(The beginning of a story that was never continued)

Prologue

Moonlight over a frozen lake, and people of the village across the lake fast asleep in their snug beds. Little do they realize their danger. And yet, alas, I could not warn them if I tried, for I am the danger and indeed their greatest fear. Some may say it is a simple decision, –When They bring you out only call for the people to wake and defend themselves– but nothing is simple. There are so many things at stake. Too many! My mind is a flurry of colors and voices, sounds and pains. Different pains but all equally terrible. How can I choose? If only I were wise enough . . . but then, if only many things. What should I do? Oh, Loelyon, help me! Must I face death on every side? Death for so many; but not me. I would die to stop it, but They will not let me. I have tried, but I cannot reach death when They are watching, and They are always watching. I cannot . . . or maybe . . . No . . . why? . . . help me . . . help. But there! It is too late, They are opening the gate. I am forced out onto the tongue of ice and stone, far above the frozen lake. I can see the village: my home, my people They would have me be the death of. I will fight them! No! They will not let me. Curse their kind and kin and life's-breath! I am falling; They have pushed me over the cliff. Falling, falling. I know I will not die, the waters will protect me, but not my people . . . my kin. They will all die. Loelyon where are you?!?!

Chapter 1

I am Nÿtir. I do not think that when my parents named me they truly understood the power of their choice. Dark-son has been my name, and as my name, my way. My eyes are deep-gray as pools of water beneath a stormy sky and I have been told they gleam with the light of the blue moon beneath which I was born. My hair is black as the gems found in the depths of the lake Qyatréth. It hangs to my shoulders free as the waves themselves save for a single braid hidden at the base of my neck. From the day I was born my mother kept that braid tight-woven. It is a mark of our people – we do not cut our first braid, nor do weave it into any other. And we never, for any reason under the sky, unravel the first braid. No one I knew could tell me why, and as a child I was always trying to discover the reason – but to no avail. I wish now that I had not been so inquisitive, for then things may have been different. And I grew from a lad into the first strokes of manhood knowing nothing of the danger in my braid, the keeper of my name.

Three days after my seventeenth birthday, whereon my mother had woven the year's growth into the braid, I was out fishing upon the storm-calmed waters of Qyatréth with my youngest sister, Layly. I felt more than saw the approaching storm, and moments after I had begun to gather the sheets and lash our catch to the ship Layly called from her perch at the stern and pointed into the gray Southern sky. There I could just discern the forms of three Ekáyr, or Storm-petrel as the Bird-masters name them. They were dipping and wheeling in the sky, diving down so far that they seemed to disappear beneath the waves only to soar back up again and begin their dance once more. I knew that the more daring the Ekáyr were, the greater the storm would be.

[here the manuscript ends]