A pecking noise had woken Lillian hours ahead of schedule. Only halfway out of the dark, she noted wearily. Outside, a dozen lantern posts softened the cold night’s gloom; they were as flowers of light, hazy but radiant through the feathery frost that rimed the windows. When she wiped the fog her breath had left upon the glass, a bracing chill shot up her fingertips, cutting through the muddle in her mind.
Again with the pecking? The racket had dragged her out of bed, and she shambled her way to the source with her eyes painfully shut, groping the walls and furniture like a blind girl down an unfamiliar hallway. The noise was now a ringing in her sore skull, and she wondered if some stray woodpecker had mistaken a tin can for a tree. Lillian found herself stopping at the entrance, where she knelt to better examine the letterbox.
It clacked open at once, and a rush of wings sent the girl tumbling on her back with a shriek. Her eyes went suddenly wide, eerily luminous in the pitch darkness; they scanned the vestibule for an intruder, cold and hard and piercing like chips of jagged ice. They caught the faintest glint of copper, and before she could even question why, her hand had sprung out to snatch the thing in flight.
“A… bird?” Not quite, she realized at once. Though avian in design, it had wings of canvas, clockwork joints and a frame of thin copper wires. Lillian couldn’t yet tell whether it was a proper machine or animated by sorcery, but she was much more concerned about the glass capsule attached to its neck. She uncorked one end as delicately as she could, picking out a tiny roll of parchment with her nails. With only the distant lights from her bedroom windows, she managed to read all the same.
“Lillian Sesthal, my son Dorian told me how to reach you.
Should my instincts be right, then it is urgent that we speak.
Come, and I will tell you everything about your last name.
P.S.: Swallow the paper, and you will know the way.”
“Pithy, but still cryptic,” she said with a sigh. “Brilliant.” Despite her reservations about traveling hundreds of miles or more on the basis of a mere four sentences, they were four very good sentences. She had met a young man named Dorian a few months back, at the town of Lovstok near the Ahyark Mountains. We set out to find wyverns, she recalled with a smile, and we ended up finding so much more than we could handle. He had spoken to her about his life, living in a remote mountain cabin with his folks, and she had told him where to send his letters, should he ever need any help in the future. What she hadn’t shared, however, was her last name.
“Well. As far as traps go, this would make a decent one.” Lillian gave the parchment a quick sniff; if it were poisoned, she at least wanted to know she’d been killed by something odorless. She balled the parchment up, closed her eyes, took three deep breaths, prayed to the moon and, throwing caution to the wind, popped it into her mouth like the sourest of grapes.
There came a breeze from within – not in her lungs, but in her mind. Every shade of every color flared inside, like myriad threads of light peeling from a midsummer rainbow. They twisted and turned, tangled and unwound, weaving a shimmering network across every cell of her brain. When the overwhelming sense of interconnectedness eventually faded, Lillian found herself grasping what could only be described as a new memory. She knew where the village was. “Okay. I was not expecting that.”
She started when something squirmed in her hand. The… bird, as it were, had grown agitated. It seemed eager to leave, now that its mission had been accomplished. Lillian got to her feet, rubbing out the ache in her tailbone as she made her way back to the bedroom. She flipped the window clasp and gave the frame two dry wallops before the panes burst open in a cloud of diamond dust. A sudden wave of cold sent her teeth chattering, but she kept strong, lifting the strange automaton to the endless night skies.
“Ow!” The blasted thing had pecked the tip of her index, drawing blood. It flew off after that, and the glass capsule about its neck seemed somewhat darker before they both shrank to a dot in the horizon. Grumbling, she licked her wound, looking daggers at the heavens before slamming the windows shut.
Lillian tried to go back to sleep, too tired and annoyed to travel at this hour. She tossed and turned for a while, until it dawned on her groggy mind.
“Dorian,” she said, absently at first. Her brows then furrowed. “Dorian who?”