[Indigo]

[Please don't read this, it's garbage.]
The raven is an omen of death, in Wallander, and if Raven Vish were a different sort of man, or if he had led a different sort of life, he might have thought it funny. But in Wallander they love their death omens, or at the very least embrace them as a natural part of being, and he can find no humor or comfort in the coincidence.

They don't believe in luck here. The first few times people asked him why he always travels alone, he answered honestly—"I'm bad luck. It's better this way." He's never been able to choke out a good lie; he feels sick and he stammers and he doesn't convince. But when he tells the truth about this one thing, in this place, people laugh and look at him expectantly, like he hasn't answered the question.

[Indigo]

He doesn't explain anymore. He says "It's a long story," because that's true enough, and if they keep pushing after that he doesn't reply. Silence is the only misdirection that comes naturally to him.

The long story turns over and over in his head in these moments, his murdered friends whispering in his ears, sometimes recrimination and sometimes reassurance and neither is better or worse than the other. Raven is not the one who turned them in—he couldn't lie in words but he could shrug and take refuge in technicalities, when the Royal Shadows came asking questions, Who wrote these broadsheets? Where is their press? Have you seen any suspicious gatherings, anything out of the ordinary? He would sooner have thrown himself off the nearest cliff than send his friends to their deaths.

[Indigo]

Raven didn't turn them in, no, but he was the only one who knew what they were doing, the only one on the outside, who didn't do the work. The only one the Shadows didn't find. For some, that was evidence enough of guilt; when Vervain came back, Vervain who was the best friend he'd ever had, the only one of them released from the Shadows' torture chambers, he desperately needed someone to blame, and it was Raven on whom his eye fell.

Easy enough, after a while, to begin to believe him—not an intentional selling-out, because Raven couldn't believe in what he knew in his bones hadn't happened, but some subtle clue, something that gave them away without his realizing, something he couldn't see. Subtlety was often the source of his failures. Or perhaps something beyond him, some vortex of misfortune that swirled around him and could not be dispelled, because after all his parents were dead and his friends were gone and everything in his life was falling apart.

[Indigo]

In Drosca, the home he cannot return to—not yet, he says, but hope grows fainter every day, and it has been four long years—there ravens are clever, quick-thinking, problem solvers, rule breakers. He's got that last one down, but it's the reason he's here now in this cold damp marshland, hoping he never runs into some Droscan diplomat's escort with orders to shoot him on sight. As for the others, well. He can do anything with a machine, or almost, but mechanical skill doesn't help him solve the problems that really need solving; it can't bring back the people he loves, can't bring down the system that took them. All it can do is make him a living, and that's not what he wants at all.

[Indigo]

The life of an itinerant repairman is lonely, but he's gotten used to solitude; though it means few chances to practice the language, and so he still sounds like a recent arrival, receiving skeptical glances when he mentions how long he's been here. Someone who can fix a mechanism and run a telegraph is in an excellent position to overhear the news, but people speak too freely around him, thinking him unable to understand. He forgets their secrets to the best of his ability. He is tired of knowledge with the power only to harm.

Normally he doesn't stay in one place more than a few days, long enough to fix everything he can but short enough not to bring anyone else into the unlucky swirl, but a terrible, unseasonable storm whipped up around Foxweed just as the time came for him to leave it, and so he's been trapped here for almost a week.

[Indigo]

In hindsight he's shocked this hasn't happened to him before. How many messes has he left behind, unknowing?

There's no more repair work in Foxweed at the moment, but their telegraph operator hasn't taken a day off all month, and Raven is a ready replacement. He likes it. Transmitting messages across great distances, keeping families and friends in contact, spreading word of emergencies or breaking news—these things are of little consequence, but they bring some comfort. A scrap of atonement, perhaps, for what he's done.

He hasn't been here long, but it's a small enough town that he knows the woman who enters the telegraph office isn't from around here.

[Indigo]

"Office" is an exaggeration, really, it's hardly more than a shed with windows, but it's the only such place within a considerable radius and so it is bound to draw strangers.

The woman sits down across from him and says, with the shadow of a frown, "Mr. Vish?" Like almost everyone in Wallander she pronounces the honorific like it hurts her mouth, simple good manners turned to unbearable formality by the crossing of a border.

"Yes," he says.

She doesn't introduce herself and he is grateful. The endless parade of strangers telling him their first names, handing over the most intimate part of themselves without a thought, makes his head ache. Instead she says, "I have something of an unusual request," and hands him a sheet of paper. It's completely covered in dense text, smeared at the bottom by its hasty removal from the typewriter.

