40°49'37.0"N 47°42'45.1"E

  Q?b?l? International Airport

  20.05.2024 – 22.45 UTC +04.00

  People in the plaza who were nearby, perhaps guided by my intentions and the light, sprinted to the sugary border.

  Please protect us, I whispered, willing the wall to expand and to ward off a wider area. The dust particles vibrated, denying my request.

  “I am sorry,” I whispered, and then I yelled, “Don’t move an inch.” Everyone inside the shop thankfully listened to me.

  As the glass reached the floor, I saw the expressions on the people in front of the shop: momentary relief. The falling glass didn’t hurt them. They could still run and take cover.

  But it was momentary. The glass never touched the floor, as a malignant force still needed it. I held my ground behind the wall of sugar: I knew I could hold this hex back. Across the dust, I saw some people running towards the shop, still thinking they had a sliver of hope.

  I did not close my eyes as the levitating glass sprang into motion.

  Glass parts flew around the dark and crowded room. Cutting and piercing through, looking for a target, any target. Horrified screams from inside the airport reached us, but the glasses could not. All the glasses that were hurled at us met my warded wall of dust, and turned into dust themselves after a golden flash, only enhancing our protection.

  This only lasted a few seconds, enough for hundreds of people to lie dead and wounded on the floor. The only group of people standing was the ones in my ward.

  “Listen to me, and we shall survive,” I told them quietly as I turned. Behind me, the dust stood still in the air, lining my ward. A few nodded, and some stood still. “Find lighters, candles, any open flame. And light them.”

  Ramin went to move, but the rest didn’t, petrified at what they had just witnessed.

  “Open flames now!” I yelled, and people started running. There must have been around thirty people in this shop, and I am sure, given what Azeris believed about Cursed people, they would rather not listen to me. But all of them did.

  I looked back at the pile of bodies through the boarding area, only momentarily lit by the lightning storm outside the airport. Most of everyone outside of my ward was dead. I could not save everyone, but I would save as much as I could.

  Ironically, the moment I made this decision, starlings landed in the airport through the shattered windows. As they did, they turned into humans with Starling masks, dark figures standing far from where we were.

  “Hurry!” I shouted. We were warded from other curses, but not hidden to the eye. I needed light.

  People were lighting aromatic candles and lighters throughout the store. Ramin handed a lighter to me as well. I breathed in.

  “Stay lit only for us,” I commanded. The flames flickered weakly before turning green one by one, as my warding whisper flew to them. They were not only our light source but a conduit of my warding Curse and all standing between us and Starling’s threatening posse.

  “Stay lit only for us,” Ramin repeated. It didn’t help really, but I smiled at him.

  The sugar and glass dust wall in front of us turned invisible to the eye, as it should have now as well from anyone standing outside the store.

  “This should work,” I said calmly to the crowd, “as long as we all stay silent.” My statement was unnecessary, with or without a warding Curse. Everyone was holding their breath as the men and women in dark clothes and Starling masks scoured through the bodies outside the store.

  “Who, I wonder, are they looking for?” An annoying, nonchalant man’s voice broke the silence, only a minute after it had started.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. A man holding a tiny candle walked through the crowd, approaching me. He was tall enough for me to ask myself how I hadn’t noticed him before. His hair ended in a long braid, and he was wearing a long leather jacket.

  An invisible hand caressed my lungs and stole my breath, as the events of that fateful night flashed through my mind’s eye. That night, two nights ago, I was warding a field in the southern parts of Oghuz, as my ex-coven was raiding for a long-lost artifact.

  Reach for the bow; Starling.

  A past whisper.

  I repeat, abandon wards; Starling.

  Another one, a whisper of warning from the leader of the Coven now hunting me down. It had been a ridicule then as much as it was now.

  Something was unsealing my memories. The whispers and omens of that night were returning, but the more they returned, the less they made sense. Why was my coven hunting me? All I had done was protect them.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Why was I placed in an enchanted prison, where a Shadow was kept for years? Was I meant to release him?

  Why was the man who broke my ward that night here, standing in front of me?

  “Why are you here?” I asked. The man did not respond.

  A man yelled somewhere inside the airport:

  “Break the witches!”

  The man with the braid, Ramin, I, and everyone else in the store couldn’t help but watch in silent awe the scene outside the store.

  Brown platanus leaves appeared out of thin air and started falling, as in autumn’s fall, into the field of scattered glass shards and bodies. Their fall was slow, and among the leaves, men and women appeared right out of thin air, chanting Curses at the Starlings.

