“Really? I hadn’t noticed, sir,” the young blonde murmured, voice honeyed with innocence even as her coppery complexion flushed under Cait’s vicious scrutiny.

No one spoke, and Cait wrenched her gaze away from her sister to consider the Abbot’s desk. There was a small packet of papers, not a foot away from her, that was practically falling off of the cluttered desk from the pressure of its surrounding mounds of parchment. She wondered idly if it were important and if its absence might in some way inconvenience her uncle, the Abbot, and waited patiently for him to turn away from them to glare out of his drastically askew stained glass window as he always did when he became frustrated with his brother’s wards.

As if on cue, the Abbot turned away from Cait and Aster to squint through the fractured panes of glass at his back. No longer a young man, his age had begun to show in the slope of his shoulders and the near right angle at which his neck jutted from its moorings and caused his long trailing white beard to dangle inches ahead of a frame made skeletal from years of its owner’s lack of care for it. Though his midnight blue and gold robes were by far the most splendid of the Torrem’s various uniforms, no amount of dignified attire could hide the fact that the responsibilities of his position had worn on him over the past three decades since his nomination had forced him to come to terms with the fact that there was nowhere left for the cocksure ambitions of his youth to carry him. Reflecting on these facts for the dozenth time that day, he sighed as he watched the progression of life in the Torrem compound below him, surely contemplating the grievous lapse in judgment he had displayed all those years ago when he had so graciously and so selflessly welcomed the girls. Cait’s hand darted out to grab the packet at the exact moment Aster reached for a tin of some sort which was half hidden under the litter of the Abbot’s desk. They smirked at each other, mouths curved into identical expressions of petty self-satisfied amusement as they pocketed their respective prizes.

Aster and Cait had always been an odd pairing. Aster was dark skinned, tall, and well-rounded. Her mane of shining golden locks hung loose around her pleasantly wide features, and her glittering magenta eyes watched everything around her with a cutting, bright intelligence completely devoid of menace. Her wit was matched only by her seemingly unending supply of bright enthusiasm for life, and an intense acute focus on whichever area of arcane study had held her attention most strongly that week.

To Cait, she was the most perfect person to ever tread mortal soil.

She was sociable, funny, and comfortable in any environment, even with the strangers who came as guests, which simultaneously intrigued and terrified the antisocial and unerringly practical Cait. It was Aster who weedled tales and the occasional dark-corner interaction from the residents of the halfway house, Aster who thought of the helpful questions to ask their tutors, Aster who plotted games and heists to keep the pair entertained, Aster who seemed to continuously succeed at every opportunity offered to her.

By contrast, wherever Aster was soft and malleable, Cait was sharp and harsh. She was both exceptionally short and exceptionally pale, and her unruly hair was such a rich blood red that it had caused more than one newcomer to express concern that she had acquired a head wound. She kept it tied back in a long plait extending from the nape of her neck (which Aster helped her straighten each morning to the sounds of their grumbled sleepy recountings of dreams or complaints about the temperature) in part for ease of maintenance and in part so that her thick tresses could lay reliably pinned over the sharp points of ears which were a clear indication of her peculiar race. Her features were pinched, jarringly sharp atop a rounded face. She would never be considered particularly attractive, but she would also never be particularly concerned with that fact.

Her only points of vanity were her unusually bright golden eyes, which she thought were rather striking though they had a tendency to make people uncomfortable and encouraged complaints about her unnerving tendency to not blink. The rest of her corporeal form she mostly viewed as an irritation. Despite dense muscling caused by her habitual hyperactivity, she remained small, standing two heads below Aster who was more than four years her junior. Her size was—similar the unusual shape of her ears—likely thanks to her mother’s inhuman heritage. She was what the Torrem’s people would call an elf, likely a partially-blooded elf, she had been told. Harel had known her mother through some mysterious means, but no further information had ever been given to her, and she was unable to look into the matter further on her own. Elves were hard to track and impossible to reach since their self-imposed seclusion in their homelands at the end of the War of Kings nearly nine hundred years before.