[Indigo]

"You want all of this?" he says. "It will take a long time." He watches her face change as she registers his accent, his awkward sentences, but not in the way he's come to expect—she looks almost pleased, and that's somehow more troubling.

"I can wait." She smiles. "It's still faster than sending it by mail." She says this like it's a joke and so he summons up the expected chuckle before setting to work.

As he transmits, letter by letter and barely paying attention to the words, he feels her eyes on him and wonders why. Some people like to watch him work out of a fascination with the mechanical or interest in the profession, but usually they ask questions rather than staring in silence. When she does speak it's to say, "What brings you all the way out here?"

[Indigo]

There are several different possible answers and for a minute or two they all pile up in his throat at once, none of them quite able to escape. Some of them he doesn't even know all the words for. "Work, but I'm not staying. The storm got me," he says. Because a lifetime of memorizing the rules of conversation doesn't disappear in a mere four years, he adds, "And you?"

"It's a long story," she says. Before he can react to that she goes on, "Were you around for all that excitement about the—" and finishes with a word he doesn't recognize, which must show on his face. "Funny little water-dwelling animals, like dragons, I believe the local witches found them? Everyone was talking about it for a month or two."

[Indigo]

"I remember." He does, vaguely, though it was some time ago and he didn't pay very close attention at the time. It seemed to have nothing to do with him.

"Well, a friend of mine at the Lower School of Sciences asked me to help him prepare an expedition, to go up to where they were found and study them. No one's ever seen anything like them in Wallander before, you know." She gestures to the document between them. "Right there is my prospective plan. It's much later than I meant it to be so I need to get it to him as fast as possible. That's why I'm here."

[Wild Pet Found]

[Indigo]

He nods, makes some light conversation about the expedition as he continues to transmit, and an itch begins at the back of his brain. Something here is misaligned. He's the telegraph man—he's not important enough to lie to, and yet.

He reads Southern Wall better than he speaks it, and while that's not saying much, his grasp of the language is skewed toward his work. Clothes and pleasantries are infrequent subjects for one so isolated, but machines, construction, weights and cables and beams, these are words he has reason to know. The document under his hands, describing the goals of a projected journey, says almost nothing about the dragon-like creatures the woman is enthusing about; it's pylons and pulleys that fly beneath his fingers. And the woman doesn't mention those things at all.

[Indigo]

Raven does not object to lying on principle, despite his lack of facility with it, but he can muster only a handful of explanations for this lie, and none of them sit right with him.
When he's nearly done with the transmission and the conversation has mostly died, he says, "Maybe you will have need of a telegraph on your expedition?"

"We might," she says, surprised. "If we can find one that will work in the middle of nowhere. There's no radio reception on a good half of our route, and it's not worth dragging along something that won't be useful the whole way."

[Indigo]

It's been years since he built anything purely for the joy of it, but once, before everything went bad, he'd put together a telegraph that ran on ambient magic, like the very first models decades before he was born. It will be even harder to get the parts now, but he remembers the steps. He could do it again. Find the truth behind this lie.

Stop a disaster, instead of starting one.

"I can make one for you," he says. "In one month, maybe two, if that will not be too much time."

The ghost of a frown reappears as she considers her options, weighing the value of what he offers against her short schedule.

[Indigo]

Assuming she was telling the truth about that. Then she smiles, and extends her hand to shake, though she has to wait for him to finish sending her message before that transaction can be complete. "A month and a half, Mr. Vish. We meet in Reedgrass. I look forward to seeing you there."

---

Coming back was harder than Raven had expected. Not as bad as that first semester—the quiet disappearances, his friends going missing one by one, and no one saying anything, no one noticing, because they had been so careful, so very careful, and nobody on the outside had even realized they knew each other, and forming close friendships outside such a group was almost impossible with a secret like that. No investigation, or none that mattered. What could you do when the Shadows had already come, their victims vanished without a trace?

[Indigo]

Those months of denial, trying to believe they were still alive, and coming home to his aunt at the end of the term and admitting the truth, that they couldn't be. She'd listened, and her eyes had said Not again, but that wasn't it; he didn't even remember his parents. For him this was the first time, and that made it better and worse. Mostly, in his estimation, worse.

One person had noticed, sort of, other than him: he'd been having lunch with Alta, pretending to be fine, and Alta had said, offhand, like it was gossip, "I see you finally stopped hanging out with your ex all the time. Good for you. It's not healthy to fixate on someone like that, you know."