The Raven Girl

Chapter 1

¡Buenos días! Have you got a fresh cup of tea? Or coffee? Or vodka? Or just some good old fashioned water? (Or whatever you fancy drinking whilst you read) Again, I appreciate all feedback so please do comment if you wanna :D I have been doing one hell of a lot of word gardening so I hope it's paid off...

It was said her family derived from ravens.

Dark, cold and gloomy, and thoroughly hated, the Ravner family lived up to their name and all that came with it long before their failed revolution, long before their failed attempt at tearing the royals apart.

Amund Ravner had been, as her brother so crudely put it, stark raving bonkers – mad to the very core – and no amount of good publicity could change that. Of course, that had been wishful thinking. There had been no good publicity whatsoever amongst the people and, as a result of that, the Ravners were no longer welcomed in society, banished to the wildlands not long after Amund's army was crushed on the battlefields and slaughtered like unsuspecting cattle.

He had been offered a deal, when held captive as a prisoner of war, that if he took his household far from the stretches of the kingdom and spoke no more of his treasonous words, then no one else need be harmed. Amund accepted and here they were today, forty years later. Perhaps if he had not been so mad, he would never have put his family through all that. Perhaps he would've realised how the odds had never been the slightest bit in his favour, that any army he had would have been more suited to tending fields rather than war, but he hadn't and as such lost his campaign and damned the Ravners to an eternity of, more or less, hell.

Asta had spent many a day reading up on the history of her family, be it Amund's revolt or the mythology that permeated their kingdom. There was nothing much to do besides reading, nothing much to do besides hanging about the dreary castle until the weather picked up, because they were an enemy to the king and to the country, mocked and scorned by all, and remained isolated in uncultivatable lands that nobody sane would want. The weather there was always dull at best, morbidly cold and regularly torrential and the crops were thin and reedy, often drowned by the time they hauled them in from the farms.

She, of course, had grown up used to their miserable existence and the weather was the least of her concerns. In fact, she'd grown up with a lot more and was used to that too. As many of the literary giants of the day expressed, children could get used to anything if that was all they grew to know.

With a sliding glance at the window, Asta let out an exasperated sigh. The trees that marked the outskirts of the forest were practically being dragged from their roots by the great gusts of wind, quivering like frail skeletons at the gates of hell. The rain had picked up and was at that current moment battering the stone exterior of the castle and the small panels of glass she was looking out of. Just as she had turned her gaze from the upcoming storm and directed it back to the book in front of her, the sky let out a rumble of thunder.

She rolled her eyes. The weather was always so melodramatic, so unnecessarily violent and seemed to enjoy nothing more than confining her to four walls and oh did she hate to be confined, cooped up like some bird in a cage.

The original Ravner people were not people as they are in the modern world, but are said to have evolved from the long winged, black creatures of which they are named after, existing as beings with the potential for potent magic –

The Ravners might've had a potential for 'potent magic', she thought as she lifted her eyes from the page, but this book had little potential for beauty. It had turned a poetic, mystically alluring story into something that seemed almost matter-of-factual in its writing. But it wasn't fact. Why write myths so dully when they had originated as something to thrill and excite its listeners?