Rites of the Starling

After weeks at sea, Caspia³ and Xandra¹⁰ reach an unknown land and both grow violently ill — fevers, cramps, a sickness that worsens the farther they walk inland. Clicking sounds pursue them through the forest: bariwolves. When the beasts attack, Xandra¹⁰ drops to her knees and screams — the ritus seizing her body. She orders Caspia³ to run.

But the creature that rises is not a swift, the beloved bird of Nelfinex. Xandra¹⁰ has shifted into a bariwolf. Her gold eyes flood black. She kills one wild wolf, claims its pack, then stalks her cousin³ to a cliff's edge. Caspia³ calls her name again and again. Xandra¹⁰ only snarls. With nowhere left to go, Caspia³ leaps into the river below — her only escape from a cousin who no longer knows her.

Andreas,⁴ a solitary man living in a Genesis hunting cabin, finds Caspia³ unconscious on a riverbank and nurses her through five days of delirium. When she wakes, they can barely communicate — his language resembles a Beesan dialect she recognizes.

Over quiet days of fumbled words and shared meals, they build a vocabulary between them. He never doubts her, not even when she describes a continent he has never heard of. He accepts her visions without question.

As strength returns, Caspia³ notices her body changing: sharper sight, faster healing, green blood seeping from a paper cut. Something about Calandra is rewriting her at the cellular level. When she says she must leave to find Xandra¹⁰ and the silver-eyed warrior, Andreas⁴ packs a bag and walks beside her.

After weeks riding through Ozarth with a man whose alligask-hide coat matches another journal entry, Odessa¹ crosses the cave ginger bogs and meets the Mavins during a monster attack. Thora,⁷ their white-haired commander, splits a Lyssa-infected alligask's skull with a single ax throw — identical to the journal's desert warrior.

Her face is inked with five four-pointed stars. The Mavins are mercenaries bound to a shadowy master named Salem, each earning tattooed stars for debts they cannot repay.

Jodhi,⁸ a silver-tongued rogue with three stars, taunts Odessa¹ relentlessly but keeps watch from across every campfire. When she tells them about the crux scout and the approaching migration, Thora⁷ agrees to escort her to Quentis. The price: one thousand zillahs per warrior, payable by the Gold King.⁵

A recurring vision grips Caspia's³ sleep as she and Andreas⁴ travel toward Turah: his lifeless body in a fortress courtyard, throat torn open by Xandra's¹⁰ bariwolf jaws. A gold wedding ring glints on his finger. The vision comes six times — the number Caspia³ dreads most. She realizes the path toward the silver-eyed warrior leads directly to Andreas's⁴ death.

On a rainy balcony in Skanshon, she tells him she wants to go to Quentis instead. She does not explain the full vision — only that she is choosing him over vengeance. Along the way, they rescue Kos, a street orphan caught picking pockets, and sail for Andreas's⁴ homeland with a boy whose future Caspia³ has also seen. Her sister's killer will walk free. The price of love is justice deferred.

In Genesis's skeleton forest, a massive bariwolf pack attacks. The Mavins scatter to fight, but there are too many — twenty-one wolves with Lyssa-green blood. Mathias falls, his throat torn out. Freya, Odessa's¹ beloved horse, crashes with shredded legs.

Odessa¹ puts Evie⁶ in Jodhi's⁸ arms, whispers that she loves the girl, and sends them away. She draws her sword across Freya's throat to end her suffering, then turns to face two wolves alone. She is seconds from death when a blade drives through the first wolf's heart — and a black stallion thunders through the trees.

Ransom.² He kills the second wolf by opening its belly in a single stride. When their eyes meet, Odessa¹ crumbles. He drops to his knees and pulls her into his arms. No more pretending. No more hidden crowns.

The largest mural in Quentis's castle depicts an auburn male with glossy feathers, blood-coated horns, and a woman crushed beneath its talon. Caspia³ recognizes every detail — the scarred ankle, the chipped beak. This is Bisten, a temperamental swift from the palace mews back home.

In Nelfinex, the swift are gentle, intelligent, beloved. In Calandra, they are crux — the most devastating monsters in the realm, responsible for cyclical migrations that decimate the population every generation. The revelation sends Caspia³ to her knees.

She vomits into a potted fern and lets Andreas⁴ hold her as the truth crystallizes: whatever magic corrupts this continent turns the Starling's most treasured creatures into instruments of mass death. Andreas⁴ confirms the migrations kill thousands. And no one in Calandra has ever known the crux were something else.

Odessa¹ arrives at her childhood castle to find a party in full swing and a father⁵ who can barely look at her. He dismisses the crowd and greets Brother Dime before acknowledging his own daughter. When she introduces Ransom² as the true crown prince of Turah, reveals the Guardian's real identity, and demands payment for the Mavins, he shows no surprise — only cold indifference.

He sends them to the west wing, reserved for guests he wishes to ignore. In the days that follow, Margot¹¹ leaves brown hair dye in Odessa's¹ bathing chamber. Guards harass Ransom.² Mae¹² sneaks into their suite with knives. The castle guards do not even recognize the princess who left months ago. And the father⁵ she returned for won't explain why she was never enough.

Through secret meetings in a library carrel, a Voster named Hain¹⁴ — wearing blue robes marking him as a dissident — reveals the truth Calandra has buried for centuries. The Six worshiped as gods were once starving monks who bartered their bodies to demons for magic and immortality.

A Starling pythoness fought and defeated them. Their remains were sealed in glass orbits and hidden. But the dark magic seeped from those orbits into the land, cursing everything it touched: granting the Voster power, turning swift into crux during migration, trapping any Starling who shifts in her monster form.

Hain¹⁴ has searched for the orbits for hundreds of years, but only Starling blood can sense them. He is risking his life to give Caspia³ this knowledge — and his brothers in the brotherhood will kill him for the betrayal.

Andreas⁴ organizes an expedition of fifty soldiers to descend the Evon Ravine, the deepest chasm in Calandra. Giant blood-drinking bats called chiropti swoop from the darkness, killing their merchant guide and several soldiers.

Caspia³ navigates by following the sting of magic through her body — the closer she gets, the worse the pain. At the very bottom, behind a hidden wall passage, she finds a waterfall streaming down obsidian rock into a small pool. The orbit rests at the bottom: a glass sphere containing a trapped storm of wind and water.

Andreas⁴ pulls it free. The magic overwhelms Caspia,³ and she collapses. He carries her out of the ravine with the orbit concealed in his cloak, hidden from every soldier. It proves the theory. But no one yet knows how to destroy it.

Dark veins from Lyssa have crawled past Ransom's² heart toward his throat. During a nightmare about the crux in Ellder, he wakes violently, slamming Odessa's¹ wrists against the headboard and snarling with pure silver eyes before he recognizes her.

There is no trace of the man beneath the monster. He retreats to the couch, terrified of himself. The infection is accelerating without the High Priest's regular siphoning. In the days that follow, he breaks a guard's arm after the man was whipping a horse bloody. Father⁵ blames Ransom.²

Meanwhile, Healer Alore — a brilliant woman whose colorful spectacles and vibrant frocks mask a relentless mind — recreates Luella's elixir and tests monster saliva on rats, searching for a way to reproduce Lyssa so she can engineer a cure. Nothing has worked yet.

Nine off-duty guards corner Odessa¹ in the castle gardens at night, drunk and intent on stealing Faze¹⁵ to sell. One presses a blade to her throat. Others pin Mae,¹² tearing at her clothes and necklace.

Faze¹⁵ leaps at the man holding Odessa,¹ buying her a fraction of a second to wrench the knife free and drive it upward through his jaw. Mae¹² fights with feral precision, but they are overwhelmed — until Ransom² arrives. He kills the remaining attackers with devastating speed, beating the last man beyond recognition.

Then he vanishes into the night, unable to trust himself. Father⁵ arrests Ransom² for the deaths. But in the jail cell, Brother Skore⁹ appears and siphons every trace of Lyssa from Ransom's² blood — more thoroughly than the High Priest ever managed — erasing the dark veins entirely.

Three months after giving birth to a girl she names Odessa,¹ four Voster priests storm the throne room, hunting for the Starling and her child. Caspia³ knows what comes next — she has seen this moment in a vision. She kisses her baby, hands her to the maid Margot,¹¹ and walks to face them.

She tells Andreas⁴ to drive his sword through her heart without hesitation. Then the thrum seizes her body. Flesh turns to feathers. Arms stretch to wings. Golden eyes flood black. She is Starling — and crux — and she slaughters all four priests in moments.

But the monster craves more blood. Deep inside, Caspia³ fights for control, holding the beast just long enough for Andreas⁴ to obey her final request. He drives the blade home. And the woman he loves becomes the silence that defines his reign.

The summons comes not from the king but his queen. Margot¹¹ arrives at the barracks carrying a purple book and tears, telling Odessa¹ to read it with Ransom.² Inside is the story of Caspia Starling³ — a princess from the continent of Kenn who sailed across the Marixmore, fell in love with a man named Andreas,⁴ discovered the truth about the Six, found an orbit in the Evon Ravine, gave birth to a daughter she named Odessa,¹ and sacrificed herself to save that child from the Voster.

Odessa¹ reads her mother's³ words pressed against the cold iron bars of Ransom's² cell, their fingers intertwined. Caspia³ was the secret this castle kept for twenty-three years. And the elfalter necklace against Odessa's¹ heart was the first thing her mother³ left behind.

On the throne room balcony, the man Caspia³ knew as Andreas⁴ — Odessa's father, the Gold King⁵ — weeps for the first time his daughter has ever seen. He tells her everything: how Caspia³ stood on this same balcony staring at the twin moons, longing for Nelfinex.

How she shifted to kill the Voster who came for their baby. How he held her body on the marble floor for two days. How he buried her name so the brotherhood would never learn a Starling descendant survived. He reveals that two orbits are hidden beneath the castle.

That the Kennin — Brother Dime and Skore⁹ among them — are allies searching for the rest. That Allesaria in Turah likely holds another near the Voster sanctuary. He places Caspia's³ elfalter rings in Odessa's¹ palm, alongside the key to Ransom's² cell.

In her mother's³ carrel in the Quentin library, surrounded by Caspia's³ journals and the echoes of a life she never knew, Odessa¹ meets Brother Skore⁹ one final time. He confirms the quest: the remaining orbits must be found and destroyed to end the crux migrations, free the Voster from Calandra, and purge the dark magic that fuels Lyssa.

No one knows how to shatter them yet, but finding them is the first step — and only Starling blood can sense their locations. When Odessa¹ asks who the warrior was that she was always meant to find, Skore⁹ answers simply: you.

That evening, on her cliffside above the crashing sea, Ransom² finds her and speaks three words she has waited months to hear. Then a thrum pulses once through her chest. The ritus has begun to call.