Flame and Sparrow: Prologue

Once, when I was a child, I accidentally set fire to a god.

I recalled the flames now as I stared at my sister’s empty, blood-soaked bed. The way their heat had licked at my body was remarkably similar to the scorch I currently felt creeping over my skin. The way my vision tunneled, unable to focus on anything but the bright and burning spots of red…it was the same. As was the sick twist in my gut telling me I was in trouble.

The difference was now my sister was not here to get me out of trouble as she had that fiery day—as she always had.

“Karys!”

The sound of my name shocked me into moving, sending me tripping backwards, stumbling out of my sister’s tiny room and into the hallway.

A hand landed on my arm, strong and unyielding. Steadying me. I finally managed to pry my gaze away from Savna’s bloodied bed, and I turned to face the person standing behind me.

Andrel’s bright hazel eyes met mine for a fraction of a moment before they caught on the horror inside the room beyond. His lips parted slightly. His breath caught briefly. The tiniest glimpses of emotion—most would have missed them, but I knew Andrel. I knew when he was rattled, when he was afraid.

It didn’t happen often.

There were voices raising outside. A fierce wind swirling stronger, creaking the trees and rattling the thatched roof of the house. The air felt strange, prickling against my skin, leaving an acrid taste in my mouth if I dared to inhale too deeply. 

An unspoken understanding passed between Andrel and me.

This place is not safe.

I didn’t know what was happening. What sort of darkness was falling upon my home, or when—if—I’d be able to return to it. So I pulled free of Andrel and took what I could of my sister, sweeping things off her desk into a bag, grabbing items from the trunk by her bed and tossing them in with no real method or reasoning. I didn’t even look at what was inside before cinching the bag shut. 

I just knew I couldn’t leave all of her behind.

Hoisting the bag onto my shoulder, I turned and raced down the hallway, through the back door, past the marks that had been clawed into the frame. My gaze snagged on the deepest of those marks. 

A shiver skipped down my spine.

I shook it off and ran faster.

Andrel followed closely behind. We didn’t stop until we were deep in the woods that stretched for miles behind my family’s tiny farm. We approached a steep, rock-strewn hill—too steep for anyone to easily descend on us from above—and settled in with our backs against it, scanning the area before us for threats. The trees were thick here, wrapped in the puffy white flowers and timid green leaves of early spring. The weaving of their branches seemed almost unnatural, as though they had reached out and worked together to tangle up as tightly as possible.

The softest of footfalls snapped our attention back in the direction we’d come from.

Our heightened senses confirmed we were being followed, but relaxed us soon after; we recognized the scent on the air. Earth and a tang of something fruity.

A familiar face appeared in the darkness. Deep set green eyes, the slightly crooked nose he’d broken as a child, sharp cheekbones framed by waves of pale golden hair—Cillian. He was my sister’s closest friend, and had probably been paying one of his regular late night visits to her, only to stumble on a scene of…

What?

I still didn’t know, still couldn’t think clearly enough to make sense of what we’d fled from. 

I just hoped, for Cillian’s sake, that he hadn’t gone into the house.

If he had, he said nothing of the blood, or the strange voices, or the odd airs that had swallowed up my home—nothing at all for a very long time, until his breath caught, nearly choking him before he cleared his throat and said, “There were beasts prowling around your house.”

My heart sank like a stone into the pit of my stomach. “Beasts?

“Divine ones.”

We’d been right to run.

But where were those beasts now?

Cillian choked on another breath. “And Savna…”

Andrel’s expression was grim as he finished the sentence himself. “…Can handle whatever danger we’re dealing with better than most. She might have escaped. She might be hiding somewhere safe and sound; no point in worrying yet.”

As if to challenge that lack of worry, a rush of wind roared between us, strong enough to lift pebbles from the hillside and pelt us with them. 

Cillian’s usually stoic form broke a little. A soft gasp slipped from his mouth. He knelt and braced a hand on the rocky ground, tucking his head toward his chest as if fighting the urge to vomit.

I stayed on my feet, though I shared the same fight to keep my stomach in check—because it wasn’t a natural wind caressing my cheek and making it tingle. Not a normal breeze lifting my hair, curling the dark, normally straight strands this way and that… 

It was wind caused by magic, just as it had been at my house. 

