Brivaria was a patient girl. She really was. She’d learned to forgive countless indignities across her many interventions on Zlithia. Some of those who called for help treated angels with respect, even reverence. Some did not. That was part of why angels didn’t answer every call they received.

Sometimes there were not angels to spare for intervention. Sometimes the summoner didn’t really need an angel’s presence. Sometimes, just sometimes, the summoner was a jackass. Brivaria had met summoners who treated angels like summoned monsters rather than people. There was no covenant against visiting holy wrath upon the caller if they were an idiot but Brivaria, saint of patience and kindness she absolutely was, resisted shoving her sword up many an arse even though they definitely deserved it. Well, they deserved it according to her.

That made her current situation all the more impressive as these gods damned birds were worse than anything she’d ever dealt with. She was covered in scratches. Her clothes and armor were stained with bird poop in many places. Worst of all, the birds were laughing at her in the unique way that only birds could. She dodged one diving bird while trying to calm herself only to feel something wet and squishy land directly on her head.

“Fucking birds!” the angel swore in the skies above Tenome.

The angel, dog, and lamia arrived in Tenome a day past. This was the location of Brivaria’s second request from the adventurers guild. It was one of the few requests that wasn’t handled by most adventurers not due to obscurity or pay but rather because few adventurers had the skills to handle it even if they wanted to.

The village of Tenome lay south of Pemburne. It was growing steadily larger over time. As it grew larger, it attracted more people which, in turn, caused it to grow larger. Such was the cycle of a settlement. One of the visitors to the little village was a wizard. This was how a lot of terrible stories began and Tenome’s was no different.

The wizard had been friendly enough when he first moved to the village. He wasn’t sociable by any stretch of the imagination but he was polite. He waved. He said hello to folks in passing. He showed up to village gatherings even if he kept to himself. He fit the image of a reclusive wizard and no one questioned that, for a time.

Eventually the village people started asking him questions. Mainly they started asking him for help with things. Wizards were known to have dozens, even hundreds of spells. If every skill was a magic skill then 10 levels could translate to over 20 spells. If the wizard had skills to blend spells together then they could have hundreds of odd combinations. A high level wizard with levels in the class was a tremendous asset to any community.

What the village failed to realize was that a wizard who moved out to a village in the middle of nowhere might not want to be an asset to a community. He might simply want to be left alone. Over time, the wizard expressed this desire. Whenever anyone from the village asked him for his assistance he replied with “I’m not that kind of wizard.”

Someone needed help moving lumber? I’m not that kind of wizard.

Someone needed help removing a boulder? I’m not that kind of wizard.

Someone needed enchanted tools? I’m not that kind of wizard.

No matter what the people of Tenome asked of the wizard, his answer was always the same. I’m not that kind of wizard. As the months went by, the relationship between the wizard and the village grew frosty. The wizard grew ever more annoyed as the requests seemed to increase rather than stop. The village was perpetually frustrated with the wizard and made a game out of trying to figure out what kind of wizard he was. It was the type of situation that could only end one way.

A rock was thrown through a window of the wizard’s home late one evening. The note on it asked if he was the kind of wizard who could fix a broken window. The wizard took this in stride. He gathered the rock and the note then did the responsible thing—he took them both to the local sheriff.

The sheriff of the time was one Earl Tefton. Mr. Tefton had a Mrs. Tefton and, earlier in the month, she had an encounter with the wizard. She’d purchased a bolt of fabric from a passing trader only to realize she’d been swindled. The beautiful fabric she liked so much was on the outside of the roll and the inside was something else entirely. Distraught, she went to the wizard to ask if he could change the color. As was predictable, he told the woman that he was not that kind of wizard.

When the wizard entered the office of Sheriff Tefton, he demanded the sheriff find the vandal who threw the rock that broke his window. The sheriff looked him dead in the eyes and said “well, maybe I’m not that kind of sheriff.” That was the wrong thing to say.

It turned out that the wizard was a specialist in animals, specifically birds. He was incredibly focused on birds, flight, animal communication, and more. The reason he never did what the Tenome villagers requested of him was that he literally couldn’t do it because he truly wasn’t that kind of wizard. He’d moved to a remote village to spend time with his avian friends and become the bird-equivalent of the eponymous cat lady.

