Young Writers Society

a/n: hey, thanks for checking out Starry Veins! This is the novel I wrote for Round V of LMS, and it's still a first draft! While I don't discourage any feedback, I prefer not to receive feedback on grammar! I'm not polishing this draft up yet, so I'm not as concerned about editing. I am, of course, open to all feedback, but I ask that you keep this in consideration! Thanks <3

*

[Cassius]

“Lift it higher.”

Cassius gritted his teeth and let the stick in his hands drop until the tip hit the ground. “This is stupid. I don’t have a sword. Why should I be training to use one?”

Enoch swung at him with his own blade and Cassius narrowly staggered backwards to avoid decapitation. He tripped over the edge of the industrial road and landed on his tailbone. Enoch put the tip of his sword against Cassius’ chest.

“Because you’re really fucking bad,” Enoch said. “Get up.”

Every muscle in his body hurt and he was hot from exertion already, but a burning anger still managed to made it worse as it flared in his chest and he hit the sword away with the back of his hand before standing up. “No. I’m done. I’m tired and we’ve been walking all day and I don’t want to be training too. My feet are about to fall off.”

“Cassius,” Ember protested.

“You go then,” he said, kicking a tuft of grass. “I’m done with this.”

Enoch folded his arms over his chest. “When the Grey Masks come back, you’ll get angry at them then? Ask them nicely to leave you alone?”

Cassius ground his teeth together and it grated in his ears. “Why does it matter? I don’t have a sword. I have a stupid dagger, but I can’t fight someone using a sword with my dagger. What would you have me do, use a stick?” He threw the stick he had been using aside. It clattered against the road, rolled to the other side of the road, and was immediately swallowed by the ground.

“They’re trying to help,” Artemesa pointed out, all the feathers on her neck ruffled. She shook herself. “Calm down.”

“No!” he shouted. “I’m tired, Mesa, and I’ve been tired since we left the Citadel! I want to rest, I don’t want to knock sticks together and I don’t want to train! This isn’t helping me, and neither are you! I won’t calm down. I haven’t seen Isadora in seasons, now Alanna and Rowan are gone, and what I get is cuts and bruises and sore muscles and a barely filled stomach! You calm down!”

A spike of irritation jolted his stomach as Artemesa glared at him. Behind him, as he stomped over to his pack, Enoch snorted.

“You sound like some noble’s bastard infant,” Enoch growled. “You’ll have to learn to fight eventually, and whinging about how hard your life is and how these inconveniences are so hard and toiling on you will get you as far as crying under a blanket about it.”

“That sounds fine with me!” he snapped, whirling back around. “I’ve never left home before, until a bunch of strangers attacked and burned it up with the intention of kidnapping us! Then some ass of an ex-knight does kidnap us, drags us up to Glacier’s Keep with the intention to sell us and only misses that window because someone else came along and you put on a show for them! My family is all gone, my parents are probably dead, and I’m tired and sore and miserable, so you can call me what conceited, privileged, whiny baby you want! I’m taking a walk.”

Ember leapt to her feet and trotted over to him. She grabbed his arm. “Hey, Cassius, come on.”

He yanked away from her. “Leave me alone, Em,” he said, deflating. He turned away, a lump rising hard in his throat, and stormed away. His chest was pulsating, burning with a pain that ran all the way to the tips of his fingers and his toes, leaving him shaken. Pins and needles coursed through him.

“You can’t go off alone!” Ember shouted behind him, a fire rising in her own voice.

“Don’t follow me.”

And still, behind him, he heard the clack of something sharp rapping against the road. Another jolt of frustration hit his stomach, dragging it down until he felt sick the further he walked.

“I said, don’t follow me,” he grumbled.

“And what are you going to do to me?” Artemesa was at his side now, and she rammed the blunt edge of her horns against his arm, then peered at him sharply, extending her neck just enough so that she was a little taller than him.

He muttered, but said nothing, and allowed her to trot beside him.

“Ember was right, we shouldn’t go off. The Grey Masks could ride up at any moment.”

“They’d have to pass through Enoch and Ember then, since they were up north with us and there’s only one road here going west. I won’t go that far that I can’t hear them, stars Artemesa, I’m not stupid.” He tugged his lilac vest around him tighter.

Some of the weight in his stomach receded. “I know you’re not,” she said. “Do you doubt my understanding of you? Don’t push me or them away.”

He frowned. “I’m not. I just… I need a minute.”

The road had rounded a bend in such a way that tall coniferous trees were now blocking the view of the watchtower that Ember and Enoch were next to. Cassius stopped and collapsed down onto the road, aware of the distance he had put between himself and the others, but unconcerned. He was all right on this side of them, since they weren’t coming from the west.

Artemesa laid on the road beneath him and placed her head in his lap, which was now big enough to cover it completely. He ran his fingers over her head, between her horns, and over the back of her neck. She ruffled her feathers up like a pleased bird, shutting her eyes, and trilled sweetly. Her breath came out in long snuffs that teased one side of his curls.

“I don’t regret going with Ember,” he told her quietly. “I really don’t. You know that.”

“I do.” She shifted until one of her eyes was craned up right at him and opened it, the sapphire ring around her pupil glowing. “Cassius, you know you are smart, right?”

He frowned, staring out at the river running parallel on the opposite side of the road. The water bubbled and gushed as it slithered along the path, and for a moment, he swore it shifted like a giant snake. “Of course, why?”

Artemesa let out a long snuff through her nostrils and raised her head to stare, eye-level, at him. He didn’t meet her gaze.

“Because you’re lying.”

His throat seized up and he shrugged. He tried to close himself off from Artemesa, but he had no idea how, not when he was even certain how they were connected. She continued to stare at him with a serpentine intensity.

Then her snout jerked left, towards the west, and her nostrils flared. She got up into a crouch, and began to stalk, slinking away from him with her tail low and flickering behind her.

“Mesa?”

“There are people coming. On horses.” She tilted her head and raised her nose, sniffing the air.

He stood. “I’ll start walking back. Maybe you should go towards the trees, though.”

She wheeled her head back around to look at him. “Are you sure? What if they’re hostile?”

Cassius snorted. “I don’t think anyone will just attack some random citizen walking around on the roads. Go, I’m serious. I’ll be fine.”

In the distance, now he too could hear the sound of the rhythmic clop of the hoofbeats.

“What if it’s the Grey Masks?”

He turned away from the noise and shrugged. “They’re coming from the west. If it was the Grey Masks, they’d be coming from the northeast, like us.”

She cocked her head. “But where do they come from?”

“Uh.” He blinked. “Why—”

I heard Tyrus Frost was getting up to some trouble in the west.

Artemesa growled as he was hit with the realisation. He glanced over his shoulder as the figures came into view, cresting the horizon at a moderate pace.

“Oh no.”

word count:

1,337