Her heritage had earned her sanctuary in the halls of the Torrem which kept her as if she were one of their many precious tomes. Aster’s had as well, though her parents’ identities had been wholly withheld from them both. Whoever they were, the Abbot had been tempted enough by Aster’s potential to allow the child entry ten years ago, forcing Cait to sacrifice the privacy of her room for the comfort of finally having someone to call a friend.

“It won’t happen again,” Cait said earnestly as she patted the front pocket of her jacket flat.

The Abbot sighed.

“I’m sure it will not,” he droned in a dry monotonous voice which betrayed his disbelief. He gestured once over his shoulder toward the door, “You may go, but you will be required to provide three hours of labor at the guest lodgings this evening as recompense.”

Cait and Aster grinned at each other.

“Oh no, not that!” Cait exclaimed in a tone not dissimilar from his, and the Abbot turned to glare at her.

“And you can muck out the stables once you’ve finished.”

Cait’s face fell, and she ground her teeth, cursing her own dimwitted petulance. “Yes, sir.”

His lips thinned even further into chapped, pale lines of disapproval as he added, “That is, if you’ve the daylight for it once you’ve finished making up for your abysmal performance in this quarter’s examinations.”

Cait’s blood stilled. She had hoped her failure to keep up with the Abbot’s dictated expectations for her would have been at least softened by her tutor, but—as usual—she found she had displeased her instructors more than they had let on in their interactions with her. Her stomach clenched at the reminder of her many failings.

“Yes, sir.”

“Now get out of my sight and attend to your morning devotions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, Cait?”

Cait froze, half-turned toward the door which Aster already held open, “Yes, sir?”

“I expect you to be able to manage some amount of responsibility. You are our oldest, after all. You are relied upon to be trustworthy and to do your best. Perhaps I have not offered you as many opportunities to display those qualities, it is true, but nevertheless these behaviors you’ve been indulging yourself with will need to be left behind at some point. Am I understood?”

Cait bowed her head, shame creeping through her veins like ice. She was supposed to be better than this. She had to be better than this, but somehow whenever she was alone with Aster that enforced sense of responsibility seemed to wane in the overwhelming light of joy.

Why am I never better than this?

“Yes, sir.”

They scurried out of the office, both girls feeling the relief of a narrowly escaped death despite the fact that the Abbot never seemed to truly find the will to properly punish them. They’d gotten away with worse than a few misclassified books in their time, but the older they got the more disagreeable he seemed to become. One of these days he’d lose his patience entirely, Cait knew, but somehow she was never quite able to make herself care.

“I’ll help you with the stables,” Aster whined as soon as the door to the Abbot’s office had clicked shut behind them. “I’m so sorry, Kitten, I should’ve told you.”

“Yeah, you should have,” Cait groaned as she began the descent down the long curving stairs of the tower which radiated a soft gold in the spell-lights’ glow. “And you shouldn’t have tried to find someone for me to fuck just because that’s how you deal with these situations.”

Aster gasped in mock-insult. “I just thought we could use a little company! I get tired of playing cards with you every night. You always cheat.”

“I don’t cheat, you’re just really bad at it ‘cause you don’t pay attention. Don’t lie to me.”

“Fine! So you’ve been really sad since—”

“Don’t say her name.”

Aster growled in irritation, “You’re so dramatic.”

“Bite me. I don’t have time for this, ass. I’m supposed to be running drills with Val.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“Well, then don’t call me kitten!”

Aster came to an abrupt halt at the next landing and whirled on her, using her height advantage in an attempt to cower her much shorter sibling. “I’m sorry for trying to help. You’re the one who’s been moping around like the world ended!”

“I have not been moping,” Cait hissed, knowing it was a lie.

Aster just gave her sister her usual blank stare of disbelief before throwing her hands up and continuing their descent past room after room of studious Readers pouring over their morning devotional tomes, surrounded by the infinite densely packed shelves of the Torrem’s amassed treasure.

“All I’m saying is that you deserve a little fun. Life isn’t archery practice and running laps, babe.”