The sheriff’s pithy remark was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. The wizard cursed the village. It wasn’t the conventional kind of curse. One couldn’t hire a curse-breaker to come to Tenome and remove it. No, this was a different kind. He told a local flock of ravens what the village had done and asked them to do him a favor—do their business over the village and nowhere else.

Nearly five months later, the ravens were still keeping their promise to the wizard. Every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, the flock flew over the village dropping messy missiles from above. Not a single house went unsullied. People started carrying crude umbrellas not to ward away the rain but the putrid projectiles falling from the sky. The rancid rain never ended. Tenome had stopped growing and even started shrinking as people fled the doody downpour.

By the time the village council realized this was a feud they were doomed to lose, the wizard was gone. They were too late to make amends. All they could do was put in a request to the region adventurers guild in the hopes that someone could help them. Unfortunately even the best bowmen in the region couldn’t hit the birds high up in the sky with any accuracy. They were too fast and too far away. The fact that the birds had pinpoint accuracy with their booty bombs dissuaded many from extended attempts.

So it was that Brivaria returned to the village inn she, Trixie, and Kseniya were staying at without success and covered in bird poo. The angel tried to store all the poop attached to her in her inventory but some was suitably spread out to make getting all of it impossible.

Trixie started to pad over toward the winged girl, got one whiff, and started going the other way. Kseniya was much more helpful.

“Washing area is that way,” the serpent girl said while pointing toward a hallway. Brivaria stomped away while the lamia shared a look with the golden sunchaser. A short while later they were all in the inn’s common room and gathered at a round table. The angel was resting her forehead on the table’s wood surface.

“They’re the worst. The absolute worst. I don’t want to hurt them but they’re not doing me any favors,” the angel said, more to the table than her companions. Trixie was sitting on the chair next to Brivaria. She leaned forward to lick Brivaria’s cheek, evidently deciding the angel had done a good enough job cleaning herself to warrant it.

“Little angel, you can’t solve every problem. It sounds like this village is getting what it deserves. I say we abandon this quest and just go north to Pemburne. We don’t need the coin, you know?” Kseniya was right but Brivaria would never admit it.

“I can’t let them win. Not like this,” she pleaded, still face down on the table. Trixie whined and licked her cheek again.

“Fine. So what makes them so hard to catch? You just want to scare them away right? Birds are smart. Turn a few of them into roast chickens mid-air and they’ll fly away. I know I would. Maybe shoot them with bow and arrow if magic is too slow?” Brivaria thought about that. She didn’t have a bow nor did she have any experience shooting one.

“I don’t have a bow or arrows,” the angel said with a sigh. Kseniya arched an eyebrow.

“Oh? Why not? Bows shoot arrows really fast. They’re good for when arcane is low. Why don’t see if the village has any we can buy. It would help with the birds and it might be something worth having anyway. Besides, shopping will get your mind off the request,” the snake girl suggested. Trixie wuffed and Brivaria realized she was outvoted. They left the inn a little later.

Kseniya had no need to fear the birds. Her scepter created an enormous dome of green magic that blocked all the falling filth. Most of the ravens had departed but a few remained specifically to torment Brivaria. They flew away when it became apparently the snake girl’s magic wouldn’t let them have their way.

The village had a single, lonely trading post. It didn’t have a proper merchant area like a town would or a whole quarter like a city would. The little trading post was a culmination of everything the village was selling and run by someone with a few merchant skills to hopefully help buyers and sellers get good deals.

“Welcome visitors! I am Ramond and I will help you find what you seek!” the human tradesman was comparatively pale and wore fairly nice clothing. White pants made of a good quality material with only a few bird-related stains were held up by a proper leather belt. He wore an exotic yellow shirt with fancy embroidery at the ends of each sleeve and around the neckline. A full black beard and mustache were seated beneath a somewhat large nose and friendly hazel eyes. He welcomed them with open arms and a level of joy reminiscent of a drowning man spotting a passing ship.

