Two years earlier


    Azrael picked at his food, sensing his father’s anger in the silence. He had become accustomed to picking up on how things felt in the soundless world which he inhabited. Seven years of deafness had trained his other senses to recognize how a mood stirred the air around a person, or accented their signing just so. He was able to feel the cold emptiness in a room after someone had cried in it, could feel the contagious glow that hung about lovers.


    So he didn’t need to hear the furious silence to feel it. He hazarded a glance up and across the massive wooden table where they took their meals. There was a stormy look on his father’s features that usually preceeded a rage. Any minute now, the man would explode.


    Wanting to head it off, Az shoved his plate aside and stood up. He signed, “why have you called me here?” With a stormy look of his own and gritted his teeth in anticipation of the flurry of movement and vibration that would surely follow. It didn’t come.


    Instead of rampaging around the room at his son’s insolence, Azrael’s father and Chancellor-on-high of the Eastern Colonies set down his fork and frowned.


    “Azrael...” He began, whistling sharply for the interpreter. Azrael automatically turned towards one of the gilt and sparkling walls, where a doorway led to the servant’s chambers. His lifelong interpreter, a dark man who signed almost without any accent at all, hurried into the dining hall and stood dutifully by to translate. Diago quickly signed a greeting before taking his place at the Chancellor’s side.


    Feeling a familiar flash of irritation at his father for not ever having bothered to learn, Az sat back down and watched Diago’s long fingers spell out what his father said.


    “You have been my greatest disappointment,” the Chancellor began, using a voice so unnecessarily loud that his son could feel the vibrations through the table. “But I have been patient. You were lucky to be born into this station. I have spared no effort or expense in trying to raise you in God’s light. For it is only through this light that the dark can be eliminated.” He paused here and made a cross over his forehead with two fingers.


    “I have been a most generous father, providing the best for you even with your physical shortcomings and spiritual… tresspasses.”


    Az stared unmoving, already certain where these words were leading and willing the tears to stay back until the lecture was finished. He felt that horrible sense - his so-called gifts- knotted inside him like a constant ache; an itch that he must never scratch. He cast all his hate and anger inward at it, wishing he could tear it out of himself. Wishing he could destroy it.


    Diago, frowning openly at the words the chancellor spoke, looked down at his own feet. Az thought he spotted tears in his interpreter’s eyes before they disappeared beneath long, dark lashes.


    The Chancellor continued, his face full of affected sorrow. “But yours is a soul that seems determined to the wastes.” He stood then, adopting the regal stance he often used at criminal hearings. Hands clasped behind his broad back, chest forward proudly. “And despite all of my best attempts and fatherly discipline, my most hallowed Advisor has determined that your presence here is an affront we can no longer sustain.”


    Diago’s hands fell away in shock, and Az turned to read his father’s lips. “I simply cannot afford the risk to my authority. So we’ve made a decision.”


    We, Az thought in disbelief. Who is we?. He raised his hands to start arguing the point but just then two Armsmen entered, flanking his father. Diago backed up a few steps, looking positively horrified now.


    “Goodbye, son. Go knowing you’re doing a noble thing for this family, by leaving it.”


    The Armsmen marched around the table and each seized one of the boy’s arms. Absolutely sick with fear and hurt, Azrael didn’t even think to put up a fight as they frog-marched him from the room. He looked once over his shoulder and saw Diago, mouth hanging open, staring after him.


    The Chancellor didn’t even watch. He waited until his son had disappeared, then dismissed the interpreter and sat back down to finish his meal. He felt lighter than he had in ages.


    Azrael was led down the corridor across the floor of their estate, passing only housemaids and two of the Chancellor’s personal guard detail. The Armsmen hurrying him along weren’t gentle, but he couldn’t have told them if they were hurting him anyhow.


    Pulled along at a half-walk, half-run down a maze of hallways, Az finally let himself cry. The familiar walls and paintings blurred and cleared with each tearful blink. This estate, however coldly he was treated, had been his only home. Trying to imagine life elsewhere filled him with the sort of nameless dread that young children often feel in the dark. He had no idea if people in the outside world could even sign, or if they knew of deafness at all.


    The rich carpeted halls became plain and utilitarian as the Armsmen left the living areas of the estate, their captive lost in a fearful imagining of a world where he couldn’t communicate at all. When they finally stopped and he snapped out of it long enough to look around, he realized he had no idea where they were. Despite having explored much of the massive estate in his free time, there were still countless off-limits areas where children weren’t allowed, and which Azrael had never dared visit.


    One of his captors briefly let go of the vice-grip on the boy’s elbow to heave open a large door that was set into a plain stone wall. Cold air rushed by, full of the smells of mold and damp. The sour taste in the air was one of secrets, of deceit. Azrael knew these smells from his father’s politicking ‘friends’ (behind their back they were always sycophant morons when the Chancellor spoke of them).


