40°58‘57.7“N 47°29‘11.3“E – K?rimli, Azerbaijan

  20.05.2024 – 18.15 UTC +04.00

  “We need to find food immediately,” Ramin said. Alongside the feel of warmth and safety that the house had forced upon us, there must have been some kind of sustenance hex, as it suddenly felt like I had not eaten properly for longer than I should. I wondered if my memories of dinner were even real, or if Ramin and I just pretended to eat.

  I quickly agreed, and the first diner we found that was half-full, we sat in it. We knew the two Starling-masked Cursed were looking for us, so once we sat at the table and ordered, I asked for a candle from the waitress, who simply brought one without questioning the request.

  I lit it and left it in the center of the table. If they were to pass, they would hardly notice us. And Zephyr personally knew that was the case – and that’s why he had whispered at me, hoping I would answer and reveal myself. What I could not piece together was whether he had really detected us in that house and let us go, or simply lied to his partner in crime about my Curses.

  “Will the waitress find us now? I think the point was to eat eventually,” Ramin joked, halting my lingering thoughts.

  “That is not how my ward works.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  We both looked at each other a bit awkwardly.

  “So, a shadow and a seer enter a bar…” Ramin tried to joke.

  I took a moment to observe the establishment’s clientele and décor. Plastic fixed tables contrasted with wooden lanterns on the walls. A few tables had groups of three to four, no more than fifteen people inside them, all eating food whose scent ranged from smoke-charred meat to nutty and sweet fried dough.

  I looked back at Ramin, sitting across the table. I knew what I had witnessed, his body healing with ashes pouring out of his wounds. However, I could not sense even a hint of a Shadow from him.

  “It is a tavern. And you are not a Shadow. At least I can’t sense so,” I said.

  “Bar sounds funnier. And I am a half-blood. I can switch it on and off,” he answered as if he had just said the most normal thing in the world.

  A half-blood Shadow. Had I ever heard about that before? I frowned, trying to recover any information about these creatures. I had been taught a lot in the past decade in Starling’s Coven, but what if they did not know everything about them?

  “That is not possible,” I said.

  Ramin shrugged and chuckled. The waitress approached, unfazed by my candle’s ward, recognizing us just enough to bring our order.

  “Of course it is. Probably more common than pure shadows nowadays,” Ramin said as he grabbed the drinks from the waitress’s disk. She left some appetizers and skewered kebab on the table.

  Ramin’s eyes widened as the sizzling hot grilled beef’s scent invaded his nostrils, almost like a cartoon. He did not even hesitate, nor even acknowledged me anymore, as he promptly started devouring it.

  “Unbelievable. Really. So. Amazing,” he said.

  It was not that I expected him to have manners. It was more that, I had seen people acting like that before, only when they were starved. I was also hungry, but held back for a moment.

  “How long were you in there?” I asked him.

  He did not answer but looked at me for a moment. I gave him a few minutes to swallow down the first kebab, and then he responded.

  “You told me it is May already, so must be at least six months. It was December, I remember it was cold at least, when I was taken away. And it was right after…” He seemed to measure his words carefully, trying to recover a memory that, at least at first sight, was not a happy one. “Right after the Taint of the Ceyranbatan Waters.”

  He continued eating his next kebab.

  “I…” I tried to say, but I could not process the information.

  The Taint of the Ceyranbatan Waters was the first incident before the rise of the Shadow Domain in Bak?, well, at least back then. It was a tragedy for the Cursed, a blessing for the Shadows of the region. The Ceyranbatan Reservoir waters were hexed to cull the Cursed of the city. Poison only whoever bore a Curse, but not mortals or Shadows. Cursed who drank even a sip of that water withered away in a matter of days.

  I had only by luck avoided the fate of other fellow Cursed, having moved out of Bak? and joined Starling’s coven when I had sensed that the city was no longer safe. The Taint of the Ceyranbatan Waters was an act of revolution or of mass murder, and had made history, honored or despised depending on the side you were on back then.

  Eight years ago.

  “The Taint was eight years ago. November 2016,” I said.

  Ramin did not stop eating the second kebab, but when he finished, he asked:

  “What do you mean? What year is it now?”

  “May 2024.”

  “Ah, shit. That must be… eight years then.”

  I could not believe that man was locked in a house for eight years. Under Starling’s orders no less, and I had never heard of him.

  “What did you do? Starling must have had a reason. She has many prisoners, Shadows even, but never for so long.”

  “Honestly? I do not remember. But maybe I will soon. Whatever it is, though, it cannot be worse than what you did,” he said. “Think about it. Whatever the reason, the one you call Starling took me away and put me in that hexed house. That said, they kept me alive for so long… The moment they think you escaped, they glass bomb the house. So, I really need to know what it is that you have done.”

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  He was right. That reaction must have been proportional to something that I had done. Or something I had learned.

  Or both. I recalled the vision about the Sahara and a message I had sent that night.

  “I have only fragments of memories,” I admitted. It felt like my brain had been bleached clean, and I could only remember random whispers I had received that night, along with limited visual details. “I was warding a house south of here, hoping to protect south of O?uz from…” I vaguely gestured in his direction.

  “Shadows?” Ramin asked. Sitting under the light of the candle in that diner made the question sound literal, but we both knew we were referring to his kind.

  “Yes. Something happened that night. I think… I met another Cursed.” I dug through my mind. It was difficult, even away from the mind fog that the house had created over the last few days. The memories were locked behind a semi-transparent wall. “He forced me to whisper, or caused a vision? I am not sure exactly. But it somehow has to do with a place in the Sahara. I really can’t make sense of my memories.”

  We looked at each other. The awkwardness was palpable.

