A Brotherhood of Crows.
Prologue

I have never not seen.

I have never known darkness. Wherever I go, whatever I do, all I see are images, endless, endless images. It is always light for me. I have not seen the blissful black of closed-eye sleep for over eight years. Every minute, every second of my life, I see. I see, I see, I see. I cannot unsee. I cannot close my eyes in this world, without opening them in another.

My name is Elijah Avaron. I am twenty four years old. And currently, I am about to die.

There was no silence. The wind was more than a roar. It was snarl which never ended as I fell into oblivion. Around me, chunks of thickened, reinforced glass, great clear shards bigger than me, tumbled and knifed through the air as we fell. A single bullet and the sudden depressurising can do a lot of damage when you’re fifty thousand feet above the ground, and falling. Falling.

I couldn’t see the ground. I tumbled up and down and round and round, flipped and whipped by the wind as I feel. I was aware, dully, of the great mass of the Cerberus falling behind, sinking behind me, like an old giant slowly falling exhausted to earth. Green slashes of lightning careened about the spinning sky. Sparks, flying from the snapping fingers of God. I fell, and the airship fell behind me, an absurd twist in the laws of physics, and great shards of glass shimmered the air between us as went down, down, down.

I spun and careened. I saw cloud, wreckage of falling, broken airships, cloud, mist and lightning, again and again and again. How long till I hit the ground? Who knew. Long enough and I would see every single second.

Over the snarl of the wind now, the shimmering, throbbing groan of the Maelstrom simmered and swarmed like angry, sonorous flies. Would I fall into it like the rest of the fleet, or plunge past it to to ground. Somewhere beneath me were the dead plains of Kazakhstan, a land now peppered and scarred by the great chunks of broken airships which fell from the sky like tattered metal hale.

Maybe I’ll make it. Maybe, I’ll plunge into the maelstrom and by the absurdity of the storm, end up somewhere else, spat out on a beach somewhere. Somewhere else. Or something else. When you went into a probability storm, you didn’t come out again. At least, you didn’t come out the same.

Whatever happened, I would not be able to unsee it. Not even if I tried.

My name is Elijah Avaron. I am twenty four years old. The reason I am falling to my death, cascading down from the sky like a bloodied, latter day Icarus, along with the wreckage and burnt out husks of two fleets of military airships, to either spatter to the ground or be lost in the maelstrom - this is the story which I will tell you now, my friend. There’s time, here. Wherever here might be. There’s time. There’s always time.

There’s a few things you should know about me, beyond my name and my age. I do not sleep. Not in any real sense, at least. This is important to remember. Everytime I close my eyes, I open them somewhere else. I live straddled across the boundary between two world. Perhaps there are two of me, sharing one mind, one consciousness. Or perhaps I am dreaming one world. Or both. Perhaps you, my friend, are a dream.

This story begins a fortnight ago. It begins at night, and in the pouring rain. It begins with a girl with blue hair and a hatred of violent men; it begins with a man with small spectacles and ageless face; it begins with a phrase: “What is the Brotherhood of Crows?” and it begins in two places. One of them you might know - it’s called Edinburgh. The other you will not know. It’s called Elsewhere.