    “Go,” barked the Armsman who had gotten the door. The other one, still holding tight to Azrael’s arm, shoved forward. They stepped into a windowless tunnel barely wide enough for two of them to stand shoulder to shoulder. The floor was damp stone and sloped slightly downward. Straw had been scattered around sparsely in a feeble attempt to offset some of the moisture.


    The tunnel went on for so long that Azrael thought they must be miles underground. Even with the lanterns that were hung at intervals, the darkness seemed to grow thicker as they descended. The temperature dropped, too, though the air stayed just as stagnant. Then, finally, when fear had faded to a resigned boredom, the tunnel leveled out and widened before them. The armsmen pulled Azrael to a stop once more.


    Here another door swung open, scarcely visible in the darkness, and daylight flooded in. After a long second blinking blindly in effort to speed along his eyes adjusting to the change, Azrael gasped. He knew the man in the doorway: It was the unmistakable stooped form of his oldest tutor, Gregyir. And, beyond him, an unfamiliar grimey stretch of docks.


    Blinking up at Gregyir’s familiar dour face, Az signed furiously. Help! He gestured, straining against his captors in order to bring his hands closer together. Help me! He signed again. Relief and hope made him dizzy and so emotional that he started crying again.


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    Gregyir looked only at the Armsmen and waved them through the door, ignoring Azrael’s increasingly desperate signs. The men must have asked something, but Azrael couldn’t see their lips to catch what it was. He only read Gregyir’s reply of “it’s just there,” which was punctuated by gesturing to a carriage pulled up to the left.


    The Armsmen nodded curtly and pulled Az toward the waiting wagon as he tried one final time to sign. Please! He wished in that moment that he could scream instead. He tried to make a noise, any noise, but the old tutor didn’t so much as glance in his direction.


    Azrael, staring in disbelief, was jerked forward by his captors so violently that he stumbled and nearly fell. This earned him a painful thump in the back by way of one of his captors. They shoved him into the open carriage door face-first, and when he had recovered enough to get up and turn around Gregyir was standing there instead.


    He stared down at Azrael, a lock of his salt-and-pepper hair hanging over one eye. There was no kindness, no shred of guilt or even familiarity in that look. The tutor who had led him patiently through so many lessons merely nodded once and slammed the door. Azrael, plunged once more into near-darkness, sobbed.


    His father rejecting him hurt, but it hadn’t been entirely surprising. He had, on some level, seen it coming his whole life. But Gregyir? He just couldn’t understand that. He’d liked Gregyir.  At times in his young life he had even entertained daydreams of a life where his father was not his father at all, and Gregyir was instead. Those dreams had gotten him through some dark days. But even that boyish fancy had been a lie.


    A vast sense of loneliness yawned inside Azrael as the wagon began to move with a jolt. There was no anger there, as he in his child-mind struggled to ascribe blame to the adults. He felt hatred only towards himself. He was bad, he was wrong, he was something to be discarded. The dark thoughts numbed him like a salve, and he used that numbness to cover up the growing feel of that other thing – that gift – that roiled in his chest. He wouldn’t give in to that, wouldn’t be even more bad by letting it out.


    After awhile he laid on the floor into an uneasy doze. The worst of the emotions had dulled out by then and their absence felt strangely empty, but the cold apathy was a relief. There was only the dark, the creak of wheels, and the cold damp of wood beneath him.


    Endless minutes passed as Azrael laid there drifting in and out of sleep. A small vent near the ceiling was the only source of air and light, and as the wagon moved tiny slivers of light were cast upon the other side of the wagon wall. He watched those lights dance by, losing sense of time entirely.


    Sunset had just begun to fade the light out entirely when the wagon stopped so suddenly that Azrael was thrown forward. His shoulder painfully struck the corner of one of the wagon’s benches. Rubbing at what he was sure would be a nasty bruise later, he climbed up on the seat that he’d struck and peered out through the vent.


    A young boy was standing in the road, arms out wide, dangerously close to the hooves of the wagonhorse, which was rearing in surprise. A driver hopped down and ran to get the beast under control but still the boy didn’t budge.


    Then a woman came into view and ran at the boy, her face hidden by a cowl. She grabbed the boy’s shoulders and he pulled away, staring daggers at her and screaming something. Az squinted, but couldn’t make the words out in the dusk’s failing light.


    The woman turned to look directly at Azrael then, startling him backwards. He sat back down on the floor, heart pounding, wondering what was going on. What he’d seen left more questions than it did answers, but he could sense a discordant tang of confusion in the air. This hadn’t been a part of his kidnapper’s plan. And that woman— A terrifying thrum of something had flashed through his mind when she looked at him. It woke up that shadowy mass in his chest that he worked so hard to contain and made it flare up.