  A fight was breaking out.

  The man with the braid snapped his fingers, and as he did, all the sound from the battle outside vanished, successfully grabbing my attention again. People inside the ward scurried back to the edges of the shop, leaving space between the man.

  “Why are you here?” He asked back and chuckled, “You were supposed to escape, not run back into trouble.”

  The man’s expression irritated me. It was something between a proud smirk and a surprised smile. And although I had only seen him masked before, I just knew that was how he must have smiled, back when I had fallen under his control, when I had first encountered him in O?uz.

  “Supposed to…?” I asked. “Supposed to what? Escape?”

  The man’s glance shifted lazily between the people in my makeshift ward, Ramin, and then landed back on me. I insisted:

  “Who in all the hells are you? Answer me. One wrong word and I will hurl all that holds this ward together and implode us all.”

  A collective whimper spread throughout the crowd.

  I was not bluffing. My ward would not hurt me, and yes, most people in it would regrettably die, but I had just had enough. Outside this tiny corner of the airport, a battle between Starling’s and Adil’s covens was claiming more lives by the second, and I could pretty much bet that all of us were doomed anyway if we were to sit there.

  “I am R??id,” he said, “and this has nothing to do with you, little bird.”

  He turned and nodded at Ramin, ready to say something.

  “Do I fucking know you?” Ramin spat at him, his voice cracking. I asked myself if this was all theatrics and Ramin held the answers all along, but I doubted that thought: he looked more frightened and confused than I did.

  “It does not matter if you do. You cannot be caught in the crossfire. You have to come with me, Shadow,” he responded, and then turned to me, “if you care even a tiniest bit about him, you have to let him come with me.”

  Ramin took half a step towards me, and then he took it back, staying put. Was he seriously considering this random man’s words?

  “Why should we care for any word that comes out of your mouth?” I asked. I lowered my hand holding the lighter, and with that gesture, the flames in the hands of the people, be it candles or lighters, all flickered. And with them, the wall of sugar and glass vibrated, golden.

  R??id’s expression changed as he squinted his eyes. I shook my head. I needed him to understand I was not bluffing with my threat.

  “Do you reckon you can whisper faster than my silence?” he said, but remained perfectly still. He knew that perhaps I could.

  People scurried even further away, at the edges of the store, and hid between the aisles.

  I made a step forward, and I could almost see it play out: R??id snapping or taping his fingers to cast a silence hex, me hurling all the dust and sugar particles at him, and then disappearing before the hex caught me. I could do it.

  “No, no. No!” Ramin shouted, bypassing me and stepping in front of me. He raised one hand behind and one to the front, “whoever you are, listen to me, either we all leave safe, or you can fuck off! I am serious!”

  I heard people gasp and hold their breath. I stepped back; I was willing to hear out Ramin’s play.

  A hollow scream from Hokum?, muted and twisted by R??id’s tricks, shook the airport. He looked momentarily outside the store’s boundary. He raised his hands and softened his expression as he stepped closer to Ramin.

  I mirrored the distance.

  R??id kept his eyes fixed on me, but spoke to Ramin:

  “This is not a game, Shadow. This is bigger than all of these mortals. They were plain lucky they were with you when Starling landed, and you were lucky this bird here used to be in her coven. Starlings brew this storm, and it will unleash hell in Q?b?l?. No one is meant to survive. Do you get it? No one.”

  I wanted to protest. Starling would not aimlessly kill and cause bloodshed. But then why did she?

  “I am not following you anywhere,” Ramin raised his voice, “unless we all leave this place in one piece. Your covens created this, and the people here need not suffer it.”

  He was turning his head back and forth to look at both of us.

  I felt a knot tighten in my stomach. It was a combination of shame and second-guessing. I wanted to refute this guy’s claims that Starling would simply kill so many innocent bystanders. I was another starling for years.

  We were the protectors and wardens of the northwest part of the country.

  Shadows were unfortunate, Cursed spawns.

  Adil’s men were the evil men in black lurking in trees, trying to break our wards.

  Outside of the store, I saw starlings fly and dive, and pierce men’s eyes. Turn to humans, snap their necks, while hissing hexes. I saw glasses dancing in an ominous breeze, pulled around by Curses.

  And gunshots, men appearing from dark corners, cutting starlings' hands and wings, before they would fight back. And brown leaves provided cover to the few people still trying to survive the onslaught.

  Was it all because Q?b?l? was outside Starling’s domain, and she moved to expand, at all costs?