Before the vigilante, before the mask, before the black feathers whispered through alleyways soaked in blood and filth, Selene Kain lived in silence.
She was twenty-nine. Her apartment overlooked the industrial graveyards of eastern Ashfall—abandoned smokestacks and rusted trains gutted by fire and graffiti. She kept the lights off most nights. Her windows never opened. The city breathed poison.
At the Ashfall Forensic Morgue, she was a phantom. Clean. Efficient. Almost mechanical in how she worked. Hair always tied up, voice low, sleeves rolled high. She wore surgical gloves longer than she wore friends.
"You're too cold," her old supervisor once told her.
"You want warmth in a morgue?" she replied.
No one asked again.
---
By day, Selene filed reports and reconstructed shattered skulls. She read blood patterns like poetry. It all made sense to her—the angles, the violence, the hidden stories under skin. The dead didn't lie. The living did.
She worked in a dim corner room two floors below ground. No windows. Just blue fluorescents and the soft hum of refrigeration units. She liked the stillness. It was the only place in Ashfall that didn't pretend to be alive.
Her phone buzzed. Another body. She didn't flinch.
"Burnt male, thirty to forty. Found in a trash chute in Harrow Heights." It was Marcus Vey, Iris Calder's new partner. Young, unsure, always walking in Iris's shadow.
"I'll prep the table," Selene said. "Give me twenty."
He didn't ask how she always beat the ambulance to the door. He was learning.
---
Iris Calder had known Selene since academy days. Back before the fractures. Back when they shared long nights at cheap diners and talked about fixing the world.
That was a lifetime ago.
Now Iris was a detective with two kids, a federal-agent husband, and an ulcer burning through her gut. Nathan Calder called nightly from Washington, but lately, Iris had stopped picking up. Maya had a science fair. Liam was getting bullied again. She didn't have time for ghosts.
Yet whenever a body dropped under strange circumstances, Iris still called one person first.
Selene.
"Anything unusual?" Iris asked now, standing over the latest corpse.
"Rope burns on the wrists. Ligature, not cuffs. Third-degree burns mostly postmortem. Pulled fingernails. Left molars removed."
"Removed?"
Selene nodded. "Surgically. Clean cuts."
Vey turned green. Iris just stared.
"Message kill," Selene added. "Someone wanted this one to disappear slow."
"Who was he?"
Selene didn't blink. "Still running dental."
But she already knew.
---
Ashfall whispered to her in patterns. Like a machine vomiting secrets in blood code.
The man had been a runner for the Valen Cartel. They operated out of the industrial zone—the very same sector where children had gone missing over the past five months. Selene had tracked each one. No official case files. No press. Just missing posters that vanished faster than they went up.
She kept their names in a little black book taped under her bathroom sink. A vigil of ink.
---
Later that night, she returned to her apartment.
No TV. No music. Just the city groaning outside.
She opened a drawer beside her bed. Inside were old pieces of her father's police uniform—badges, notes, a shattered watch still stained with blood.
He was murdered when she was sixteen. Shot three times and buried in a shallow ditch by officers he trusted. They called it a mugging. She never believed them.
They never found the body. But she did.
It was the first corpse she ever examined.
---
The city had taught her two things:
Justice was bought.
And monsters wore silk.
So she taught herself the rest.
---
She met her first teacher in a ghost town on the outskirts of Raven Hollow. An ex-vigilante named Maddox Lane—once known as the Talon. He was crippled, half-blind, but he taught her to move through shadows like water. To use fear. To think ten steps ahead. "Pain doesn't break you," he told her. "It hones you."
Her second teacher was even worse. A butcher named Arko, once an enforcer for the Syndicate in the south docks. He taught her how to kill with blades. How to rupture arteries clean. How to strike the lungs so a man chokes quiet.
"You don't have to enjoy it," he told her. "Just be better at it than they are."
She never did enjoy it. But she was better.
---
The transformation wasn't loud.
No explosion. No oath to the heavens.
Just a woman in black, standing over a predator with a slit throat. A whisper through fire escapes.
The first strike.
A pedophile ring operating from inside a closed-down subway terminal near Gracemire. She had found them. She had ended them.
The city didn't know what hit it.
Just headlines:
"Butchered Men Found Underground."
"Serial Killer Targets Criminals."
"Rumors of a Vigilante Grow."
They didn't have a name for her yet. Only stories.
---
At The Rusted Halo, a dive bar wedged between a pawn shop and a shuttered chapel, people talked in low tones about a ghost with knives.
Aleric Venn, the bartender with a split eyebrow and iron arms, cleaned his glass and nodded quietly. "The bird's real," he muttered. "I saw her once. Didn't even hear her come in."
Across the bar, a junkie twitched. "They say she carves feathers into the skin of the ones she kills."
"No," said Aleric. "She only does that when they deserve it."
---
Camilla DuPont, the underground medic, stitched a gangbanger's thigh on a metal table behind a laundromat that doubled as a front. Her gloves were red. Her voice steady.
"You see anything lately?" the patient asked, grimacing.
"Lot of things," she replied. "But I did treat a girl last week. Said she escaped a place with black masks. Kept talking about crows."
He went pale. "The Flock?"
"Maybe."
Camilla didn't ask more.
---
At the Calder residence, Maya drew a picture of a woman in black with wide wings.
"She protects people," Maya said.
"Where'd you hear about her?" Iris asked.
"School," Maya replied. "They say she's not real. But I think she is."
---
Selene watched it all unfold from rooftops and dark glass windows. Her name wasn't spoken yet. But the city had begun to shift. Shadows moved different. The worms under the skin had begun to squirm.
And in a mansion high above the south hills, a man known only as King Crow sat in silence before a wall of surveillance monitors.
His face was hidden behind a crow-skull mask plated in chrome. His voice distorted. His hands gloved in bone-white leather.
"Something's rising," he said.
Behind him, the inner members of The Flock stirred. Murderers. Brokers. Butchers. Every one of them handpicked from the filth beneath Ashfall's surface.
"Shall I act?" one asked.
King Crow tilted his head.
"Not yet," he said. "Let the Raven show her wings."
---
And in the deepest dark, far beneath the surface where the city's rot fermented in steel coffins and data streams, a whisper moved across a black screen.
A coded message.
A single glyph.
A sigil of the Umbra Syndicate.
Unknown. Hidden.
Watching.
The voice that echoed through King Crow's private line was hollow and ancient.
"You will break this city slowly, my Crow. Every fracture will bring her closer to us."
---
The city was a wound.
And tonight, the Black Raven flew for the first time.
Not a hero.
Not a myth.
Just justice.
With blades in her fists.
And vengeance in her chest.
---
[End of Chapter One]