“Where did you find him?” asked a voice from above.

“In the home of Queen Maerl,” was the answer. It was a man speaking. “That is why I brought him here. We found him beside her.”

“Where is she?” this was also a man.

“She is dead, my lord; she was stabbed through the heart. We thought that this poor fellow had died, too, through the act of birth.”

“So it is her child?”

“We believe so, sir.”

“Is he all right?”

“We will bring him to the Archives. He’s in a bad state—it looks like he got stabbed, too—but we thought you would like to see...?”

“He’s not my child,” the King said, his voice rising in anger. “Avantiel is the only child I had with my dear wife. Why... Who... and who would want to kill her and her son? What had she done to anyone?”

“The last person we let in to see her was the Green-Eyed King—”

“No! Neon wouldn’t do such a thing.”

There was a pause. Tension lay heavy in the air.

“We had better get him down to the Archives,” said the man. “But first, he needs a name.” There was a pause. “Sir, he’s your wife’s son; will you give him a name?”

“May I take a look?”

The blanket covering his face was pushed back. Wise, tear-filled, stunningly blue eyes looked down on him.

“What happened to his eyes?” the owner of the blue eyes asked.

“We are not sure, sir. We found him like this.”

“Dark hair. That’s odd,” the eyes disappeared again and he found himself staring up into a clear, bright sky. He writhed in the man’s arms to get away from the brightness. It was very strong. “Well, I should hope that he is not entirely dark in nature. His name is Penumbra.”

“Thank you, King Adenel.” The arms began to move.

“Guard...”

“Yes sir?”

“Don’t bring him back, on my orders. It pains me to see that my dear wife had a child by another man.”

“It’s time to practice archery,” a small, gentle voice twittered in Pen’s ear. The small boy closed his picture book with a slam and got to his feet. He found himself face-to-face with an elf-girl, who was a year older than himself. She had golden hair that went to her waist, tied back with a red ribbon, and big, dark pink eyes. She was dressed in short, baggy pants and a t-shirt, over which a light armor vest was pulled tight. Her feet were bare. In her hands she held two bows, the longer of which she handed him once he had put the book back into the shelf.

“Thanks,” he said. The girl smiled briefly and ran out of the huge library of the Archives, her hair dancing behind her as if it had a life of its own. Pen took a moment to adjust his own practicing armor before he followed.

The library was the oldest building of the Archives’ campus, and the most well known. What many of the elves living in Nydia did not know about the Archives was the system that was built behind it. Not only was it a historical archive as the name suggested, but it had become much more over the many generations. It was a hospital, a gathering place, a school, and an orphanage. Pen had lived all of his short life—seven years—in the care of the elvish wisemen and wisewomen of the Archives. The elvish girl, whom everyone called Tory, was also one of the few children that resided in the orphanage.

Archery and swordsmanship was taught in large field in front of the library. The rest of the Pen’s class, consisting both of orphans and children of the nearby village, was already gathered beneath the broad-leafed trees. Pen took a place beside Tory.

In the group of young, pale-featured, longhaired elf-children, he stood out like a red on gray.

Pen was not like the other children. Elves had light colored eyes and hair; both got lighter with age. Hair was always grown long since it was painful for them to cut it off. But Pen had black hair that got slightly lighter gray in the dark, and it was cut short by his own hand. His ears were barely pointed and he preferred swords to bows.

As if his hair wasn’t already enough to set him apart from the others, Pen had another, more stunning feature: his eyes. They looked like black pits, and even the white was missing in them. Nearly invisible eyebrows did not help the fact that it didn’t look like he had eyes at all. They didn’t shine when light hit them. The darkness absorbed everything.

The elves believed that his strange eyes were the cause of magic of some sort. Pen no longer let it bother him. He accepted that he was different.

“We’re going to practice shooting in the forest,” explained the archery wiseman, their teacher. Instead of the practice armor of the children, he wore a plain, cream-colored surcoat that covered chain mail. His bow was sleek and nearly as tall as himself.

It made Pen take a moment to look at his own little bow. All the elf-children were taught how to make their weapons. He had searched for weeks in the forest until he had found wood of a quality that met his standards. He did his best to carve it, and he succeeded in smoothing out all the knots. He was generally content with the result.

“Will you be my partner?” Tory asked him suddenly. Pen noticed that the wiseman had stopped talking and pinched his leg as punishment for not paying attention.

