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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: On the fantasy world of Aeyrrhi, sentient avian creatures live in nesting communties divided against each other over the issue of over-population. Silver, a female of the Skybreaker cult, rejects the advances of her courting male until she completes the destiny denied her as a newborn by the 'enlightened' ones--the barbaric fight to the death between twins known as the Blood Trial.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: MZB, 1990
Fictionwise Release Date: May 2001

14 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [208 KB], eReader (PDB) [34 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [21 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [20 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [41 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [91 KB], hiebook (KML) [76 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [54 KB], iSilo (PDB) [18 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [22 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [50 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [33 KB]
Words: 6412
Reading time: 18-25 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

A long time Silver, who called herself Jessless, stood in the Skybreaker shrine. But for her slightly erect hackles, she seemed enraptured in meditation. Her glove hand, naked, was drawn up into the plumage of her breast; her eyes were fixed on the twin figures in the icon above. She was unadorned now, except for the two slashes of paint, one on her writing-side cheek, the mark of childhood, for she was virgin, old enough for a husband, but denying herself for the sake of her mission, her Blood Trial. She also wore a slash of paint on her talon-side cheek, red extending her eye. The meaning of that mark was a holy secret. It was called the Mark of the Elder, but Silver's was for a younger twin bent on redressing a wrong, the wrong of having been denied her trial of childhood.

After a long time, she extended her glove hand and placed it on the head of the sacrificed rabbit doe. Her talons, grown too long to write or manipulate tools of any trade, so long that she needed no flying glove to grasp perches or hunt her own food, those talons fit around the skull of the doe. She squeezed; blood ran on the shrine's floor.

Even as the Skybreaker will on the last day take the egg of Aeyrrhi in his talons and crush it like a clod of dirt, thought Silver. He will heed me. It will surely be his will that I so crush the breast cage of the sister who should never have lived. He will surely mantle in joy over this sacrifice, over the body of the Usurper, my twin. He will grant me the victory. He will surely be pleased with me. A small voice said, But you were the younger. You live only by chance. But that voice was only in her head. She paid no attention to it.