Dae Avari's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Dae pushed through wet reeds, his talons sinking into black mud. Behind him lay months of dead ends — torn maps, burned letters, a dozen wrong names. He carried a worn leather journal under his clockwork arm. Inside it, every rumor about wounding an immortal. None of them led anywhere. Time was eating him alive, and he still did not know what could make his quarry afraid. The hut rose from the swamp like it had grown there. Herbs swung from its eaves. A small woman in a tall brown hat opened the door before he knocked. She looked him over once — the feathers, the cloth over his eye, the journal — and stepped aside. "You look like a man chasing something that bites back," Greta said. "Come in. I have books." She let him stay. He read for months at her table, working through her strange stack of tomes — gods and their domains, their wars, their quiet hatreds. He filled the journal with new notes. No name matched the one who took his family. But deep in an old researcher's diary, two names sat circled in faded red: Darchovius the Death Lord, and Garoth the Judge. Gods who could punish gods. Proof, at last, that immortals could be hurt. He closed the book carefully. Greta watched him from across the room, stirring something that smelled of root and smoke. "Found your weapon?" she asked. "A direction," he said. He stood and gathered his coat. She did not try to keep him. "The fee for the reading," she said, in the same plain voice, "is that you come back when your silly revenge is finished. Be my apprentice. Three left before you. None stayed." Dae laughed — short, dry, surprising himself. He looked at her small, steady face and dipped his head. "When it's finished," he said. He stepped out into the wet air with two god-names burning in his journal and a door he could, someday, return to.