Pale golden morning sunlight trickled down the cliffs into the valleys below, bringing with it a cold, sharp wind and a light shower of rain. The boy, named Scribe by his inattentive and literal-minded parents, watched the skies from the shelter of a small cave he had found in the side of a cliff ledge. From this height, he had a good vantage point of the entire valley, including the town of Brokenshire where he lived and worked as an apprentice in the Grand Library. Surrounded by cliffs on three sides and steep paths that led down into terraced fields on the other, the town's natural defensibility was complemented by its high population of dragons (two, at his last count) and its supernatural luck in remaining uninvolved in the politics of the outside world. It was said to be protected by Spatula, Goddess of Defeat, although it was mostly the town's one priestess of Spatula who said this. There was no space in his head for history right now. He was thinking about his future and watching the skies.

The boy named Scribe was sixteen years old. Under the laws of Brokenshire, this was the age at which apprenticeship ended, acolytes became priests and students of the University earned their degrees. Of course, the end of training meant exams. Even a boy with as unusual a history as Scribe was required to prove his worth, and the trials of the Grand Library were notoriously harsh. The Library had a reputation to maintain as the pride of Brokenshire, as the one place where it was possible to find information on almost anything, where the history of the world was annotated even as it occurred, where things that would otherwise fade away and be lost forever could be immortalised in words. Lazy, clumsy or ignorant new employees could ruin that world-renowned reputation, so it was vital that they were weeded out in the examination process. Only an apprentice who understood the importance of their role as a chronicler of the world's knowledge could hope to become a fully-fledged servant of the Library.

Today, Scribe was searching for a feather for his new quill pen. Like all trades, the Library expected its apprentices to learn great respect for their tools. People tended to attach more significance to things that were personal to them, so one of the most important steps in the examination process was to make one's own quill pen, including finding a suitable feather. As a general rule, the more impressive-looking and exotic the feather, the higher the examiner would mark you, although anything that writes properly and doesn't break would theoretically pass the test. It wasn't just a test of skill in craftsmanship, it was a time to apply all the knowledge collected in the Library to a practical task – deciding on a bird, locating its nest and somehow persuading it to part with its feathers.

It was quite a sight to behold on the day of examination; hundreds of young men and women sneaking around the forest and trying to scale cliff faces with bows and arrows, nets and, quite often, bizarre clockwork bird-catching contraptions of their own. One gang of scientific-minded students had even built their own flying machine, although it didn't work very well. The entire town looked forward to the free entertainment that came with large gangs of clumsy adolescents, mostly with no clue about hunting apart from having read about it in books, chasing unsuccessfully after brightly-coloured birds. Many of the more intelligent birds had memorised the time of year when it happened and were already hiding, mocking their pursuers in their own avian way. One bird even had a specific call for the occasion.

Out of all the apprentices, Scribe could not be satisfied with a mundane feather. Not only did he believe himself to be capable of a lot more, he felt obligated to, under a debt as strong as any oath. At a young age, he had inherited his grandfather's pen. A year ago, he had broken it. Although it had been necessary for his survival at the time (probably – he still wasn't certain he remembered exactly what had happened back then), he had still quite deliberately snapped it in half. It had been a precious family heirloom, possibly even a holy relic. The rumours surrounding it told that its feather, leaf-green and occasionally seen to glow, belonged to a Garuda, a legendary God-bird, and that it had been awarded to Scribe's grandfather when the great sage ascended to the ranks of the Celestial Bureaucracy. It was, all in all, not a good thing to have broken. Filled with remorse, Scribe had vowed to rebuild the feather, or even improve upon it.

Finding another Garuda was probably out of the question. All the legends said that the birds only lived on the Celestial Plane. While Scribe knew how to get there, and in fact had made the journey once, he didn't want to go again – he had angered a few people there who would quite cheerfully do some very nasty things to his soul, which would be completely defenceless, as it was impossible to journey there in one's physical body. Added to which, he didn't enjoy the process; it was too close to being dead.

Raiding the library for its oldest tales, he made a list of several legendary birds in his ever-present notebook and ticked each one off in turn. Phoenix feathers would only be a fire hazard, Roc feathers would be far too large, unless he also planned to find a giant to hold the pen for him while he dictated, Thunderbirds lived on the other side of the continent. Most of the birds turned out to be too large, inaccessible, murderous, existentially dubious or made out of inappropriate elements to be a good source of quill feathers. He had begun to despair until his best friend Tracy, who was a year older than him and had already been ordained as a full priestess of Spatula, had given him a new lead.

