The final noise Sora Hikari remembered from his world was the zzzzzz of skateboard wheels on concrete, muffled music pulsing in his ears. He was fourteen, adrift in his Tokyo suburbia, the taste of Ramune soda fading from his lips, a Monday math test a dull pounding in the back of his head. Spring sunlight filtered through ginkgo leaves onto the familiar sidewalk. A perfectly ordinary moment.

  Then reality distorted.

  The air in front of him pulsed – not with warmth, but with a tight, off pressure. Colors mixed: hedge-green and sidewalk-gray and sky-blue became wet paint. A crashing, glass-shattering-in-reverse scream tore through his earbuds, followed by an impossible, stomach-churning inversion. He stretched, compressed, and was dropped into a heavy darkness that felt real.

  It lasted a blink and an eternity.

  Impact. Cold, wet, jagged rock knocked the breath from his lungs. Pain seared hot in his hip and shoulder. Mud, thick and icy, clung to him immediately.

  Then the stench. Rot, acrid smoke, the coppery flavor of overwhelming amounts of blood, sweat, waste, and something sickeningly sweet underneath. It was a physical assault.

  The sounds that followed: screams of fury, brutal clashing of metal against metal, splintered wood, and weak, futile cries that could be barely heard among the slaughter.

  Sora tore his eyes open. A fine, icy drizzle was falling from a leaden sky, dampening his schoolboy finery. He lay in a castle courtyard, weathered stone walls scarring and looming. Shattered battlements grasped at the heavy twilight. Torches coughed smoke, casting mad shadows.

  He'd stumbled into a fight. A savage horde of furs and leather stormed the walls, hacking at a massive wooden gate with a tree-trunk ram. They had crude axes, clubs, rusty blades. From the walls, fewer defenders in dark leather and bird-beaked helms rained arrows, stones, and sizzling dark fluid – boiling oil, he knew, stomach lurching.

  The ground was a churned-up mire. Mud, blood, and broken bodies. Twisted bodies littered the ground in every direction. He curled up, trembling.

  Where am I? What hell is this?

  The sense of pain, the chill, the stench – it was horrifying.

  A figure loomed over him. The behemoth attacker, stretched over one eye, smiled with broken teeth, wielding a bloodied warhammer. Sora closed his eyes, whining, expecting the crush.

  Thwip-gurgle. Nothing.

  He blinked. The thief jerked on the ground beneath his feet, a black-fletched arrow – raven feathers? – lodged deep in his throat. Blood seeped into the mud.

  She emerged from a shadowy archway like smoke solidifying. Black steel and dark metal encased her tall, dark figure; she moved with deadly, silent movement starkly at odds with the melee. Her black hair was tightly plaited; her white-painted face, across one eyebrow marked by a thin white scar, was marble-smooth beautiful, her dark eyes unconsolably deep and cold. A thin black sword in her gauntleted hand welled blood.

  Her arrival turned the tide of battle. Defenders cried her name – "Kurotsuki!" – and gained fresh strength. Attackers stumbled, fear dancing in their eyes.

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  She advanced. An axe swing? Eased past with no trouble. Her sword flashed, driving into the attacker's ribs. He fell. She spun, parried a short sword, cut upwards. Another throat gaped, spilling crimson. No motion wasted, only cold calculation. A dance of death.

  Then, her cold, sharp eyes fastened on Sora. Hunched over, small, out of place among the carnage. She tilted her head, studying him like some odd specimen. No feeling, only. interest. Possessive interest.

  She moved closer to him, enemies parting like automatons. She used her boot to send the severely injured brigand sprawling out of her path. Close up, she smelled of leather, cold steel, blood, and something faint, like damp earth.

  "Who are you, boy?" Her voice was low, measured, cutting through the din. "Fall from the sky?"

  Sora attempted to speak, gagged, gestured helplessly up. Rain and tears mingled on his dirty face.

  "You are not of these lands," she declared, making the impossible true. "Your attire… ridiculous. Your smell…." A small sniff. "Clean. Like storm-washed stone. Baffling."

  She offered a black-gloved hand. Sora stepped back. A ghost of a cold smile passed over her lips. "You're cold. The ravens never get full." She waved a hand towards the combat vaguely. "Come. Safer inside."

  He stumbled. She was terrible. The atmosphere of controlled violence made him feel more numb than the rain. But there was the other choice: being brutally murdered here. Shivering, he offered his hand. Her grip was instant, cold, phenomenally strong. She pulled him to his feet.

  "Mistress of Shadowfall Keep," she breathed, her voice inches from his ear. "Welcome." Her grip was a fraction tighter. "And you, boy-fallen-from-the-sky. now you belong to me. Under my protection. And my custody."

  She pulled him towards the archway. Guards parted to let him through, cautiously looking at Sora. Inside, the battle noises were muted. The air was chillier, filled with damp, dust, and that residual odor – sweetish-metallic, like raw flesh. Torches cast monstrous shadows on a wide stone hallway.

  The walls did not stand blank. They bore murals. Black, exquisite, ghastly. Raven upon raven with glinting eyes and hooked beaks fed on disembowelled bodies littering grey fields of battle. They clawed out eyes, flesh, intestines with ritualistic intensity. Sora felt sick. This was a fortress, all right; this was a temple to cannibalism.

  "Local art," Vayne complained dryly, not yet looking at him. "A reminder of how things go in Kurogane. You eat, or you get eaten. The weak become sustenance for the strong. The ravens would understand."

  They passed into a gigantic, dim hall. Cold flames, rough tables, more raven murals higher up. Silent sentries in black armor waited as they passed. Vayne stopped, releasing Sora. He felt tiny, exposed.

  She addressed a burly, scarred guard. "Kenji. Take this. find. to east wing guest room. One with a cliff view. Clean clothes, hot meal - simple. Hot water. Don't bother him."

  Kenji nodded his head in acknowledgment, eyes flashing quickly over Sora. "My Lady Vayne."

  Vayne whirled around to Sora, her dark eyes slicing through him. "Treat him gently, Kenji," she told him, her voice a low command. "He might be worth something. Or a curiosity. Either one, under my protection. No one gets into his room without my express permission. Understood?"

  "Understood, my Lady," Kenji jerked his head at Sora. "Let's go, boy."

  Sora glanced back at Vayne. She stood bathed in torchlight, an obsidian silhouette of darkness. Was curiosity burning in her eyes, or mere cold possession's calculation?

  "Rest now, Sora Hikili," she declared, somehow managing to learn his name. "Tomorrow, we talk. You have much to learn. And so do I."

  Kenji led him through a darker hallway. The heavy door of a small wet cell – straw pallet, thin coverlet, bucket – slammed shut behind him. Bolt home. He could hear distant rumble of fighting out in the castle. He could smell wet stone and that sickly, nasty, metallic sweetness.

  Safe? Maybe. Trapped? Definitely. Alone in a cruel world that refused to make sense. And Vayne Kurotsuki, his "guardian," seemed like the cold heart of it all. The terror, he guessed with a sureness that settled like ice in his stomach, had only just started.