Prologue
I had to keep running. There was nothing else more important to my survival than to have my legs working. And keep working. I couldn't hear them. I don't think they knew that I had left yet, but they certainly would soon. When they found the Illyrian guard lifeless and cold on the floor of my cells, his keys tossed next to his body and my chains unbound.
The night was cold and bitter. My ragged clothes were nothing more than a brittle layer against the frosty wind that made my muscles ache and pulsate. I felt their pain; the way my legs cried out to stop, the way my back learnt to scream, the way my wings burnt in a fiery rage as the backs of my heels pounded against their drooping forms.
But the pain did not act to stop me. It did not fever my body to have me trip and fall, and succumb to the fate I knew would be mine if I stayed in that place. No, the pain was my fuel. It was my fury. It was my survival.
I brushed through the forest of pine trees that swept through the valley of the mountain pass. It was a sweet, delicious, and fresh scent that they offered, and I wished so much to slow and fill myself with their scent until my nose became so used to it, that I smelt it no more. What I wished more though, more than to run through the valley of pines, was to fly above them. Fly under the protection of the stars and run my hand along the current of the wind.
And I would keep flying. I would fly until my eyes fell closed and I felt no more. I had envisioned that more than enough times for it to come clearly at a single thought. Intrusive, I used to label them. I swatted them away as all younglings would be trained to. There was no place for dreams in the war-camps. No place for hope, either. But I was in no war-camp so I let myself dream.
I was not a trained warrior, but I knew how to survive. It is all I had been doing for the past fifty years. It is all that I had let myself think about. All I was allowed.
A dark root that protruded from the pine forest floor entangled my foot. It threw me forward, my already patchy tunic-top tore down the valley of my stomach as the gritty dirt scratched over my front. I yelped and skidded across the forest floor, the sound tearing my throat as I rolled over my back.
Once I came to stop, I let myself look at my wings for the first time since I had escaped my torturous cage. Looking at them made the pain all to real. What was once a steady film of scales, veins and ligaments, now draped with tears. My right wing was snapped along the peak of the bone connecting it to my back. The bone had not broken the membrane, but it was jagged against the lining and sunken where there was a gap between the bone.
A small wail escaped me and a shaking, skinny hand reached over my shoulder towards it. I was not a pale person, and if I were not so aghast by the state of my wings, I might have begun to fret over the starkness of my skin. My wings were my everything. They gave me an escape, they gave me a way to fight when I needed it. They were who I was born. To see them so torn, so lifeless, felt like a part of me had been destroyed.
And I will never forget the face of the man who did this to me.
Survive. Survive and I can have my revenge one day.
I scrambled back to my feet, ignoring the rash and burns that had dirt embedded into them. I had to get far away enough that I was safe to rest. Safe to find food. The root was soon far behind me, but everything looked the same. The dark whisp of nightfall, the scattered blips of starlight and the never-moving crescent which hid behind the thin tops of the coned trees.