Soul of the Crow: An Epic Dark Fantasy (Reapers of Veltuur Book 1) Read online

  Soul of the Crow.

  Copyright 2020 Jessaca Willis.

  ISBN: 978-1-7339925-6-5

  ASIN: B089DLJ6WB

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Request,” at the address below.

  Any reference to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names, characters, and places are products of the author’s imagination.

  Front cover by Claire Holt of Luminescence Covers. Editing by Sandra Ogle from Reedsy.

  Book published by Jessaca Willis 2020.

  Jessaca Willis

  PO Box 66574

  Portland, OR 97266

  https://www.jessacawillis.com

  Created with Vellum

  To Kieran.

  This book was only possible because of you.

  Books in Series

  REAPERS OF VELTUUR

  Assassin Reaper, Prequel

  Soul of the Crow, Book 1

  Heart of the Sungem, Book 2

  Fate of the Vulture, Book 3

  Contents

  1. Taken by Shadows

  2. Contract to Kill

  3. The Next Heir

  4. A Story Before You Go

  5. A Soul Beckons

  6. The Fate of the Princess

  7. Run

  8. Farewell

  9. Judgment Passes

  10. Running from Shadows

  11. Converging Paths

  12. By Order of the King

  13. Among Mortals

  14. Better Left Forgotten

  15. Sinister Memories

  16. Cuddly as a Firefur

  17. Trick of the Bandits

  18. The Princess and the Reaper

  19. Caught in a Lie

  20. The Mark of Prophecy

  21. The First Soul

  22. A Life in the Balance

  23. Betrayal

  24. Home No More

  25. The Weapon

  26. Aacsi, Shadow, Death

  27. A Reaper Born

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Taken by Shadows

  Sinisa

  When the shadows reach for me through the floorboards, blood is still warm on my fingers. I flick my wrists, desperate to shake away the proof of my crime. After all, that is why the shadows have come.

  But not even a thorough bath could save me now. The blood stains my soul, a marking that I cannot escape.

  The darkness shifts, growing into talons large enough to wrap around an entire boar. They latch around my ankles instead, squeezing tightly enough to puncture my skin. The yelp that escapes me is as much from pain as fear. I know what is to come. I know what happens when someone commits murder, and I know it is inevitable.

  I just thought I’d have more time.

  I can hear the other orphan children screaming and pattering down the stairs, afraid of the shadows. Afraid of me.

  Some instinctual swell of desperation has me struggling against the black fortress-like grip, but the claws only dig deeper into their prey. I am about to cry out when I see the lifeless body again out of the corner of my eye. Blood pools beneath him, around him. It covers him so thoroughly that I can’t even see where I stabbed him.

  I didn’t mean to—yes, you did.

  I wish I hadn’t—don’t lie to yourself.

  Each excuse I make is muted by some inner darkness I never knew existed. But the truth doesn’t ease the rampant heaving of my chest. I thought I was supposed to feel safer now, maybe even victorious.

  Caw.

  I twist to the wall behind me, my feet anchored to the ground and preventing me from getting a better look, but I can hear the rustling of feathers filling the dormitory. I see the flutter of darkness surrounding me.

  The gulp of air I swallow feels more like rocks.

  I’m not ready. I’m not ready. I’m not ready.

  My breathing hastens to a point so close to hyperventilation that for a second I convince myself that the darkness closing in is just me losing consciousness. Maybe this is all just a hallucination, a dream, a nightmare.

  But I know that’s not the truth.

  A beak appears from one of the walls. More follow, beaks and feathers and wings, until hundreds of crows are swirling in the room with me, iridescent in the light of the moon. They close in around me until all I can see is black. All I can feel is the greasiness of their feathers flapping against my skin. All I can smell is death.

  In one motion, I become weightless. I can feel myself flying—floating—but I don’t see where. I know where, though, and that knowledge alone makes my heart thrash.

  There’s only one place they would take a murderer like me: Veltuur, the underrealm.

  I am to become a Reaper.

  Tears sting my eyes. I’m not ready to say goodbye to my life. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to my friends. I don’t want to become a Reaper. I don’t want to have to kill anyone else.

  Seconds as long as eons pass. I am suspended in darkness, like I am dangling over a bottomless chasm.

  Finally the frantic fluttering dwindles as, one by one, the murder of crows leaves me utterly alone. I’m left with nothing but the chill of the air. I didn’t even notice my eyes were closed until the birds were gone, but now I’m too frightened to open them. I don’t want to see where they’ve taken me. Part of me thinks that if I just keep my eyes closed, this nightmare might end. But I’ve had this thought before, hundreds of times, and it has never once been true. The nightmare never ends.

  The air is dense and still. The longer my eyes remain shut, the longer I feel like death is pressing in on me. That thought is all it takes for me to finally open them wide.

  I am not dangling above a chasm.