Cait sighed and clenched her fists at her sides, feeling only a little guilty for her sour mood as she trudged down the steps behind her sister. It wasn’t Aster’s fault that woman had left, she reminded herself dejectedly. She picked up her pace until she was back in lockstep with her sister and reached out with a small, pale hand to pluck at Aster’s beloved, browned, callus-roughened one as it swung at her side. Aster casually flicked her hand out and caught Cait’s, squeezing it once fondly as they silently apologized to each other in their usual way.

“We could camp out in the hay stacks tonight? We haven’t for a while,” Cait suggested timidly.

“Ooh, now there’s an idea! But don’t you have to have an extra session with Parda?”

Cait growled at the reminder, “Well, I can meet you there after.”

The mismatched pair reached the bottom level of the tower where the single staircase flared out into the small, ancient entryway. The tower of the Torrem had stood since time immemorial, and while the history of its construction was still a much contested debate, the Torrem themselves had resided in it for the past four hundred years. It was a plain structure which had—under the Torrem’s care—been extended in height to such a point that it had begun to lean heavily eastward as if in exhaustion. The extreme angle of the building had been compensated for by the Torrem’s usual careful resourcefulness—in this case, a long bar of magicked steel which extended from one of the outer walls to the top of the tower where it gently prevented any further slouching. The floors were leveled every ten years, an event which was handled with much solemnity and care as the strongest of the order’s magic users pooled their strength to carefully shift each stone into a more amenable angle.

The effect was that of a lopsided and odd-angled tower of tomes carelessly left stacked away from the safety of their shelves, threatening to collapse at any moment. The stairs were notoriously uneven, and the ceilings of each room seemed to obey laws of their own as the beams slanted at strange angles beneath the weight of the shifting stones. As the order’s stores of books had grown, they had begun to tunnel down out of necessity for space, building tunnels in corkscrew mazes known as “the warren” beneath the tower which itself housed a vast minority of the Torrem’s collection at this point in its existence.

A doorway had been cut into the far wall in more recent years, caddy-corner from the main entrance, and Aster headed for it.

“I’m on reading duty,” she chirped excitedly. “But afterwards I think Parda is going to let me work on my transfiguration! I showed him—” she cut herself off, glancing toward the main doors and up the stairs to ensure they were alone. “I showed him that new trick I figured out with my hair!”

Cait’s gold eyes lit with enthusiasm. “Did he have any books on it?”

“No!” Aster crowed, her tone of excitement contrasting sharply with her statement. When she didn’t continue, Cait quirked an eyebrow at her.

“And that’s. . . exciting?” she paused, hoping for clarification, but Aster just nodded enthusiastically, eyebrows raised expectantly as if Cait were missing something obvious. “I thought you wanted to get better at it,” she continued, her words trailing out slowly in her confusion.

“He’ll help! But it’s maybe just a me thing!”

“Really?! Wait, does that mean—”

“That if I can figure it out myself I might be writing a book on it for the shelves!”

Cait squeaked, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she resisted the urge to jump up and down, screeching alongside her sister. She could no more contain her delighted shriek of “WHAT?!” than she could have skinned the moon. Her cry echoed oI the largely bare stone walls and from the reading rooms above came a cacophony of disgruntled complaints. Cait flushed crimson and mumbled an apology up the stairs.

There was no higher honor than to be a member of the Torrem and to be able to mount your own work on one of the thousands of shelves where it would be lovingly cared for and memorized by the faithful for the rest of time. At least, not that either of them was particularly aware of. Both Aster and Cait were merely adopted members of the monkhood and were not even technically considered postulants. They had lived most of their recent years wondering what their purpose was in a compound otherwise entirely occupied by the devout who underwent chores and tasks dictated by their particular areas of study which were in turn dictated by the rites they had endured while achieving their status among the monastery’s population.

