Wingheart: Sword of Caligus

Prologue: The Exile

The smith's breath quivered fast as he recoiled. "Your eyes!" He reached blindly for a sword on the table, toppling the lantern. "Why do they burn? Why do they shine like a blood moon? I don't know King Darius' fate, but I know..." He swung out a bent longsword without confidence or skill. "...I know you're not him."

Darius gave a quiet sigh and let his hand drop off his sword. Even as he moved towards the door, the smith continued to inch away.

"Demon!" the man cried. "Face-stealer! Leave my shop! And this valley! Or we'll drive you out at daybreak!"

Darius exited in silence. Not a moment after he had set foot on the roadside, the smith's door flew shut behind him. The slam of a crossbar followed; then there was only the groan of the wind.

Darius took two steps down the dirt road with his jaws locked and his hands fisted. In his mind, he shivered, but his body was still as the slumping suburban huts around him. He consulted the stars for answers to the unintelligible questions that rattled inside him, but their gazes were emptier than he ever remembered them—as if he were staring in the face of a dead god.

"O, lonesome is the life of the outcast!" a voice blared from the shadows, spinning Darius around. It was a ragman; he sat at the end of a strip of houses like a dirty shrub. "What is it, friend? Are you an exile? A foreigner? Or is your face just that hideous?"

With an indignant huff, Darius turned and stormed on down the road. At the edge of his vision, he saw the ragman get up.

"Come now, friend!" The man's voice grew closer rapidly. "I mean no insult! Simply some recognition, outcast to outcast!"

Darius heard the man's footsteps at his back and took hold of his sword under his cloak. When a thin hand settled on his shoulder, he whipped around with a shout, but the black eyes that met his were no stranger's.

"Ah—!" Darius' paralyzed hands leapt into the air as his knees buckled. He stumbled when he tried to step back. "Oh, what've I done...what've I done? My friend...my dear friend, forgive—"

"I've not come for vengeance, Darius," Sigaal cut him off. Though there was scarcely any light, every ragged, rugged wrinkle of his face seemed visible. Like shards of moonlight, his eyes and teeth cut through his wild gray mane. "I've only come to talk."

Darius dropped his hands and clinched his breath as a familiar fear began to gnaw at him—a discordance in his blood, his bones, some unreachable part of him—that conjured the rub of a noose around his neck and the image of a scaffold platform beneath him. When Sigaal's hand reached out again, he thought he would be pushed to his death, but it only gripped his shoulder. "Ask me why I betrayed you," Darius murmured. "Still, I will have no answer. The things I've felt in me...wild beyond reason—beyond anything I consider to be who I am!"

Sigaal's silence seemed mournful. "I gave you what I did because I believed you were somehow above the ill fears of mankind." He dropped his hand from Darius' shoulder. "I was wrong. That is not your fault, but my folly."

"No." Darius shook his head without lifting it. "No. My hands, my lips, my feet are my own. I had my choices. I had—"

"The past holds every choice in the world," Sigaal interrupted. "But the past does not exist. My concerns lie with now. He gestured to Darius' holster. "With my sword."

Darius sighed sharply. The air suddenly tasted bitter. "It's in the rift," he professed. "That horrid place, that...hell. The beasts there, things more monstrous than I could ever fathom. Still, I swear it was all my own nightmare...still I—"

"My sword, Darius." Sigaal's voice stung his skin like a hot knife. "Who took it?"

"There were people there," quavered the king. "Winged, like gargoyles or harpies. They weren't afraid of the sword like the other creatures were; they fought me. Even if they couldn't kill me, they hurt me. When I dropped the sword, they barred me from getting anywhere near to it again."