  Instead, I find myself standing before a vast forest. It’s obscured by such a heavy and ominous fog that, at first, I mistake the dark branches for silhouettes of monsters, mangled and twisted. Each tree is crooked, like the black trail of smoke that rises from a pyre. My chest continues to rise and fall in a jerky rhythm, the shallow breaths through my nose the only audible sound in the eerily silent forest.

  Above the gnarled black trunks is a canopy of spider-leg branches, highlighted throughout by round, glowing red leaves.

  It is immeasurably quiet, the kind of quiet that makes my ears hum. As I’m admiring the contrast of the vibrant leaves against the gloom on the ground, one of them blinks. Then another, and another, until I realize the source of the hum—or rather, the rustling. These leaves aren’t leaves; they’re eyes. Thousands of crows are perched in the branches above, creating a dark void of feathers to black out the sky, each bird only discernable from the next by its radiant, hateful eyes.

  If I was frightened before my arrival, I am petrified now. Being alone in a strange, horrifying forest heightens every sense in my body to a level of alertness only known to those confronting the face of death.

  “Sinisa,” the very air whispers, and I whip around searching for the source of the voice.

  A pale, sickly man—little more than wrinkled, decaying skin on spindly legs—steps out from the shadows. His hands, tucked against his hollowed belly, are covered almost entirely by billowing red robes.
The fabric drapes over his face, casting each crevice into shadow, falling all the way to the ground and pooling like blood at his feet.

  This reminds me of something—the pooling of blood—but the memory comes and goes so quickly I can’t latch on to it. My mind is just as foggy as the land around me. I know I had a past before I arrived, but the harder I try to squint at it, to search for the memories that made me me, the less of it I can find.

  “Welcome,” the man says in his hoarse rasp, though I barely see his lips move. It’s like the night itself speaks. “You know what is to come?”

  I start to shake my head, but thoughts that aren’t mine invade me. They’re not tangible, and there are no words, but they soothe me with the sense that I do know, even if I shouldn’t. It’s not like I’ve ever been to Veltuur before.

  “Yes, Councilspirit,” I say, feeling my apprehension dissipate, settling to the ground like the fog at my feet.

  The longer we stand here, the more those emotions dwindle. All the dread, the guilt, the regret, gone, until all I feel is…nothing. I don’t even remember what had me so worried before. A calm settles over me, making me feel at peace. No, not at peace—that’s not the right word.

  Blank. Erased.

  More bodies of shadow and decay, adorned in crimson robes, step from behind the trees, until I am surrounded by a half dozen creatures. Though as a group they are reminiscent of the first—their velvet robes identical—individually they are vastly different. Some with spindly appendages, others covered in grotesque ripples of melted flesh. However the one thing they all have in common is an air of death. These are the husks of mankind, what is left of the people who found themselves in a position not too dissimilar from mine at one point in time.

  This should scare me too, but for some reason it doesn’t. It’s like the oxygen here stifles fear, smothering my every thought and will. Who I was is suffocated until all that is left is who I am about to become, who they want me to be.

  “Then go,” the first man says, a thin finger extending. “Walk among the trees and select your crow.”

  A nearly mindless puppet, I do as I am instructed, and though I’m not sure how I will do what he’s asking, there is no doubt in my mind that I will do it with ease. It’s like there is a hand at the small of my back, like Veltuur itself is guiding me. Everything that needs to happen will.

  I turn back around, facing the opening I’d first laid eyes on. This forest is expansive, forever growing, stretching farther than the eye can see, and yet, there is a patch that calls to me. Like it is mine and mine alone. Like I belong to it.

  As I walk down the staggered openings between the foliage, shadows scurry along the forest floor with each step. I know their names, though I don’t know how. I’ve never seen a Wraith before, but the longer I am in Veltuur, the more I start to understand it, the more I become part of it.

  The Wraiths move too fast to truly glimpse them, but I see the talons and enough to know they are the same misshapen monsters that… I can no longer recall. The harder I think, the foggier my memories become until everything up until this moment is one small blur, ready to blink out of existence.

  But the man’s robes pooling on the ground like blood, that image remains. It’s the only one I can keep hold of, and so I do. I cling to it like it’s my only lifeline, my only sense of self, like it’s the story of my birth and therefore it’s the most important piece of my entire existence.

  There is a particularly knotted tree, one whose bark bulges in patches as long as my hand, that summons me. I am careful not to trip over its roots, which creep out from the dirt much farther than I would expect, as I traverse the underbrush to get closer. It must be old, ancient even.

  As I draw nearer, the ruffling of thousands of wings ceases until I hear only one bird. I take a deep breath, letting the scent of moss and slugs slide its way into my lungs, before looking up. One crow sits, glaring down at me with immortal eyes.

  I hold out my arm.

  Caw, it says, cocking its head away from me.

  If I could feel anything in this place, I might’ve blushed when it didn’t come.

