Book One – Chapter 15

Eventually, the common room filled. Four members of the escorting party settled at the table next to Fallem. Then, someone new descended from upstairs. A shaman. Yu had not known the guild had other guests. How many more were there? So far, he had only seen the people he came with. But as the shaman came into view, that thought slipped from his mind. Yu had been wiping down the kitchen pass-through, methodical in his work. He had done so with his arms, since getting up onto a stool to use his talons would have been way too embarrassing. Now, his arms stilled. His breath did, too.

The figure was tall and slim, even more so than Harrow. But that was where comparisons ended. There was no telling what the shaman had once been — what race, what gender, what life they had abandoned. As they transformed, shamans left such worldly distinctions and personal desires behind. With their metamorphosis came different bodies and lives.

The shaman’s face bore the hallmark of their kind: a smooth, pale mask, featureless except for the faintest indentations where eyes should have been. But unlike any shaman Yu had heard of, this mask was faintly translucent, like a frozen lake in the dead of winter. There was movement though, something slow and shifting that lay submerged just beneath. Shadows, that pooled in the depths where the waters still ran.

From the mask’s edges, thin, wispy strands of grey unfurled — not quite hair, not quite smoke. They curled and drifted in the air like breath in the cold. These strands covered the shaman’s head and cascaded down the back, shifting weightlessly as if caught in an unseen current, with tips that frayed and dissipated like mist.

All of the shaman’s mask and hair was coloured in white or greys, and so was their body. It was draped in thousands of layered, scale-like folds, shifting in muted hues of ash. They were not scales in the way a beast might have them. No, these seemed softer and incredibly thin, curling at the edges like millions of petals that had begun to unfold. They rippled with every motion, as if they were breathing. Yu could not tell in how far inwards these scales reached, nor see the body beneath, with all the layers.