Spirits' Reach
an excerpt

He walked. He didn’t know why or to where but he needed the motion. It cleared his mind, freed up his awareness and in this place, broken castle grounds filled with broken people, he had to find that freedom of thought again, that edge that had driven him this far or he knew he’d become just like those people, just like the ground with its churned mud and broken stalks that had once been plants, that had once been alive. And that’s what was missing of course. There was no life in the Raven’s army. Perhaps he should go and tell the Raven that. Perhaps he could ignite a change, though of course, it wasn’t the Raven in his black shell of armour that Tarr wanted to change. What he wanted to affect was deeper than any one person and what he wanted was growing more insubstantial with every day.

Up on the walls, seeing his father’s face echoed in the patterns of smoke, he had known. Everything had been so clear then in that moment, but the Raven had strode out of the grey air, knocking the illusion and the memory aside. The Raven had knocked so much aside. From what the old knight had said, he had even obliterated a large part of himself.

So now Tarr marched like a man possessed on a mission to do the impossible, all the while having no clue what the impossible was and only that something needed to awaken. Something in himself or something in the world, something in the Raven or in the men sworn to him. Perhaps something in all of these. He wanted the warriors acting in the roles of workmen to drop their hammers and to move. He wanted the castle to fall down on itself, or to rebuild itself. He didn’t care which but action was needed. Activity was kindling in his blood and his heart raced. For days he’d drank nothing but water yet he felt intoxicated.

His pace increased as he moved away from the castle and out into the surrounding countryside. He leapt a stream, noting the course of ripples as the flow broke over rocks and laughing wildly. He began to run, trying to outdistance everything. It would be easy now to just keep on going, to forget it all, to throw himself away. The Raven and his army were behind him. He could be free if he just kept on going for long enough, if he moved far enough.

He stopped and screamed. His cry tore out of him like a beast with claws, leaving him ragged and his insides hanging out exposed to the world. His knees hit the ground, stones digging up into his skin as he dropped his forehead to the earth.

Illusion was easy to find after all. His father’s face in the smoke and the idea that he could simply walk away. Reality made less sense than this escapism, but sense alone couldn’t define what was real. Reality was men and their hammers chomping at stubborn stone walls because a murdering mad man possessed by a force perhaps older than time itself told them to do it. Reality was his father’s sword in this monster’s hands. It was the flagstaff of the fabled Ravens-Wing pressed between Tarr‘s palms.

He walked back to the castle slowly and tore up the flag from where it hung, dead in the still air outside his tent. His energy was gone now, lost across the slow trudge back to camp and he didn’t want this ugly weight with all it symbolised in his grasp. He didn’t want anything but to storm out across the land again and run away, but instead, he was going to face reality. And he was going to make it change.