  My pleading gaze travels back to the Councilspirits to see if I’ve completed the task. Perhaps all that was needed of me was to find a crow, and here I am having found one. But none of the six figures behind me have stopped staring at me in that expectant way. Truth be told, many of them seem to be growing impatient.

  I snap back to the crow.

  “Come here,” I command, stomping my foot.

  The bird squawks again.

  Before either of us do anything more, the ground begins to quake beneath my feet. A low rumble disturbs the realm. The birds in the other trees begin cawing frantically. I sense the danger too, the warning in the tone of the air, and I’m not sure if it’s directed at me or the crow.

  “Get over here!” I say, more sternly yet, and make my arm even more rigid.

  This time, the crow listens. It dives from its branch like a spear aimed directly at my heart. Before the point of its beak can penetrate my chest, it curves upward and lands on my shoulder with an unbalanced thud.

  Caw, it croaks in my ear.

  I turn back to the looming figures.

  “She has chosen,” one of the seven says, his voice crackling like fire. “The Councilspirits pronounce Sinisa Strigidae, the newest member of the Reapers. May she serve Veltuur well.”

  Contract to Kill

  Sinisa

  I awaken beneath my scarred tree to the familiar sound of crows. The rumpling of feathers, the squawking, the blinking that should be almost imperceptible is orchestrated into an ominous and delightful symphony. Their song is a moonlit night. It is the comfort of home, but perhaps that’s because for these past few years it is all I’ve known.

  I spot Crow with ease among the birds above me. The bluish-black glint of its wings is similar to that of any of the others, but there’s something about the way it carries itself that always stands out to me. It’s hunched a little more, like its back has given up on it. I’ve tried examining it, to see if it’s an injury or something—although I’m almost positive that the crows of Veltuur can’t be injured—but it won’t let me get a good look at it. All crows are obstinate, hateful things like that. It’s just embedded in the Reaper-crow relationship. If we didn’t need them to pass in and out of Veltuur, I doubt any Reaper would willingly work with the winged creatures.

  “Crow,” I call, and all of the birds fall silent. Mine turns to me with an odious glare. “Don’t look at me like that. You know the drill.”

  Crow doesn’t budge.

  I’m in no mood for another obstinate day from it. Some days, Crow seems more obedient than others; I’m not sure why. It’ll come and go at my bidding without so much as a squawk.

  I was hoping today would be one of those days.

  Today is special, after all. Today I claim my five thousandth soul, allowing me to petition for the role of Shade, a promotion of sorts, although nowhere near as prestigious as becoming a member of the Council. Honestly, I think those roles have been set for the rest of eternity.

  I take a second to pin the front section of my hair up to keep it out of my eyes during the day’s events, before stretching from the sodden earth. It’s a short distance to the hollow on the other side of my tree, but I take my time trailing my fingers along its knotted bark. When I reach the black hole, I plunge my hand inside the shallow cavern and pull free a dry piece of splintered wood. All of the trees in Veltuur have a hollow, where a Reaper’s daily assignments appear. It’s as if the trees themselves are delivering our orders, but I know better.

  The chunk of wood ignites at my touch, red embers burning without heat in my palm. The red fades to black, coals turning to ashes, and the remnants crumble between my fingers as I let them sift to the ground, though they don’t make it. They never do. Wraiths scuttle across the woodland beneath the haze and devour the ashes just before they reach the earth. Grotesque creatures, they are,
surviving solely off death order remnants and the Reapers they’re permitted to torture.

  I turn back to the leftover dust in my palms just as a mental blast of power, something more vibrant than memory, bursts in my mind.

  The first force hits me like the power of the moon high overhead, and I am overcome by something akin to a vivid dream. I catch a flash of pink hocks and sharp hooks as I intrude on the crowded streets. Inside the breezeless city, I am sweating. It’s more than just mere images though. The vision attacks all of my senses, and before I know it, I recognize the bustling sounds and rank smells of the market as well. Everything is so realistic, it’s like I’m already there even though I am merely an observer. For now.

  As soon as the image forms, it fades.

  There’s a pause. A long one. The dwindling seconds make my throat dry, and I start to worry that I might only have the one assignment for the day. That wouldn’t normally be a problem, but today, with only one kill, that would mean I won’t actually meet my goal.

  My heart plummets the longer I wait until finally there’s no hope. With only one life to claim, I’ll have to wait one more day to petition to become a Shade. Considering I’ve already waited this long, I know that one more day won’t kill me—as if I could die anyway, not as long as my servitude is active—but I can’t help but let the reality deplete me.

  Just as I’m accepting defeat though, another blast of images burrows into my thoughts, ripping me away from my self-pity. I see a crown, gold and dazzling with jewels. I feel the softness of green velvet against my skin, a fabric I don’t think I’ve ever felt before and one I don’t want to stop touching. But I drop the fabric when I see who’s wearing it: a small girl with a joyful smile, despite her lips being damaged by a jagged crack that trails up to her nostril.