Sister Mercy took a step back, her hand slick with blood. Silence spread its ghostly embrace around the hall as she carefully lifted the bag from the boy’s face.

Masha swallowed down the bile that rose in her throat, eager not to miss out on her first initiation as a Matron. The boy’s face was a bloodied mess, the human features hidden behind a map of gashes and cuts. The nose was sliced in two. One shard stuck out of his left eye. Involuntarily, Masha touched her own scars and flinched.

Sister Mercy made the boy smell a block of moongrain. Immediately, the boy’s single eye opened, like a rising yellow sun, vigour coursing through his harrowed eyeball.

‘Tell us, what did you see?’ Sister Mercy asked kindly.

‘I saw airavats breaking down a high wall. Dozens of ‘em,’ the boy slurred every word. ‘I saw men burning in a blue flame, rows of ‘em.’ He pressed a hand to his face. ‘I felt hot. I could even smell the smoke.’

‘People burn all the time. What else?’

‘I saw…a battle. And olive wreaths snaking around a cow’s neck...’

Beside Masha, a Matron scoffed, ‘It takes no divination to see a battle coming in our realm.’

‘What else?’ Sister Mercy asked, patting the boy’s head.

‘I saw a black eagle steal the lion’s head from a peacock.’

‘Must have been a great eagle,’ Sister Mercy remarked sadly. ‘He is useless. Take him.’

‘No…’ he pleaded wearily, the effects of the drug wearing off, knowing he had only moments to save his life. ‘The rest were just flashes. I saw jousting between living corpses behind a wall. One of the corpses held a trident in his hand, his torso spurting blood from where his head should have been. The other man stood in a golden breastplate; he had two faces – one monster, one man.’

That snatched Sister Mercy’s interest. She made him sniff the moongrain again. ‘Go on.’ This time, the boy went rigid, his eyes unfocused, as in a trance, his mouth sagging. His eyes started to roll. He looked like he was having a seizure.

‘The ashes of light drift,’ he intoned in a harsh voice, quite unlike his own, ‘amidst corpses of stars, and the dead storm returns, with an echo of power. And I see then…the last defiance of Asha’s blood. When the sun dies, the shadows will dance in a fiery coldness, to welcome the Son of Darkness.’

The drug wore off. Slowly but steadily, the screaming resumed. Masha could not believe it. This was not a vision. It was a prophecy! It had to be. It sounded like a poem, spoke of destruction, and was completely obscure. A real prophecy on her first day! The Light Bless Me!

‘Sister Mercy, storm, shadow? Surely, it cannot be the N’yen Valren?’ one of the Sisters asked gravely over the boy’s screams. ‘And who is the Son of Darkness?’

‘Now that is something we have to find out, is it not, Sister? Put the Matrons on double duty. And make sure the boy does not die. I see great promise.’ She wrinkled her nose, looking wistfully at the wretched figure. ‘And clean him up. He shat himself.’