And not the cursed and earthbound type that some of the elven-kind like myself still possessed—this magic was stronger. Deadlier. Divine. It made my eyes sting and my bones tremble before leaving a terrible taste of salt and metal on my tongue.

“It’s the same as the other week,” breathed Cillian, shaking his bowed head. He wore his fear openly now. It was written in the creases of his forehead—the only part of his face I could see—and it was lifting bumps along his skin, making the pale hairs on his arms stand on end. “They’re getting bolder.”

The middle-gods, he meant. The Marr. The ones who had taken our kind’s place at the righthand of the three Moraki, our Creators and the three most powerful beings in all the realms. 

The damnable Marr…who were flooding this particular realm with magic, rallying humans against us, trying to choke out what remained of our kind. It was a war that had raged for generations, turning particularly violent in the past decade or so.

Tonight that raging violence felt closer than ever.

“It is the same as before, isn’t it?” Cillian asked, shockingly green eyes wide as he finally lifted his head again. “I’m not going mad, am I? The stench of the magic, the feel of it…We all felt it coming close the other week, didn’t we? We should have heeded the warning and laid low. They were targeting us. That much is clear now.”

Andrel ran a hand through his hair, black as fresh ink and darker even than mine. “You’re not going mad.” A humorless smile tugged up one corner of his full lips. “No more mad than the rest of us at least.”

“It was an omen. An omen. And we ignored it—”

Andrel clicked his tongue, and I tried—unsuccessfully—to shove the memories of that omen from my mind.

Exactly two weeks ago, in the dead of night, a divine…beast had shown up on the doorstep of my house, its side shredded and bloody, its massive antlers broken and dangling from its head, a trail of magic following in its wake and leaching the life and color from everything it touched. 

It had died on our threshold, its claws sinking into the door frame as though desperately trying to hold onto Avalinth, this mortal realm that I—and the rest of the elven-kind—had been relegated to.

Andrel convinced my sister to burn its body. I’d watched from the window of my room as they dragged it into the wheat fields and dealt with it. There had been no incense, no water, no prayers. No rituals at all, just fire curling bright and wicked in the dark and a cloud of smoke rising, settling over our house and land. 

For three days that cloud had hung there with seemingly no intention of moving. 

Even after it finally dispersed, the salt and metal taste in the air lingered.

Word had spread of the incident, and the human villages we sometimes frequented had shunned us even more so than usual because of it. 

Disrespectful heathens, they hissed, while refusing to buy or trade with us. Inviting curses. Did they kill the creature? Did they do it on purpose? They show no remorse, and now the curses will follow, and serves them right.

My sister had been quick to snap back at them. What do a few more curses matter to us, given the hell we already endure in this kingdom?

I sucked in a sharp breath at the memory of her words, wishing more than anything that I could hear her voice. I fell back against a thick tree, grateful for its strength, as mine seemed to be failing me more and more with each passing second.

Andrel finished pacing the edge of our circle and moved back to me. He placed a hand on each of my shoulders, his intense gaze forcing me from my thoughts. “We’ll find her. I swear it.”

I managed a nod.

The heat was back on my skin, creeping up to my scalp, making my face flush. I fought the urge to pick at the burn scars that covered much of the left side of my face. It used to be a bad habit. 

Used to be. 

I’d stopped years ago, burying the tendency as deeply as I’d buried the memory of what had caused the scars in the first place.

It had been an accident. A slip of my hand that sent my lantern tumbling to the ground, igniting the maps shoved underneath a table—a table holding wooden carvings of upper-gods I was meant to be praying to. 

The maps should not have been there. 

They were pretend charts to pretend treasures, remnants of a game Savna and I had played the day before. I’d stuffed them under the shrine table, determined to keep my sister from finding them, knowing that any place with ties to the divine would be the last place she’d look for anything. 

One of the maps had been drenched in ceremonial oil spilled from somewhere above, Mother had decided afterward. It was the only explanation for how quickly things had ignited—so quickly that the flames had leapt from the table and statues, setting fire to my clothing and hair before I could escape. 

