Chapter 2 - Chapter 1 - Echoes in the Petricite

The petricite forest was not silent; it devoured silence itself.

I walked among the pale trunks that rose like bones polished by time, and the floor of calcified leaves muffled my steps even from myself. To be here was like submerging oneself in still, deep water. The air was dense, inert, a heavy blanket over the world, and each breath felt like an effort. Magic, the spark of life that animates all things, was not simply nullified here; it was slowly suffocated, a mute agony that only one such as I could feel, a phantom scratching in the very throat of the earth.

My wings, bound beneath the coarse fabric of my cloak, protested with a dull ache. They remembered. They remembered flights beneath skies that burned with celestial truth, and the presence of these stones was an affront, an insult to their very nature. It was the memory of a divine power being forced into silence by stubborn rocks and the fear of men. An old, weary argument between creation and denial.

The wind passed between the trees without a whisper, as if it feared being heard, or as if there were no stories left to tell in this place. There was only the compact emptiness that Demacia, in its blind and desperate search for order, had learned to call peace.

They use that word so often, chisel it into their monuments and recite it in their prayers. But few understand its true weight, or what must be broken to achieve it. Their peace is the peace of a well-swept cage. Clean, orderly, and ultimately, empty.

It was then that a sound tore through the stillness. A thin, fragile, and achingly human thread. A baby's cry.

I stopped, my body motionless, but my senses extended like dark roots into the dead earth. The wail came again, closer, cutting through the null air with its raw need. And my first thought, forged by centuries of disappointment and betrayal, was not of compassion, but of an old, weathered suspicion.

Human malice was a constant more reliable than the seasons. The Mage Hunters were known for their cruelty, but their creativity was, thankfully, limited. Their methods were as direct and brutal as the swords they wielded.

They might use a wounded mage, perhaps, or the echo of a forbidden spell. But a child's life? The hunt, not the trap.

I glided between the gnarled roots, as silent as the shadow I have chosen to become, the sound of the chains on my ankles magically muffled. In a small clearing, where the moonlight seemed to apologise for existing, filtering down in pale, ghostly beams, lay the source of the sound. A wicker basket, simple and worn. The scent of blood, birth, and fear hung in the air, a recent phantom still clinging to the leaves. There had been a struggle here. And loss.

I knelt, the cold, sterile earth seeping into my knees, a physical reminder of this place's void. My fingers, calloused by centuries of mortal work, from kneading bread and mending cloaks to binding criminals, drew back the coarse cloth with a gentleness I rarely allowed myself.

And there it was. A babe. Its small face, wrinkled in the universal outrage of newborns who have discovered the outside world is cold and uncomfortable. And the hair... a tuft of strands so white they seemed to drink the scarce light, a lunar silver that ached in the eyes. White as untouched winter snow. White as my sister's fiery wings in her ascension.

The name was not a thought; it was a physical blow, an old ember stirred beneath the ash of centuries. I felt the ghost-heat of Demacia's sun on my face and heard the sound of the sky tearing in two. My chest tightened into a familiar knot of fury and sorrow, one as old as myself. For a moment, I saw not a child, but an echo, a judgement.

The universe is not so cruel as to send me a sign in the shape of an orphan. Or perhaps it is.

I reached out a hand but stopped inches from its skin. I did not need to touch. Even here, in this magical vacuum, I could feel it. A spark. Tiny, stubborn, like a single ember in the heart of an extinguished forge, refusing to go out. The magic was not in her, like a tool to be used. It was her. It was her essence, as intrinsic as the blood in her tiny veins.

I drew a deep breath of the null air, feeling it weigh down my lungs. The options unfolded in my mind, a path of jagged stones, and every one of them led to some form of pain. To leave her. To take her to a village gate. Or to simply turn my back and pretend I never found her, and let fate run its course.

Prying eyes, whispered questions. If the child was not blonde-haired and blue-eyed like the wheat in their fields, suspicion would bloom. If, by accident, she ever made a flower bloom out of season or a toy float, it would be the end. Demacia's blind, self-satisfied 'justice' would arrive. A bonfire to warm their hypocrisy. I have seen too many bonfires.

It was then the impossible happened. The infant's cry softened to a whimper, and she raised a tiny, defiant fist. Her eyes opened. I had expected the faded blue or common brown of the region's babes. But what met my gaze was an anomaly, an impossibility. They were blue, yes, but a blue that nature would not dare create. An electric blue, so vibrant and clear it seemed to hold the light of another world's sky, a firmament without clouds or end. Eyes that did not reflect the pale moonlight; they seemed to issue their own.

For an instant, the world around me seemed to lose its colour, desaturated by the intensity of that gaze. She opened her hand, and in the centre of her palm, the air trembled.

Motes of dust and moonlight gathered, swirling, condensing with the near-inaudible sound of shattering glass chimes. Before my eyes, matter formed from nothing, defying every law of this accursed place. It solidified into a small pendant of dark metal, an alloy I had never seen. It fell softly, weightlessly, onto the cloth of the basket.

I recoiled as if struck, my wings bristling beneath their bindings, a primal instinct screaming that this was dangerous. That this should not be.

It was like lighting a fire underwater.

I drew closer again, a thousand years of caution guiding my movements. My fingers touched the pendant. Cold, solid, real. No illusion. No trap. Etched upon its surface were letters from an alphabet I had never seen, but which my soul the celestial part of me I fought so hard to suppress, somehow knew how to read.

Azra'il.

A name? A word of power?

"Az... ra'il," I tested, the word feeling strange and angular in my mouth.

The child's cry returned, thin and irritable. She did not like it. The name did not fit. I tried again, shifting the emphasis as if seeking the right harmony. "Az-rá-il... Azra-íl..." Each attempt sounded like the wrong key in an old, rusted lock.

Then I tried one last time, quieter, almost a whisper to myself, letting the syllables flow as I found them, without force.

"Azra'il."

And the world shifted. The crying stopped abruptly. The sound did not vibrate like a spoken word but resonated like a recognised truth, an ancient echo that had finally found its source. Silence.

For an instant that stretched into an eternity, those violet-silver eyes focused on mine. And I felt it. It was not the vague, unfocused gaze of a newborn, but a presence. An ancient, sharp, and terribly weary consciousness observing me from within that fragile form. I felt as though my own shadows were suddenly illuminated, every one of my fears, every one of my hopes, laid bare beneath that gaze. I was seen. Measured. And, somehow, judged. The sensation sent a shiver down my spine, a feeling I had not known for centuries. The feeling of encountering something much, much older than myself.

What passed through that small being's mind was a mystery. But for the first time that night, a faint smile touched my lips, though I knew not why. I felt a strange and inexplicable familiarity, like rediscovering an old lullaby I did not know I knew.

I gathered the cloth around her tiny body, the pendant cold and heavy against my fingers. I lifted the basket. The weight was almost nothing, but the responsibility that settled in my chest was as vast as a mountain. It was a choice. And I had already made mine the moment I saw her. Justice is not only about punishing the guilty; it is, first and foremost, about protecting the innocent.

"Azra'il, then," I sealed it, my voice a vow in that silent, oppressive forest. "Men tear fates apart and burn futures with their laws of stone. Let us see what we can stitch together from the scraps they leave behind."

With the child held close to my chest, the strange, small spark of a cosmic mystery, I turned my back on the clearing. A shadow and a newborn star, leaving the devouring silence of the forest behind, walking towards an uncertain future that neither of us could foresee. The first step was the hardest. The second, a little less so. By the third, I had already accepted the burden. It was just one more chain I would choose to bear. And for some reason, this one felt different from the rest.