the city of crows

“The City of Crows”

Where the sky is always watching.

Prologue: The Black Sky

Before the world turned to dust and glass, before machines replaced the bones of cities, there was a place known only in whispers: Corven Hollow, the City of Crows.

It did not appear on maps. Its borders shifted like the wind. People didn’t find Corven Hollow. The city found them.

No one knew who built it. No one knew when.

They only knew one thing: the crows ruled it.

Chapter 1: The Boy and the Feathers

Twelve-year-old Wren Calder arrived in Corven Hollow the way most did — lost and cold.

He had wandered for days after fleeing the ruins of a war-torn village. He remembered fire. Screams. And the sharp cry of a single crow that led him through the woods like a shadowed shepherd.

Now, he stood at the edge of a great stone archway, its frame twisted with iron feathers and runes long worn by wind and time. Beyond it stretched narrow alleys and towering rooftops made of black slate and red brick. The sky above churned with gray clouds, and crows — hundreds, maybe thousands — watched silently from rooftops, wires, and twisted trees.

A cloaked woman met him at the gate. Her eyes were white as snow, her voice as hollow as an empty bell.

“You were called, Wren Calder. The crows do not summon without reason.”

He didn’t speak. He only followed.

Chapter 2: Feathermouths and Watchers

Corven Hollow was unlike any city Wren had known.

There were no cars. No lights. Only gas lamps that flickered with blue fire and windows that blinked closed like eyelids. Streets bent the wrong way. Buildings leaned toward each other as if whispering secrets.

Everywhere, the crows.

They did not act like birds. They did not fly away when you neared. Some wore tiny cloaks of velvet. Others had rings on their claws. One even had a monocle. They watched with a knowing stillness — like they remembered you from a dream you didn’t have.

Wren was taken to the Tower of Tongues, where the oldest crow of all lived — Tharn, a giant black creature with feathers like cracked obsidian and a voice that echoed in thoughts instead of ears.

“This city sleeps beneath a curse,” Tharn said, perched atop a throne of broken clocks.
“And you, boy of ash and wind, may be the one to wake it.”

Chapter 3: The Curse of Corven Hollow

Long ago, Corven Hollow had been a city of wizards and whispers — a place of balance between humans and birds. The crows had been guardians of knowledge, keepers of secrets, voices of the wind.

But something came. A Sorrowscribe, a being of ink and shadow who fed on forgotten names. It unleashed a curse: silence fell on the libraries, memories turned to dust, and people became hollow echoes of themselves.

Only the crows remembered the old magic. Only they stood between the city and eternal forgetting.

And now they needed Wren.

“You are a Namer,” Tharn told him.
“One who can speak true names and awaken sleeping magic. That is why you were called.”

Wren didn’t understand. But deep inside, he felt something stir — something old and aching.

Chapter 4: The Forgotten Street

To break the curse, Wren had to find the Three True Names: the Name of the City, the Name of the Scribe, and the Name of Himself.

The first lay hidden in the Forgotten Street — a place that only appeared at midnight and disappeared before dawn.

Guided by a murder of silent crows, Wren crept through the shifting alleys and found the street — cobbled in broken mirror shards, where doors whispered and lamps wept ash.

He found a house with no number, and inside it, a painting of the city that changed each time he blinked.

On the back, written in crow-feather ink, were three words:

Vel Ashtar Corven.

The city’s true name.

The painting flared with light, and for a moment, the entire city sighed — as if some great pressure had eased.

Chapter 5: The Sorrowscribe

But the Sorrowscribe knew Wren was searching.

It came to him in dreams — a creature of unraveling parchment and black ink that bled from its fingers. Its face was made of lost letters, its voice a thousand forgotten poems spoken at once.

“You cannot unwrite what I have written,” it hissed.
“I am the silence between names. The shadow of memory. Leave this place, or be unmade.”

But Wren did not leave.

The second name was hidden in the Library of Lost Birds, where knowledge perched in feathers and memory nested in scrolls. There, beneath the skeleton of a great firehawk, Wren found the truth:

The Sorrowscribe had once been a boy like him.
A Namer who tried to write a better world, but whose ink grew hungry and wild.

Its name had been struck from time.

But Wren saw it, written in the crow-scratch of a dying librarian:

Mael Arhath.

He spoke it aloud.

The city shuddered.

Chapter 6: The Mirror Sky

Only one name remained: Wren’s own.

But the curse had taken it. He remembered nothing of who he was before Corven Hollow. Only fire. Only fear.

So the crows took him to the Mirror Sky — the highest point in the city, where the air thinned and the stars wept ink.

There, Tharn gave him the final gift: a single, perfect black feather.

“This is your quill,” Tharn said.
“Write your name, and write yourself back into the world.”

Wren held the feather to the sky and wrote his name in starlight.

Wren Halden Calder.

The moment he finished, the city woke up.

Epilogue: The Crows Fly Again

Windows opened. People blinked and remembered their own names. The gas lamps flared gold. The buildings stood tall again.

The Sorrowscribe, called by his true name, wept and faded into ink.

And the crows — oh, the crows! — they took to the air in a thousand-feathered storm, filling the sky with song.

Wren stayed.

Not as a boy.

But as the new Keeper of Names, living in a tower of feathers and glass, helping the city remember — helping the world find its words again.

Because Corven Hollow was no longer lost.

And now… it had a voice.

[The End — or perhaps, the beginning.]