Sparrow Falls
Prologue

It began during the mysterious hours of the night, when everything was still and nothing was like itself. The moon burned in the sky; that was the first sign. It burned red as the roses that bloomed, dripping real blood. It burned against a sky with no stars, and it burned like the shower of venomous rain that spilled onto the dark earth. By the time the golden dawn came, normal as breathing, the rains were gone but the blood and roses remained.
May woke early, and the first things she saw were the rusty stains trailing down the dusky wall of her tiny room in the Library. There was one window, a large frosted window along the back wall, currently glowing yellow with the rising sun. She squinted against the light, shielding it from her with one pale hand, and that was when she saw the stains. She stared for a minute, blinking blearily, then slid out of bed to get a closer look.
As soon as her feet hit the ground, the coffee maker lurched into gear and began sputtering coffee into a vast round-bellied mug. When it was only half-full, May absentmindedly grabbed it and took a huge swallow. The coffee maker continued to burble out the warm brown liquid, dripping it onto the fluffy white carpet. But May was busy staring at the other stains.
Something bothered her about the stains. They were all over the three walls that weren’t taken up with the window, coming from everywhere and nowhere, trailing up, down, and across, from every direction. Still taking gulps of coffee, she poked her head out the door and looked down the dim corridor of other doors, but there were no stains. Feeling very strange, she set the empty mug down in its place in a puddle of coffee and walked into the bathroom.
She stood in front of the mirror, examining her reflection with a look of distaste as steam filled the room in warm clouds. Standing as tall as she could, which wasn’t much, she twisted from left to right, swiveling her head around in every position and flicking her long red hair out of her face. It was too thin, but the color looked nice, if it were just a little thicker…she bunched it up with one hand above her head, giving herself a solemn look in the mirror, then trying out a smile…
A metallic glimmer in the mirror caught her eye and she jumped and shrieked. A bored-looking robot, nothing but a sphere with two digitized eyes and an absurd pair of fairy wings that only pretended to hold it up, was hovering just over her bare shoulder. Indignantly she jumped away from the mirror, face flushing bright red.
“You! What are you –”
“Lady, you might as well look in the shower before you get in there. Just thought I’d warn you.” Robot voices had no tone, but she narrowed her eyes anyway and spit at the little spherical flyer.
“Buzz off,” she snapped, and with what might been an eye-roll, the robot took a lazy, swirling path out of the bathroom. Still clutching the robe around her and scowling, she turned towards the shower, but before she could take more than a step she stopped cold.
Water flowed out of the shallow tub of the shower in bubbling waves, full to bursting with rose-petals and stained a dark, dark red.

In another part of the city, in a vast glass castle on the top of a high hill, the prince wasn’t very happy. He leaned his elbows on the rich mahogany desk and set his head heavily in his hands. Robots of all shapes and sizes swirled around him, bearing pens, paper, memos, documents, and assorted other business things Abel had no desire to deal with. One very large, plate-shaped robot with eyestalks like a crab was hovering hopefully by the edge of the table, bearing a handsome breakfast burrito.
When the moon burned and the roses bled, Abel was awake, shoving away the cold breakfast burrito and swatting at the irritating robots, trying to frame his response to the Holman diplomats. The roses burst abruptly through cracks in the walls, spilling out like liquid and filling up the room.
Abel jumped to his feet, knocking the chair over, stumbling backwards into a sea of sticky bloody roses. Making an odd strangled noise halfway between a yell and a whimper, he backed against the window. When his silk-clad back touched the glass he yelped in earnest and flipped around. That’s when he saw the burning moon, the starless night, and the poisonous rain that sizzled tiny holes into his window.
The servants found him later that morning. The roses were dried and crusted over with blood, filling the room with a strange scent neither good nor bad. Prince Abel, of Chase City, was flat on his back and out cold. Once he’d awoken to find that the plate-bot had dropped the burrito on him and that his best silk outfit had a large burn-mark in the back, he was in a perfectly awful mood.

Just outside the city, in the woods that surrounded the valley, a large black crow sat quite still, watching the proceedings with an unnaturally fixed gaze. He neither ruffled his feathers nor twitched his head, but the other birds of all kinds that swirled around him kept their own fidgety eyes on him. He watched the moon burn, he let the poisonous rain wash over his feathers, and with a sight that was more than natural, he saw the roses that May and Abel saw.
As the sun rose and the city resumed its normal appearance, the crow flicked the moisture off his wings and in the space between one breath and the next settled with a sigh into the shape of a very tall man with albino skin and glossy black hair down to his feet.
Shaking it out of his crow-like eyes, slanted and dark in a round, pale face, he started to take a step and tripped on the strands. Immediately a swarm of birds descended on him and struggled to lift the strands away. One had a stolen brush clutched in its beak. The man snatched the brush away from it and swatted irritably at the rest of them. They settled back on the branches, eyes watching him, the trees filled with their chirping and rustling.
Muttering darkly and throwing the brush to the ground, the man swept all his long hair into a ponytail, then tucked it in half and secured it with a large plastic clip – black, of course. Rummaging in the bushes around the trees, he pulled out a long black cloak with a deep, thick hood and draped it over himself until his hair, and the clip, was hidden. The birds waited a moment, then left their branches and jockeyed for position on his shoulders, head, and arms. Deep in thought, he ignored them and headed out of the twisty woods.

The last person to take note of the night’s strange events was not far from May’s small room at the Library. The twisty woods backed the Library, and in the midst of them, a very large brown bear was sound asleep when the rains began to singe his fur. It was the smell of the smoke that woke him. He rolled over frantically, then darted into his cave, small eyes peering out of the gloom. He could see the moon through the trees, casting its eerie red glow over the dark green branches. The woods were full of smoke. The scent of blood was on the breeze.
His heart dropped into his stomach. With a soft whoosh he settled into the form of a man with brown hair as long as the crow-man’s, dusky brown skin, and a stocky, bear-like build. His eyes were brown and gentle, and despite his size his beardless face revealed that he was much younger than he looked. There were leaves and dried brown pine needles stuck in his hair, and as he watched the rain and the moon he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. His name was Tom, and he and the crow-man were among the few who understood the signs.
He scrambled into the back of the cave and unearthed a rough black robe and a wooden cross from beneath a pile of dead leaves. He had several hair-clips of all colors, some clearly stolen, one of them a bright pink. He stuck them haphazardly in his thick hair until it was pinned untidily atop his head, then tugged the robe on, settling the deep hood carefully over the assortment of clips. He dropped the cross around his neck and started to run from the cave, then stopped, sliding in the leaves, and fell to his knees.
“God,” he prayed fervently, “Please, let me find them before they do.” With no more explanation and assuming God knew who “they” were, he shot with an ungainly lurch from his knees and set off from the cave at a dead run. He kept his nose to the air and followed the scent of blood and roses as fast as he could.