The Arkanist

Prologue: A Hanging

Prologue: A Hanging

Nightfall, 2995

Ash fell from the stony grey skies, and it had for ten days.

  Since then, nearly a thousand men had died, either burned at the stake or hanged.

Laric had been sentenced to a hanging. He would be the thousandth.

He had been held within a small prison just outside of a small town. What little people lived there came to see him off. A public hanging was rare in these parts and not likely missed.

His cell had been old, all of crumbled granite and rusted iron, the gaps in the walls whistling with a high, shrill voice that would scream through the day and into the deep of night. Laric had sat with his back resting upon the wall, his clothes gone haggard and wet with his own piss. The space had been lit only by a single torch, shivering in the corner, its light pooling upon the wet floor in shuddering spasms, cold and pale in the black.

The days had passed slowly, day and night seemingly blurring into one, a compendium of shadow, a whirring nightmare so loud and quiet and still and violent to haunt a man to death. Laric did not die in that place. But he did fade. He faded like a shadow in the high breeze, like the petals of a whisperblade in deep autumnal madness.

It did not make the walk to the gallows any easier. Nothing would.

Laric half-watched two children scamper past him and settle down before the wooden gallows, looming like a nail of ebony, a gaunt skeleton razed black, the corded rope a thin grey bony hand. Their eyes were wide with excitement, with anticipation, and innocence. He remembered them, knew them, clear as white flame upon the mountainside: one set blue, the other grey as ash.

Laric did not remember the name of the town he would die in, but remembered their colors and the sigil of their lord. He knew the jailor had bore them, the meaty man with the screwed face and one eye. He remembered the banners had rippled with them and the walls had worn them and still now his captors garbed themselves in it as they carried him across the ashen ground. Without thinking, Laric could see it, a haunting mass: a murder of crows, black as pitch, flying against a grey field. They shrieked with the voices of grinding metal, crying through air upon ink wings, bloody and sharp.

It was midday, and the sun was but a memory upon the sky, concealed behind stormclouds of increasing darkness and gloom. They ran across the expanse like wolves, grey as cold stone, broken by lashes of branching lightning. The bolts cracked the sky, two jagged blades of crimson and cobalt, stark and vibrant upon the black.

The ash fell like snow: lazy and languorous, dull upon the ground, broken.

Laric had been blamed, blamed for the ash, blamed for the darkness, blamed for the cold, as had the hundreds before him and the hundreds to follow. They were arkanists. They posed a threat.

The Anturan Empire told the world they had killed the gods. They told the world the ash was their remains, their shattered remnants, and that the legends were true.

But they were wrong. They were all wrong.

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This is the start of the SECOND DRAFT. The First Draft starts with the chapter titled: Prelude.