    A few tense moments passed and light flooded the cramped cabin. The hooded woman had pulled the door open and stood sillhouetted where not long ago Gregyir had stood. Unlike the apathetic gaze of Azrael’s former tutor, however, this woman glared in open fury at the boy huddled on the floor. Wordlessly she stepped into the cabin, bringing darkness in behind her as she closed the door.


    They stared at each other in the half-darkness as their eyes adjusted, Az’s black ones wide as saucers and hers narrowed still in anger. The wagon started forward again with a lurch, and Az would have hit his head once more if not for the woman grabbing his shirt just in time to hold him steady against the sudden motion.


    She let go just as quickly, and though no recognition showed in her face when Az signed thank you, she nodded anyways and at long last took those rage-filled eyes off of him. The wagon bumping along beneath them was the only movement for the remainder of the journey.


    Azrael was sound asleep on the floor when another stop, this one smoother by far, woke him up. The door opened again almost before they had completely stopped moving and the strange woman hopped down from her seat. She took his arm the way the Armsmen had, but a great deal more gently. His legs were weak from so long spent traveling in such cramped quarters, and he might have fallen down in his attempt to exit had it not been for that gentle hand on his arm assisting him.


    Outside, the docks and the harbor were nowhere to be seen. They were in a wood, instead, the trees all bare for winter, and the cloudless sky was lit by a beautiful orange and yellow sunset. Az, looking around, caught something glinting at his strange travel companion’s hip. It was the hilt of some great blade.


    All the gratitude he had felt towards the woman’s kindness left him in a rush, replaced by a realization as steely and cold as the blade she wore. He felt a hysterical smile spreading on his face at the irony of it.


    Assasination. His father’s favorite political tool. Azrael thought of all of the people, all the so-called friends of his father who had run afoul of him and subsequently met their fates at the end of a blade or the bottom of a poisoned glass. The myriad oh-so-convenient deaths that the chancellor had paid for. Each one as a move in a game of political chess — calculated, precise.


    All while his deaf-mute son watched in horror. Watched yet did nothing because some secret part of him had always hoped at gaining the man’s favor. So Azrael had fawned, just as all of those poor souls whose deaths his father funded had. Yet he hadn’t considered that he himself could also be slain as they had. He was too silly, too childish to have seen coming what now seemed the most obvious ending.


    He felt hollowed out by the day’s events, in light of this realization, and found he no longer cared much what was going to happen. The strongest emotion he felt was embarrassed amusement at his own stupidity. He stifled the insane laughter that wanted to bubble up in his throat and found he was almost looking forward to the blade. Best let it come quickly, so he could be done with it.


    The path he was led down was barely distinguishable from the surrounding woods, but his latest captor followed it confidently, hardly stopping to help him up whenever he stumbled on one of the many roots and rocks that the winter carpet of dead leaves disguised from view.


    They eventually came to a clearing bordered on the far end by a patch of muddly wetland. In the flattest spot of dry ground three Armsmen were sat near a tent. They spotted the two approaching and stood up, the shortest one holding out a hand in greeting. The woman waved back, then reached for her blade.


    This was it. Az’s adrenaline kicked back in as he was led to a stop a few paces from the Armsmen. The woman – his assasin, he supposed— had paused with her blade half-drawn. She glanced down at Az, some strange emotion he wasn’t yet familiar with filling her expression.


    He met her gaze, trying to be brave despite the fact that his entire body was trembling with fear. Then all at once he was flying backwards and the assasin was making a mad rush at the Armsmen, her blade glinting. The air left Azrael’s lungs in a painful whoosh as he hit the ground. He scrambled to his belly, gasping for breath, and saw that the Armsmen had been fallen upon so quickly that only one of the three of them had had time to draw his own sword. In quick seconds, they were all dead.


    The assasin strode back towards him, wiping blood from her blade and sheathing it before offering him her hand. When he didn’t immediately take it, she clumsily gesticulated friend. Azrael was dumbfounded, but took the offered hand and allowed himself to be pulled to his feet. She turned away suddenly, looking intently at the treeline.


    Az brushed dirt from his clothes without taking his eyes off her. He felt the vibrations of hoofbeats in the near distance long moments before the rider they heralded broke from the woods at a gallop. The assasin relaxed when she saw him.


    The horse was huge, a beastly drafthorse whose sides shown with sweat, and before it had even come to a stop its rider was swinging out of the saddle. Relief made Azrael’s knees weak as he recognized another familiar face. Diago!


    Crying and tripping over his own feet as he rushed forward, Az signed furiously at the man. Diago nodded, his face pale and unusually stressed, and caught the boy in a big hug, rocking him back and forth as if he were still a toddler.


    Azrael felt the vibrations as Diago spoke to the woman, a soothing judder where his cheek pressed against the man’s chest. His relief was so great that he cried again, shamelessly, losing himself in the knowledge that he wasn’t alone after all. Someone, despite everything, was still on his side.