Magpie remembered very little about the time before the world ended. He was young then; that was part of it, probably. But everything about those years had fogged the moment the curtain fell over the sky, and all that shone through those memories felt distant and distorted, like they belonged to someone else. But in his clearest memory, he remembered this:

He was a child. Three, maybe four. Young enough that he still tripped over himself, occasionally, if he ran too fast. Young enough that the stones around him felt gargantuan, like monsters, things he'd one day be able to climb. He was three, four, and his feet were rooted to the ground.

Crow stood before him, watching something move within the ground. Beside her, Rook knelt in the mud. The thick fabric of his pants was stained in brown and red, and his hands were buried to the wrists in the ground.

Magpie stood behind them. He watched Crow's long, dark hair swoop over her thin shoulders, tangled and filthy. He watched Rook dig through the mud, as whatever he searched for slipped farther and farther beneath the surface.

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"Look at me," he told them.

Neither Crow nor Rook did. Magpie tried to take a step towards them, but his feet wouldn't move. He swallowed, gasped for breath, choked. "Look at me," he said again.

Crow's large, black eyes remained fixed on the ground beneath them. Rook's wild, furious snarl of a face remained turned away, screaming at the thing Magpie couldn't see.

"Look at me," Magpie said one last time, his voice a hitching, desperate thing.

In his clearest, earliest memory, Rook and Crow's faces remained turned away.

That wasn't the way it happened, of course, In reality, Magpie hadn't said anything. He'd stood silently behind them, four years old and trembling, words tangled in his throat. If he'd spoken, maybe they would have turned around. Rook would have, at least. Rook wouldn't have been able to stop himself. But in his memory, Magpie begged, and they didn't listen, and reality has never been as important as what Magpie believed.