My sister—the one who had finally managed to put out the flames—swore it was magic. That the statues were cursed, as were all things dealing with the damnable gods. Cursed and just waiting for a chance to burn their fallen, disobedient mistakes.

I’d dreamt about the same thing for weeks afterward. The Upper-God of the Shade glaring down at me, making me feel small and insignificant and wrong…And then fire catching on his wings, wrapping up his body that turned out to be made of nothing more than wood. 

But the statues never truly burned in my dreams. The gods were always still there when the smoke and flames cleared. Always glaring back at me with their cruel, carved smiles.

“Karys.” My eyes blinked open at the sound of Andrel’s tired, hoarse voice. I didn’t remember closing them. Didn’t remember slumping down against the tree, or drifting off, but apparently I had—the first hints of daylight were filtering through the tangled trees. Birds were chirping. A rooster crowed somewhere in the distance. 

Loud. 

It was all so terribly loud. Like I didn’t belong here, and every noise threatened to announce me, to give my presence away.

Andrel offered me a hand. I let him pull me to my feet. My knees buckled and my stomach churned more violently than ever, but I stayed upright. He began to walk, and I followed without bothering to ask where we were going.

As we walked, my hands twitched and fumbled for solid things to hold. I pulled my bag around to my chest and pawed through its pockets, my fingers eventually closing around something I couldn’t resist pulling out.

A thin but strong cord of leather came first, and then the carved wooden charm that hung heavily from its center. A sparrow-shaped charm. A gift from our father to Savna—he’d given me a matching one, but I’d lost it just a few months later. I’d been devastated.

This was not how I’d wanted to replace it.

I stopped walking, my thumb tracing the wing curled around the bird’s body. It was well-made, fluid and alive-looking, as if it might unfurl those wings at any moment and take off despite being made of thick wood.

Andrel slowed, glancing back at me, frowning. 

I tried to speak. Failed.

“We’ll find her,” he said again. 

My heart felt as if it might crack in two. But I trusted Andrel nearly as much as I trusted my sister. He had a way of making impossible things seem not only possible, but probable—not just to me, but to everyone who spent more than a few moments in his presence.

I clutched the tiny sparrow tight in my palm, and I didn’t argue with him.

* * *

Weeks passed.

We didn’t find her.

Months passed.

Nothing still.

The days rose and fell like violent waves against this jagged and rocky stretch of my life, and soon I came to more fully understand what Savna had known from a much younger age—that the gods took whatever they wanted and did not give back.

I saw the devastating pattern of it all so clearly now.

The Marr were the ones who had taken our identities, after all. Called us the unworthy ones. The mistakes. The fallen. They had tried to erase us, crush us, made the humans hate us, turned us all against one another so that they could distract from whatever atrocities they wanted to commit in order to further take over this realm. 

Taking, taking, taking.

My mother had been among those who gave willingly. But my father had rebelled, and he’d died when I was eleven—an accident, we’d been told. 

I no longer believed that.

Mother had withdrawn into herself after his death, spending her days drifting like dandelion fluff on the wind, her only outings to the shrines popping up at a relentless pace across our kingdom, her only words coming in the form of prayers and one-sided conversations with the statues in those shrines. 

I’d tried to follow her. I hadn’t wanted her to be taken from me too, so I’d knelt and prayed side-by-side with her for years—until one dreary spring morning when she packed up and disappeared, off on a pilgrimage to prove her devotion to the new gods of our world. 

Good riddance, my sister had said. We’d managed on our own ever since, with Savna becoming more and more like our father—a rebel with her sights set on destroying the divine—every day.

Now she was gone, too.

All of them were gone, and I realized that every major hurt or loss I’d suffered could be traced back to the gods. 

Every. Single. One.

And those gods…oh, how I started to hate them.

Soon I could no longer remember a time before the hate. Before the burning. I forgot the statues, the prayers, the sacraments my mother had so fervently insisted upon throughout my childhood—it all left me so quickly, like a tree without any roots, a ship caught in a storm without its anchors.

Such fragile, useless, unsteady things.

Which was why sometimes I wondered if my childhood memory was faulty, and if setting fire to that smiling god had really been an accident at all.

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