Ashen Daybreak Act One

Prologue

“Would this be called a beginning, for the man was not born here, and he will die his death elsewhere? His greatest battle awaited on a distant rock saturated with ash, where he would greet his friends and at last face his foes. Yet the tale begins on a day most mundane, in a place so serene—for to study an avalanche, one must first heed the pebble that stirs the first fall of snow.”

The man opened his eyes to Karina, sculpted in relief as she severed a man’s head. The chatter from the outer halls had risen to an unbearable frenzy, and the restless flutter of pigeons struggling for balance upon his window rail only worsened the noise.

What a poor lad. To think the blade had not even reached his throat, and yet he was already dead. If only he had known Karina was neither famed for defeat nor known for mercy in the midst of a fight.

In his eyes, he sensed a fleeting calm—the kind that settles in just before fear fully sets in, as he met Karina’s indifferent gaze, he wondered whether this was the moment he finally understood he was about to die. Had he learned it already, or was he still latching onto the fragile hope that he might live this fight, right up until the last light left his eyes?

The look on the boy’s face was familiar. Too familiar. Like the boy he himself had killed once the one who had fired forty-two rounds at him before he made the cut.

His stomach growled.

He lay still in his bed and let his gaze drift from the ceiling—its polychrome bas-relief wavering in the low light—to the pitcher of milk and the wooden cup resting on the bedside table.

It was a warm morning at the Temple-Castle of Thablis. The grand edifice served as the permanent seat of a Padre and stood among the holiest sites of the man's faith. The temple was more library than shrine and more school than fortress, often coming to life in the hours before the first light of dawn.

This summer had been full of restless nights—three grand balls for the graduation of the new generation of Priest Templars, and a brawl between Silvion and Seluk had left the latter disgraced. To be expelled from Thablis overnight and denied entry thereafter was a stain no Padre could forgive. Still, Mirander thought, Padre Silvion had always been dismissive of Admiral Seluk.

The past week had been one of agony. At least now he could no longer smell the rot in his wounds—a sign, perhaps, of healing. Yet the itch beneath his skin remained raw.

A moon before Silvion led him to the cellar beneath the castle—
a cellar devoid of wine and filled instead with the gutted remains of a colossal, unknown machine whose roar never ceased—
she had acquainted him with the chained
man.

The figure had been impossible to forget: bald, colorless, his skull grotesquely oversized for the thin body it crowned, his skin stippled with black boils that wept down his neck.

Silvion had questioned him about Mirander’s readiness for propinquity metamorphosis.

The chained man had answered with a rasping laugh and an assurance far too pleased for the subject at hand.
He declared Mirander ready—twice, slowly, as if tasting the word—and in that windowless chamber the repetition had carried a weight that made Mirander’s stomach knot.

The other words the creature had muttered haunted him still.

They rose unbidden in his mind with every breath, curling like smoke:

Praise Mekan in His unending design…
He who shaped the world for men to end upon…
He who waits in shadow and strikes at light…

Mirander lay half-dead in his bed, his voice cracked and thin as he forced out a whisper—
a prayer, a mantra, or perhaps a plea to drown the memory: