Chapter 1: Off-Kilter

Let's get this out of the way. The king is dead. She passed away from blood sickness over a hundred years ago. After the freedom fighters killed all her guards, liberated the indentured servants, then burned her palace to the ground just three days prior. The kind of death historians loved to write about, pointless but poetic in its way.

So this was no longer a story about a king. It was about Sadie Crane.

From the outside, they were nothing special. Just your average Arcadian. They had their mama's temperament and light brown eyes, Papa Adel's calloused fingers and dark honey-toned skin, the studious nature of their other guardian She Follows, and at last the well-tested ingenuity of their auntie Black Sparrow. Their two great-grandmothers, Roaring Fire and Tia-Tia, were both freedom fighters during the war but passed away long before Sadie Crane was born. White Doe, their mama, said they took after Roaring Fire the most but they had Tia-Tia's soft round chin and big nose.

You'd never guess Sadie Crane was a spirit medium. Or as they were referred to in their native tongue, a seer. As much as they thanked Mother Gaia for All Creation's bounties, they couldn't bear to think what such a word entailed or why they'd been chosen. There were, after all, eight land masses on All Creation where people lived, called "arks" in the Arcadian language. They could have been born anywhere and been anything. They could have been a university professor in Turaq, a soldier in Eudora, a student activist in Ladezi, a diver in Mati, a silk merchant in North Shoal or a novelist in South Shoal, the only child of a village priest in Kat-Ari. But instead they'd become something else entirely, perhaps as consequence of a bad deed not yet realized. Born to a hunter on the month of Harvest, inside the smallest of all--Arcadia, an ark situated roughly between Kat-Ari and Ladezi. Where many languages were spoken but chief among them was Arik or "the language of gods" according to their elders.

They attended university in Perant and tried their best to forget. A small school called Passerine, where nobody knew their name or what they'd seen in the woods that night. But it, as one might expect, offered them only a moment's respite. In less than a year's time, the bad spirits and ghosts had returned. They lasted a misery-making six years before they got up the courage to leave. Now all they had from the time before was a denim battle jacket She Follows gave to them one Harvest morning, their auntie's conjure bag, and a jackalope's foot.

A long trail of bright stabbed through the nighttime gray, cast from the enormous flat headlight perched between the handbars on their motorbike. anarchy and finch scrawled across the right saddlebag like a prayer. Despite what their name would imply, Sadie Crane loved goldfinches. Their basket-shaped nests sitting high in the trees, the way a male's colors changed from season to season in much the same way Sadie Crane packed away their heavy furs and boots during the hot months.

Anarchy was more a concept than a desire. Cimet, a student who grew up in Ladezi, talked about it nonstop. She referred to Arcadia as the "anarcho-primitivist ideal", whatever that could mean. She smoked tar cigarettes and liked to embellish stories about the war. Sadie Crane didn't like her, but they made love anyway. She reminded them of Sybil.

But at the very least, Sadie Crane could appreciate "anarchist" as much as they could appreciate the colorful plumage of a male goldfinch during the month of Awakening, when the snow started to melt and flowers woke from their long sleep to feed off their million-year-old guardian.

They wore a set of headphones attached to a portable cassette player. Through the headphones, they could make out the light buzz of nighttime insects.

Sadie Crane braided their hair now. That would be the first thing people noticed. In Arcadian tradition, braids symbolized new life trajectories. Twining fingers through strands of hair, as one might weave a basket. Papa Adel taught them how to braid and how to weave, in that order. The freedom fighters of long past used to braid red ribbon into their hair, an atonement for bloodshed to come. Battle braids, they were called.

Their nose and both ears were still pierced, a small shiny gold ring through their nose and studs of silver through their earlobes. They remembered when they got their ears pierced, small age of sixteen, shaking like a leaf caught in the windsweep. She Follows pierced their ears first, then Sybil's.

Their name, as always, remained a constant reminder. "Sadie" from "Sarai", named for the god of thunder and lightning. A hawk-headed humanoid figure, bearing Its wings of orange flame. "Crane" from that old creation story, the one about a bird and a child who walked out of the sea. The child came to be known as Child Crane from the Sea, the first human on All Creation. Born from a shell and raised by a long-necked bird that didn't yet have a name.

Sadie Crane was thinking about Child Crane from the Sea when they chose that name. They wanted Passerine to be where they could relax and start over, a place where nobody know who they were. But the ghost of Sybil Basalt-Jaia stayed in their lungs like smoke and they choked on him every day. They saw him everywhere they went. In reflections, in the face of a one-night lover, behind their eyes.

They arrived in Alcoast and stopped at a cafe-hostel called Long Way Home. Cardiovascular vines and moss marched over the distressed wood exterior of a two story building. And pressed against the exterior were countless black shadows, remnants of people long dead. Only Sadie Crane could see them. They tried, as they often did, to not react. This was normal. Completely expected. Yet another example of the strange off-kilter world they lived in. A building surrounded in shadow people. A coffeehouse to the left, a bookhouse to the right. Just like they remembered.

"Welcome back," they muttered under their breath.

History runs in loops, Black Sparrow used to say. The best day ever was only the best day until it came around again a hundred years off the first. By then you weren't even a person anymore, you were a splash of red paint stuck to the side of a farmhouse.

The first floor cafe was open this time of night. Sadie Crane sat at the counter, ordering a tomato sandwich and a coffee. They were going to need both.

From their deerskin pack, a lone jackalope's foot dangled like an offering. And around their throat, a small gray flannel bag, its throat tied shut. Filled with silver coins, black salt, dirt from a graveyard, and a few of Sadie Crane's baby teeth. For protection, Black Sparrow said. Not that either did much good. They kept the bad spirits from harming them directly, but there was nothing on All Creation to prevent them from seeing.

Oanna Jaia-Basalt shot them a dagger death glare from behind the counter. She was rounder than Sadie Crane remembered, her belly filled with pregnancy and mouth thinned with righteous fury. She looked so much like her brother, her skin toned light tan brown and a small puff of reddish-brown hair sprouting from her head. She used to have a long fat braid descending her back like a snake. She cut her hair in mourning several years ago and wouldn't let it grow out again. The braid would have extended past her cannonball hips and stopped just short of her well-muscled calves.

Sadie Crane's back stiffened to an anxious peak, the hairs on their dark russet-colored arms and the back of their neck rising to attention. But they had nothing to say.

The day they left, Oanna cornered them at the train station. What started as a shouting match quickly turned physical when Oanna called them a murderer. They broke her nose, she gave them a big purple bruise around their left eye to remember. Fair's fair. This was, in every way that mattered, their fault.

They rolled the remains of their sandwich into a cloth napkin. If Oanna wanted to stare at them, she could stare. She'd earned herself that right. They only came back because they couldn't think of anywhere else to go. And because they wanted to, if possible, make amends.

They stood up from the counter, headphones in a loving cradle around their neck. The cassette tapes and player were imported from Turaq. One of the people they knew from university, a tall beautiful student called Venna with short black hair and dark onyx-toned skin, offered it as something to remember them by. They spent hours, sometimes a whole day, listening to cassette tapes for bands Sadie Crane never asked the names of.

"Hey, Oanna," were the first words out of their mouth.

The words tasted bitter. As they should. They didn't get to run away and then just come back whenever they felt like it. Not after six years at Passerine, six years learning occult history, astronomy, speculative philosophy, and how to stop hurting. Six years he didn't get to have.

Oanna waited, her face a thunderstorm.

Sadie Crane remembered something. The last names, Basalt and Jaia. Sybil always did Basalt-Jaia, his sister did Jaia-Basalt. They never asked him why.

"You got a room for me?" they asked.

Oanna would have liked to say there were no rooms, that every cafe-hostel in Arcadia should turn them away. But some familial obligation, however faint, stopped her from giving voice to years of pent up vitriol.

She reached for the black leather belt cinched to her chubby waistline. From it there hung keys in various sizes and colors. Oanna picked a small silver one, her hand the color and consistency of a tan brown sofa chair. She reluctantly passed the key to Sadie Crane.

They forced out words through teeth gritted into a cadaverous grin.

"Thank you," they said.

Oanna moved her head up, then down again. Get outta my sight and maybe I won't punch your lights out, the nod communicated.