Cane's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Cane hit the grass at dawn and the sky was the wrong color. He knew his own world. He had spent his life hunting rumors of an empty throne, one built for shapeshifters who had ruled here and then vanished. He meant to claim it. Now he lay in a wet field under two moons he had never seen, and the ruined city he remembered stood whole and new on the hill. He stood. His body ached from the fall. The gold ring on his hand still held its ruby, warm against his skin. It was the one proof he carried that his blood came from the first of his kind. But there were no others of his kind here. Not one. He reached inside himself for the old feeling of change, and found it thin, like a rope worn to a thread. "You are early," a voice said. "Or very late." A woman sat on a stone root of a huge tree behind him. Its bark looked like carved rock, and its branches spread wide enough to shade the whole hill. She had violet hair and thin, bright wings that shivered when she spoke. She had not been there a breath ago. Cane was sure of it. "Who are you?" he asked. "I don't fully know yet." She tilted her head, studying him like a puzzle. "I woke the moment you struck the ground. As if the world made me to answer for you." Cane looked at the whole city on the hill and understood. "This is the past. My past. Ten thousand years back." "Yes." She rose and stepped closer. Her feet did not bend the grass. "And there are no shapeshifters here, Cane. Not yet. The throne you want is empty because no one has been born to fill it." She smiled, but her eyes were serious. "You are not their heir. You are their beginning." The words landed hard. If he had already lived among his people, then someone had made them first. He turned his ring toward her. "This proves I'm the progenitor." "It proves you will be," she said. "Right now it proves nothing. History has a shape. You broke it by falling here. If you do not set it right, your race is never born, and you unmake yourself." Cane closed his fist. He had come to claim a throne. Instead he had to build the bloodline that built it. Every wife, every child, every legacy he wanted now had to start with his own hands, in a world that did not know his name. "Then I begin," he said. "Show me where." The fairy held out her hand. Illusions bloomed around her fingers, small figures of many races bowing to a curly-haired king. "I will guide you," she said. "Every shapeshifter that ever lives will trace back to what you do next. So choose it well." Cane took her hand and started toward the city.