murmuration
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When Adar was seven, the Blue Monitor found her in the forest cutting apart a dead cat with a sharp sliver of obsidian. Its limbs were splayed out flensed to the bone, tasseled with unbundled nerves and tendons, and she was carefully unraveling out its pinkish guts and arranging them in one long loop.
She looked up, quick and guilty, guilty not because she was doing something wrong and more because she understood the Blue Monitor thought she was doing something wrong. Its faceplate was strobing in the way it did when the ghosts were furious and arguing.
The Blue Monitor was possessed by eight ghosts in all. Four of them were the same ghosts that possessed the Yellow and Red Monitors, and they were godly in power. But they could possess only one Monitor at a time, when one was wielding…
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Ostara is a forsaken world, plunged into eternal winter at the murder of its goddess a thousand years ago. Some humans retreated into burrows deep within the ice sheets to survive, clustering in the ice caverns formed by hot springs; others drained dry their innate gift of magic to transform themselves for survival in the killing surface cold. For all mortals, life is an unforgiving struggle against the dark.
The MC is a skinshifter, one of the few of their kind to possess magic, and they’re determined to use their gifts to secure prosperity for their small, impoverished clan—even if it means venturing far from home to attend training school with the deepdwellers. Their teachers and classmates are hostile, from the xenophobic deepdwellers to the skinshifters from other clans playing their…