  “By the way you are looking at me,” he repeated my vague gesture, “things must have gone more awry than I thought. I remember the radio talking about domain wars. Is it because of us?” he said, troubled.

  These were hard waters to navigate. Shadows were very particular creatures, neither humans nor Cursed, but something in between. They always existed in the region. Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and even southern Russia and northern Iran all hosted sporadic minorities of Shadows. They tended to have obvious Curses, always associated with darkness, decay, or, like in Ramin’s case, ashes. They looked more human than we Cursed, not bearing any unique spark or charisma like we did. They were shunned by the Cursed, who tried to hide among the normal mortal world, exactly because of their particular curses. Where I had grown up, associating yourself with shadows was considered taboo.

  They also had a dramatically shortened lifespan, most of them not living past forty, succumbing to their own Curses. Or at least they used to. A couple of years back, some innovative mortal treatment was discovered. It boosted the Shadows’ health and allowed them to push the boundaries of their powers without consuming their lifespan.

  I did not share most of my background’s prejudices against Shadows. If anything, I felt a combination of pity and curiosity for their Cursed fates.

  “Your kind,” I paused, choosing my words carefully, “revolted. Already before the Taint, they had found a way to establish a domain in Bak?. After the Taint and the past couple of years, they have enhanced control over the territory, forbidding other Cursed from entering. This caused the current Coven War.”

  I waited a bit to gauge his reaction. He seemed perplexed, confused even, but not sad about it. I continued explaining.

  “Bak? was the neutral center of activities for most covens. Like a peaceful territory for commerce, exchange of resources, and diplomacy. But once that was gone, all the covens started vying for control of the areas around the Caspian Sea, which in turn has created more and more alliances and betrayals across covens in the area… My coven is in active war with Adil’s Coven, from Shaki through Q?b?l?.”

  I omitted the history of some covens persecuting and executing Shadows as punishment for their perceived insolence. I was never directly involved in these attacks against Shadows, but I was not sure how that information would help me build rapport with the only ally at hand.

  He kept frowning as I spoke, shifting his left hand on his days-old beard and scratching his cheek. I was not sure if he completely followed. As a half-Shadow, he might have never heard of coven wars before his imprisonment, maybe not even of who Starling and Adil were.

  “I see,” he answered, “not much I can do about all that. What’s the plan for us?”

  The question caught me off guard.

  “Nowhere is safe in this region if you are Cursed. The war is on full scale, and the covens only get bolder. Now not even hesitating to fight out in the open,” I said, my voice lowering, thinking of the consequences of my hypothesis, “the state authorities will hunt every Cursed to quell these fights and protect the non-Cursed.”

  “Not much we can do about that either,” he said. His grey eyes were still frowning.

  I had started to realize his personality was more direct than what that hexed house had tranquilized him into before. He tapped his hand on the table. “It sure sounds like there is a domain war raging out there,” he added.

  “Well, our case is more complex than those domain wars. My farsight showed me the Western Sahara. There is no possibility this domain war extends that far, so I believe this is about something else.”

  Ramin scoffed.

  “Are you expecting us to travel to a far-off corner of the world, on a hunch?”

  “Look, I have no other lead, family, or friends. My only close friend was the very masked man you saw, hunting for us. I have nowhere to go but far from here, so I may as well get a plane to Morocco and find out what is hiding there. You can go back to whatever weird family you are from.”

  He must have felt some of the pain and desperation in my voice.

  “Did you miss the part where I was locked in there for almost a decade?”

  After a moment of awkward silence, I second-guessed my words.

  “I apologize. My head is all fuzzy. I can’t imagine how your head feels. And I am sure you do have a family somewhere looking for you.”

  He did not say anything, and we were both left lost in our thoughts and my candle’s warding light.

  I was without a coven or allies, and I knew I must have uncovered something big for my coven to hunt me like this. If there was any way to fix how my life was unexpectedly shattered, that was to find out what I had learned that night.

  Ramin was a shadow prisoner of my coven, held against his will for years. There was no reason for our common trip to continue. We might have been enemies in proper circumstances.

  “That’s very far. How are we going to find a flight to Morocco?”

  I scanned him with my eyes. Was he planning to tag along in my crazy escape plan – and was I really okay with it? I weighed my options. His help could prove very advantageous, a half-shadow that can switch his powers on and off.

  “If only I knew a shadow,” I said in the end, “so that we could go through Shadow territories together.”

  He popped a cute smirk. I had to admit, there was something I liked about him. It was not pity, like I expected, but genuine interest.

  “Let’s find a bus then,” he said.

  I signaled to the waitress. As she came near my candle’s ward, I whispered.

  “We were never here.” We waved at her and left, as she blankly returned to her post. I felt shame for using my Cursed ward to not pay at a diner, but given we had nothing but our somehow torn clothes and a box of matches, I decided we were owed a break.

  I followed a similar strategy when we visited a nearby clothing store and when we bought tickets for the bus ride to Q?b?l? Airport. Ramin did not seem to protest but did look at me suspiciously every time I whispered a ward and lit a match.

  We hopped on the first bus that would leave the territory, heading east and passing by the closest airport: Q?b?l? International Airport. The bus’s smell of inadequate ventilation and dump seats somehow added to our desperation. He sat next to me, silent for a while.

  The bus was filled with people, most of them carrying luggage, obviously heading in the same direction as us. I wondered how much of the coven war these people had felt in the past days. Probably nothing, I thought to myself as the bus ride started.

  Neither Starling nor Adil would allow non-Cursed to spread words of witches, tearing apart the country. Remaining covert was still in their best interests, lest the Shadow-controlled government of Bak? intervene. People did look worried, though. Maybe they all knew someone who had suddenly died, disappeared, or fallen ill. Someone who saw Curses they shouldn’t have.