Beinn

Beinn was a small town, but everything looked small compared to Tàlant. Most of the houses were white one-story buildings covered in straw. A few were larger, with a small decorative crenellation imitating a castle wall. There were a few people, mostly farmers, transporting goods or carrying baskets from shops to their houses. They looked almost the same as everyone in Tàlant, apart from the tattoo on their left hand. A crow, perched on a branch with an eye in its beak.

“They call themselves seers,” Anna Dia said when she saw Tom staring, “because a lot of weird stuff happens here. Nobody is really sure why, but the locales are very proud of it. We even got a few of them up in the Lenses district, telling future. Most of the time, they’re wrong. But then some times, they’re remarkably accurate. I went to one myself and he said that he couldn’t see anything. Probably went to a charlatan. But that was when I didn’t know how stuff worked here.”

During the day, the town seemed sleepy. Most of the residents working and couldn’t be bothered to stray from their daily routine. But now, when God covered Dachaigh in the blackness of night, thousands of brilliant lights emerged from the town. At first, it looked like a constellation, some lights even flickering, but that was only for the passersby. For everyone too exhausted to walk, Tom saw the brilliance of the lights. The seemingly random flickering telling a story.

The lights formed a crow, flying through a forest, then perching atop of a branch. It opened its beak and revealed a third eye that expanded as an explosion, until the crow was once again whole. Tom wondered how they did it. They didn’t know anything about glasslights and even those were hard to control on a scale such as this.

Places

• The Pig - inn