Excerpt: On Wings of Glass and Blood

Cain set down his tongs. He then stretched, rotating his shoulders. It had been five days since he’d last slept, and he’d only slept for a few hours. It had been a month since he had started the project. Whenever he had stopped, it had haunted his dreams and taken over his thoughts until he began again. He hadn’t had any true rest since the beginning.

But now it was done. Or rather, they were done.

On the bench in front of him, wings a little shorter than he was rested, cooling. If one didn’t look too hard, they could be real. Look harder, and you’d realise that they were made of glass, liable to shatter at a hard touch.

Cain’s glasswork was the finest and the best in all of Claro, after all.

He turned around, to see the Master that had been monitoring him from outside the room. The man had slacked off, and fallen asleep. Cain opened the door and nudged the man with his foot.

“You there, get up. What day is it today?”

“The seventeenth?” The man sounded unsure.

“My goodness!” yelped Cain. “You’d best go get the others immediately!”

The Master took off at a run and Cain chuckled. It was always amazing, how quickly officials presumed there was something wrong if one used an exclamation mark.

Now that his watcher was gone, he turned his attention back to the wings on his bench. They seemed surprisingly docile now. Cain stretched out a hand to them, examining them with his magic.

He snatched his hand back and swore, just as a cadre of Masters dashed into the room.

Master Valenka caught Cain by the shoulders. “What is it, lad?”

Cain stared at the wings. “They’re amazing…”

With this, the Masters’ attention was turned to Cain’s creation. As one, they all let out a quiet gasp. To Cain, they were simply his creation. To the Masters, Cain’s wings were the most sophisticated piece of glasswork they’d ever seen. They should have been impossible.

As one, the Masters extended their hands to pry at the wings with their magic. And as one, the Masters snatched their hands back and swore.

“What have you done?” Master Valenka asked the man she was supporting.

Cain grinned up at her, a feverish look in his eyes now that his fervour over his project had released him, and he was simply a man that needed to eat and sleep like the rest of them. “It lives.”