Neither girl had ever been encouraged to undergo the sacred rites of initiation, and while Cait had eventually landed her sights on following in her father’s footsteps to serve as a Seeker and venture out into the world to acquire books for the Torrem’s collection, Aster herself had remained conflicted. Though they both loved their home dearly and had never been particularly rushed to leave it, Aster needed—nay, required its endless pool of resources and solitude for her magical studies. According to the Abbot, there was nowhere else she would be able to hone the intense magical predisposition she had developed in the latter end of her and her sister’s teenage years, and that knowledge had weighed heavily on the young woman in recent days as the two of them both began to feel more and more stagnated by the keep’s high walls and immovable gates.

The Torrem was only open to those who were willing to contribute as much as they were willing to learn. Labor was expected from each of them, and entrance of a new prospective postulant or visitor was no easy task. Postulants labored long hours doing menial chores and maintenance, training with the guard, tending to the orchard, or producing silk thread and fabric from cocoons of the worms which fed on the mulberry leaves under the hawklike surveillance of Mother Superior Mori. A postulant was only invited to progress up the ranks of the hierarchy after proving their devotion and skill over many years of labor, a process which could on its own take decades. Only once a postulant had been initiated could they gain access to the tower itself, and thus access to the tomes and education held within its walls and tunnels.

A less taxing route was available, though only to those who had the skill, fortitude, and—most importantly—money to bribe their way into a more comfortable caste by donating either a previously unknown text for the library’s stacks or enough money to facilitate the acquisition of one. However, if any member of the Torrem—at any level of the hierarchy—managed to contribute an original text that provided exclusively new information (no mean feat for a person fully secluded within the walls of a monastery), they were given certain privileges regardless of rank.

Most importantly, a published member was allowed to leave the compound and come back at will with the privileges bestowed to a Seeker of the Torrem, but without the required decade of survival and combat training Cait had already, for the most part, undergone which was expected from a true Seeker.

“So you do that, I get the old man to agree to letting me Seek, and then—”

“We’re free.”

Aster spoke the words with a kind of quiet reverence usually reserved for their many scheming conversations under the safety of the bedclothes in the dark of their room, and something about the tone being used out here in the open made the harsh reality of Cait’s world sink in. She briefly hugged her sister before exiting the tower and wandered out listlessly into the densely packed mulberry orchard which filled its courtyard. Monks darted around her as she strolled down the path in the direction of the low slung roofs of the residential quarter where the guard’s training house stood, too lost in thought to register the concerned glances at the Torrem’s collectively beloved first born daughter.

Cait would never be a Seeker. The Abbot had made that more than clear during her last attempt to convince him, but still he allowed her to go through a mockery of the rites of preparation if only because she had unashamedly begged him to. At first, the secret had been kept from Aster under the pretext of perhaps he’ll change his mind, but years had passed and Cait was still being held in stasis. While she had come to terms with the fact that she would never leave the Torrem, Aster would not take the news as well. In the meantime, she was no longer allowed to join the other hopefuls during their lessons and training, though the Abbot had allowed her to continue a sort-of private tutorship with the captain of the guard after months of her breaking her back around the compound to prove her worthiness to him. An hour a day was all she was allowed, no more, but luckily Val himself had always liked her and did his best to provide as genuine of a training experience as he could manage. It was the only thing she’d ever kept from Aster, and the hopeless chasm the lie had formed in her gut would likely never fully close. Aster would do such good in the world, Cait knew, and it would do neither of them any good for her to hold her little sister back over something as ultimately minor as sororal affection.

Beyond the mulberry bushes rose the barrier of the innermost wall. A low—merely fifteen feet or so—circle of stone guarded the inner ground of the Torrem’s sanctum in case the newer outer wall was ever breached, but on most days the gates leading from the courtyard to the singular road which circled it lay open as they did now. Cait walked through them, rousing from her state of hazy contemplation as the slight chill of the outer wall’s shadow fell over her. She looked up at the lip of the impenetrable fifty foot high, thirty foot wide barrier of stone and steel just in time to watch as a raven lit upon one of the six turrets which studded it. The hulking corvid watched her, head tilted and beady eyes unblinking, as Cait put her head down and forced herself to get to work, following a path that would never lead anywhere but back to its own beginning.