Revok

The screams came sooner than he expected.

Piercing. Rending. Especially the young ones. That’s why he’d asked them to go first. He knew their screams would be the worst.

He felt the sounds of the first boy’s shrill scream deep in his marrow as his goblet was shoved into his face. The guard who did it stepped back, and the people around watched his skin crawl with energies older than time itself. Then, his muscles turned to mush, his blood-vessels imploded, and his skin was rent and torn, giving way for a newborn shadow that flew up the the ceiling and coiled round Revok like it was his real child of shadow.

“Shadow-Born soul,” Revok murmured. Then, throwing his fraid wings open to all of the assembledge: “Free at last!”

A spirit of triumph mixed with terror runs up the crowd. The guards move to block the exits, brandishing their spears.

He can imagine how they all look down there through his silvered, useless eyes. They know he can’t see, but he watches them from on his golden balcony all the same. He watches the other children take their goblets – some willingly, some with hesitation, and some with tears staining their ashen cheeks - before all emotion is obliterated forever.

“Abandon it,” Revok murmurs, feeling Knox grow more excited by the second. “Abandon emotion! Abandon thought! Abandon…hope!”

He feels the shadowed beings of his children coil around him. A brood becomes a horde, then a throng, still growing, whispering…

…But through it all, he still hears the screams.

He thought that when the children and the adolescents were done the worst of it would be over. But no, the wails only grew louder. So loud that he wished nothing more than to cover his old withered ears.

Then – movement from Knox. Some of the crowd had launched weapons at him through the increasingly growing, gnawing void. The Windcaller summons his command of the air to slash their arrows away, and then the guards surge forward to administer their potion of rebirth.

“MURDERER!”

He hears that word through the screams of terror.

“MURDERER!”

“TRAITOR!”

“BASTARD!”

Yes. Yes – these were his true labels. Those were words he understood. Those were the first words his weak ears had heard on the surface of Averix as he crawled from the charcoal-coated ruins of his desert home. Those words had told him what he was – a freak, a mutation, an unnatural creature born of evil.

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Reborn as the Don…no, that was Jael’s idea. His black idea that was the biggest insult of all.

“Join your brothers and sisters!” he yells, wringing his claws in the air, feeling the shadows drape themselves around him, feeling the touch of their souls – no, not their souls. His soul.

He remembered how he had felt when that girl had just spoken. He had looked at her and felt the power beating within her breast. And he had guessed at what it was…but the fact that Knox had confirmed that it was him in there, a prisoner of her flesh…that told him Jael had done the unspeakable.

And so Revok’s vengeance would be all the sweeter.

He pursed his beak and drew a deep breath in his golden realm where chaos reigned.

“Remiel.”

The shadows grew stronger as he said the name, and he saw it then: the living, breathing thing that beat at the center of all of them. His children, given new, glorious forms as the scions of something greater than themselves.

“Remiel,” he said again. “You are…beautiful…”

The screams continue, accompanied now by sounds of blades being drawn and desparate attacks being made on the guards.

Knox moves to react. He holds him back.

“Let them learn, Knox,” he tells his faithful servant. “Let them see.”

He saw now. He saw and felt the glorious, unrestrained power of the shadows as they caressed his withered beak and ruined feathers who’s light had long since been seared away. They looked into his being – He looked into his being – and drew out a memory in the very back of his mind: the first memory he had: darkness. Smoke. Death. Then a hand reaching out to him before his life faded away with those of his people.

Come… a voice whispers in his mind. It is time.

The screams rise to a fever pitch. A chorus of chaos flowing over the whole palace, reverberating through each pointless golden hallway. Every velvet cushion, every pristine pillar, and every neatly stacked stalk of Okhram – he saw them for what they were now.

Futile. Just like his life had always been.

But the screams – they still don’t stop. Even when he knows they all must be gone. They all must have given in by now. But his mind contains the torment of their souls. Like a vile prison the bars of his consciousness rattle with the pained screams of the dying and the dead. The iron bars of his brain stretch with the blood-streaked faces of the lost. And this time, he can see them clearly. He can see them clearer than he’s ever seen anything before.

Then his eyes open, and the screams stop.

The world is laid before before him. His world.

A sea of silent souls watch him steadily, without moving or breathing. They watch him with burning balls of twinned pale-fire that serve as their eyes. They watch him with no hatred. No malice. No joy. No remorse. They simply watch him up there, standing above them all, and trying to stop himself from shaking as Knox pushed a goblet into his claws…

“Come…” a distant voice tells him again. “It is time…”

He looks down with his own eyes at the slopping liquid that fills his cup, and he regards Knox with a vacant expression.

Knox looks back at him sternly.

And this moment feels like the entire world is watching them.

Revok…Your gifts are a blessing and a curse both. For though you see all the options before you, your feet still waver on the right path.

He felt his legs give way. His arm trembled, even as Knox placed one reassuring hand on his and tried to steady him.

He looked back at the sea of shadows and saw – with more terror than he’d ever experienced – that each one pointed a slim, smoky finger at him.

“It is time…”

Their faces mix with Knox’s stern image in the mirrors of his eyes.

He realized only now just how ugly this world truly looked.

The goblet falls to the gilded floor.

He turns from Knox’s sad face, feeling fury fill the room.

His broken wings stretch out, ready to propel him through the nearest window.

And Knox’s spectral hands rake his back.

He doesn’t even turn round. He starts dragging himself across the floor as his bleeding wings leave a trail of his life behind him, painting his golden graveyard red.

“IT IS TIME,” the voice of the shadows say. “IT IS TIME, REVOK.”

His limbs are spread apart and he is forced to look into Knox’s eyes as he holds the goblet above his head.

“Knox…” he wheezes, feeling the talons of the shadows break his beak open and reveal his blackened throat.

“KNOX, OLD FRIEND…PLEASE!”

The torturer shook his head once as he poured the liquid down his throat, and slowly Don Revok felt his heart dissolve.

He finally was the Blackbird.