𝐀 𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐆 𝐎𝐅 𝐈𝐂𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐄..
Eagles do not eat dead things, but her family's beaks have long acquainted themselves with the cursed flesh of the frozen enemy. From a land of eternal winter, waging a never-ending war, Dannya car...
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IT STARTED TWELVE THOUSANDyears ago. Long before I was born.
Four hundred and fifty generations stand between me and the ancestor who, against all odds, had led thousands of people across an entire world, towards better lands, with the promise of a new and sturdy home, where they would never again be slaves. Daavyd bore no crown or title or even family name, for the First Men were united in their great numbers, bound by respect behind not a rank, but a proven strength and courage.
Some forgotten song hums that Daavyd was an unlikely man. Massive and tall, with dark eyes and a beard thick and ruffled in the shade of auburn, he imitated the intimidation hidden in the setting sun. Above his head flew the Ancient Eagles, five in number, all named after his brothers and sisters, lost to the length of the road or to the whips of masters they've left behind.
They say the Ancient Eagles were as tall as a tree, that their wings spread wide enough for them not to fit under the roof of any of the homes the First built on the new land. Their beaks were tougher than any of their bronze weapons and their talons long and sharp enough to cut humans in half.
I've only ever seen the tip of a single half a beak, hanging around my father's neck, then my brother's. It kept its sharpness.
The Ancient Eagles were the first victims of a purging fear that crawled from an unspeakable need: the First needed space, they needed timber for fires and for homes, but their axes turned the wrong trees into splinters, smashed through white faces carved into trunks and crying crimson tears too hastily. Those faces haunted them wordlessly at first, turning nature against them, driving wolves mad, eagles unfamiliar and horses wild, but the war had started and the Children of the Forest were our first enemy on the new land.
The First had defiled the Children's ancestors by destroying weirwood trees.
For something they did not know, the price was paid in blood, terror, gore.
Everything my people had fled their birthplaces for had found them nonetheless by the arcane powers of the first inhabitants of this new, prosperous grounds. The Children of the Forest may have been fragile, unarmored, far inferior to the toughened warrior skills of the First, but they had one advantage apart from their pristine camouflage, attuned to the nature only they knew best: the magic of the old gods.
This war spanned for two thousand years.
Greenseers, mages of the Children, enlisted the wilderness into the battle, while the First harnessed fire for attacks.
The more weirwood got destroyed, the more vicious the Children became, mourning the souls of ancestors that they were losing. Like a never-ending competition, one crime pushed another into motion; injustice after injustice had the Children pushed to the desperation of one last spell.