“Huh?”

“We’ve got to shoot as many drifts as we can with five arrows each. We can’t use an arrow again after it’s been shot. We need partners to go in the forest, so will you be my partner?”

“I’ll be your partner,” squawked a nine-year-old from the village. He took Tory by the arm and dragged her away. Pen looked on until they disappeared in the nearby greenery that was the forest. There was no one left to partner up to.

“I guess you’re all alone, kiddo,” said the wiseman. He handed Pen five arrows and went off to the forest after his students. Perhaps he knew that Pen would fare well alone.

The dark-haired boy ran between the trees as quickly as a rabbit. It felt good to be out of the sunlight and in the shadow where he belonged. The woods were full of the voices of the students as they went around, looking for signs of drifts. The creatures were numerous and pesky, looking very much like birds with fur instead of feathers and bat-like wings. Pen knew an especially good place to find drifts.

Pen fitted his first arrow when he saw the leaves twitch above. Once the long rat’s tail of a drift dangled under the perch, he aimed and shot. With a squeal, the ugly creature fell to the ground a few feet from where Pen was standing. He picked it up and continued on to the place where he had last seen a drift colony.

But when he arrived, it seemed that he was not the only one who knew of the area. Tory and the village boy were there, too, looking up into the sky hopefully. When the older boy spotted Pen between the trees, he started laughing.

“The early bird gets the worm!” he exclaimed, holding up two dead drifts with arrows sticking out of them. Tory didn’t have any kills yet.

“Don’t be that way,” she whimpered, looking at Pen hopefully. He felt nothing for her pitiful gaze. Instead, he notched another arrow and aimed for a drift high up over her head. His arrow was sent flying with so much force that the arrow passed straight through its victim. But before Pen could pick up his prize, the village boy did.

“Thanks for helping,” he said, smiling.

“Give it back. I shot it,” Pen ordered calmly. Impatience stirred in him.

“You want it back? You’ll have to strike me down, first!”

Pen promptly dropped his bow, arrows, and drift to the ground. Fights between boys were common in Nydia, but Pen had never been in one. Here was his chance.

The village boy was slow and clumsy, but strong. Pen was strong too, but he was skinny and lacked height. But Pen had the advantage of a sword at his side—the Archives supplied one to all of their children, so they could protect themselves in the dangerous world outside. The other boy had only a dagger to keep him company. And Pen knew his swords; practicing with them was one of his favorite pastimes.

Pen drew the sword and the village boy his dagger. There was a time where Pen thought he remembered Tory’s voice begging him not to fight, but with blade in hand, his body worked automatically. He ran and spun, sword vertical, and knocked the dagger out of the boy’s hand. In mid-turn, his back to the boy, he flipped his sword horizontally. There was a terrific snapping sound and a shower of blood, and the next moment, the older boy lay on the ground in his own blood. Pen’s sword, having driven through both weak armor and flesh, stuck out of his chest.

He pulled his blade out of the older boy, without a thought about what he had done. Tory was screaming at the top of her lungs, her face ruined by tears and fear. He didn’t seem to hear her; his mind was still on the great feeling of the sword. He turned away.

But even before he could put the sword back in its sheath, the archery wiseman came running to Tory’s side. When he saw the dead boy and Pen with the bloody blade in his hands, he reached for a red stone that hung from a chain around his neck. He put it to his forehead and closed his eyes, calling home for more wisepeople.

“Did you do this?” he asked when he lowered the stone, his voice shaking.

“Yes,” Pen answered, betraying no emotion. The man then knelt down beside Tory and forced her to look into his eyes. He was using elvish magic to watch what the girl had just seen, Pen knew. After a minute, he straightened up again.

“Where did you learn to do that?” he asked.

“I taught myself.”

“I see. Well, you seem to have some skill, but… this… you can’t just kill people because you don’t like them...”

“He took my thrift and said that I would have to strike him down to get it back.”

“You took that as an invitation to kill?”

“Did I do something wrong?” Pen did not understand.

The poor wiseman did not know what to say to the seven-year-old murderer.

“Sir, what should we do?”

“How old is he, did you say?”

“Nearly eight.”

“When he turns nine, send him to University. If he does well, perhaps he will go on to Havoc.”

“It will be done, but until then—”

“Leave him be. The child must learn guilt on his on.”

“Yes, sir.”