"Ravens," she had told him, "Are often chosen as the servants and vessels of the Gods. Spatula herself has a special connection with the ravens, which is why Spatula and her favoured mortals always have black hair. She likes to send a flock of ravens to the battlefield before she appears to the losing side, as a fair warning. If the soldiers pray to the ravens, the tide of the battle will be turned around, but if any of them shoot at the birds, they will be wiped out to a man."

"That sounds a little unfair on the ravens," he commented, provoking a raised eyebrow from the priestess, "I mean, they didn't ask to become involved in the war, and they're always going to end up being shot at, even if its only by a stray arrow in a massive volley. And if they always appear to the losing side, people are going to think they're bringing the bad luck with them."

"They don't seem to mind. After all, Spatula always leaves them with a lot of food," she replied, "Now, do you want my help or not?"

"What exactly are you going to do to help?"

"To the mortal eye, all ravens look the same," she told him, "Just as many of the animals you see around you may in fact be nature spirits or messengers of various Gods. This cat, for instance, looks just like an unusually black cat," she pointed to Waterloo, the temple's resident sacred animal, who was curled up asleep on his velvet cushion in the middle of the little shrine constructed for him. As far as Scribe knew, it really was just an ordinary black cat but he knew better than to anger Tracy and risk the wrath of Spatula by bringing up sore topics of contention between the two of them, "There are ways to create a state of lucidity, so that sacred birds will stand out from their mundane cousins due to their shining aura."

"Does this, by any chance, involve herbs?" asked Scribe. He wasn't sure if it was a Temple policy that all problems must be solved using herbs of dubious origin or if it was Tracy's specialisation, but in the end, her plans always came down to mind-altering substances.

"I see you're learning fast," she replied, clearly not noticing the hint of irony in his voice, "Fortunately, I already took the liberty of picking the correct herbs and I even began preparing the infusion for you."

"Out of interest, will this… lucidity give me problems seeing ordinary, mundane things, like the edge of cliffs? Or issues balancing? Or keeping my soul in my body in the first place?"

"Your gracious surrender of your life unto Spatula would put you in the perfect position to see the spirits you're looking for," she mused, "But don't worry, I'm not giving you a strong enough dose. To experience the full effects of lucidity is forbidden to any but the highest ranks of priests."

But I bet you consider yourself an exception, he thought to himself. Her situation as the only priestess of her deity often gave her special privileges, or at least, she assumed they did. She didn't really see the point of actually checking this with anybody in authority and wasting their precious time.

"I must warn you," she said, her face suddenly serious, her stare even more intense, as though she were finally looking at him rather than another plane of existence entirely, "You must not harm the spirit birds. Don't shoot at them, don't try to grab them, don't take their feathers unless they've already been discarded or given to you freely. She is watching you, Scribe, and she will not be happy."

"I promise," he said, a chill running down his spine. He had already been planning a way to obtain a feather without hurting a bird – he felt uncomfortable deliberately harming anything unless it was trying to kill him or he really needed to eat it. He was a scholar, a civilised and learned man, not a violent one, and his soul was in enough jeopardy as it was. He did not want to be reminded that, while he studied and ate and slept and chased after birds, somewhere in a courtroom on the Celestial Plane, a legal battle over the fate of his not-so-immortal soul raged and very few people were on his side.

To distract himself, he chatted with Tracy while he watched her prepare the herbs. She had been progressing well in her own career as a priestess and had chosen her specialisation – she was to be an oracle, providing visions and prophecies. She would be expected to keep herself pure in body and mind so that she would be the perfect vessel for the word of the Gods. This meant celibacy and occasional periods of fasting, meditation and isolation from the outside world. She had picked a cave that looked comfortable to sit in.

"Apparently, Oracles are often insane," she said casually, "But Spatula assures me that I should not worry about this, and that it will be quite pleasant for me to surrender my sanity if and when the time comes."

"I'll miss you," he said, also not giving his opinion on the current state of her sanity, "I hope we'll still have time to sit and talk, when we both become adults. You… will be allowed to talk to boys, won't you?"

"I can trust myself not to think impure thoughts about you," she said. Scribe wasn't sure whether to take this as a compliment or a put-down, "You needn't worry. Spatula says that it is fated that our paths will cross again. The infusion is ready now. It should last for the rest of the day before it starts to wear off. Please don't waste it. Those herbs are hard to come by."