“Nice to meet you, Ramond. My name is Brivaria. This is Trixie and Kseniya. I’m here looking for a bow of some sort. Do you have any?” the angel asked.

“Let us find out!” Ramond’s eager smile only dimmed slightly a little later after a bit of searching to realize the answer to the angel’s question was “no.” He didn’t sell any bows or crossbows. Brivaria found that hard to believe despite walking alongside the merchant as they looked through the trading post. The inventory was horribly disorganized to the angel’s eyes but the merchant seemed to make sense of it.

“What happened to all the bows? Aren’t there a lot of hunters here?” she asked.

“Ah, well, you see…” Ramond began nervously. “There were many hunters here in times past. They would go south to hunt in Cassmer then north to hunt in Cervidian Woods. They haven’t come around here in many months. It was many moons past the last time Ramond saw them.”

“That’s what Ezben and Marie of the Red Lodge said. They used to travel along the route between Keaton, Tenome, and Pemburne. What happened to them?” Ezben shrugged his shoulders at the question.

“Who can say? Perhaps they found better hunting elsewhere. The forests are large. It’s been so long I don’t remember if they were headed north or south when last they passed. Ah, how about this?” The merchant was speaking when he spotted something in one of the crates.

They had been peering into several crates in passing. Brivaria didn’t recognize most of the things the merchant sold. They were human things for humans and that was where her thoughts on them began and ended. His suddenly excitement got her attention and she looked to see what he was fishing out of the box. It was a small Y-shaped metal device with some kind of stretchy thing attached to the top ends.

“The man who sold it to me called it a ‘slingshot’ and said it was like a hand-held bow. Put a rock here, pull it back, and…” he demonstrated the little device while the trio watched. It was kind of like a bow if one squinted really hard, the winged girl supposed.

“That looks cute. You can make those little light rocks you like so very much at night and fling them at things,” Kseniya offered. The angel gave the lamia a look. Kseniya was trying to be helpful and it was appreciated. Really, it was.

“One of my skills helps match items to customers and my skill thinks this is a good fit. Why don’t you try it out? If you don’t like it then we can see if something else will suffice but I’m certain I have no bows.” The man was trying to make a sale but Brivaria could see he was trying to help her as well. She exhaled a breath and nodded.

“Okay, I’ll go outside and try it with a couple rocks.” Brivaria took the slingshot and left her friends to shop. Ramond had a couple spell catalysts for sale, one of which Kseniya bought. He also had some special biscuits which passed the sniff test from Trixie and meant Brivaria was doomed to buy them or risk making the lovable dog sad. That was an impossibility so Brivaria’s recently gained coin was fated to dwindle one way or another.

Outside, the angel tested shooting rocks with the slingshot. The black, stretchy band could fire a rock at lethal speeds. Honestly that wasn’t saying much. Someone with high physique could do throw rocks just as well. At least, the sling part of it had enough girth to hold some decently sized rocks. On a whim the angel tried using a bit of a partially dried bird dropping and firing that. The bird poop splattered against a distant tree. The winged girl had an idea.

Ramond was grinning from ear to ear as Brivaria told him she’d take the slingshot… and the treats for Trixie. The second the merchant mentioned the treats, the golden’s tail started wagging at speed. The winged girl looked into the dog’s big, brown eyes and knew she didn’t have the heart to disappoint the canine.

Everyone walked or slithered away from the trading post with something. Trixie walked away while chewing the last bits of one of the biscuits because of course the dog was getting one right away. Kseniya’s scepter shielded them from a stray bird dropping as the lone raven who remained in the sky took wing away from the village. Brivaria spent the trip back to the inn nudging any droppings on the road with the tip of her boot and pulling them into her inventory. Those birds were going to pay.

The next morning, Brivaria explained that she was going to take one more shot at the birds. The flock was too smart and too fast to fight directly. This she knew. However they had one fatal flaw—they loved tormenting people and had decided she was their new favorite victim. In the early morning hours, the birds found Brivaria already in the air and waiting for them. They screeched a battle cry and flew after her.

The ravens would catch the angel. She couldn’t stop that from happening. She could delay it though. Tailwind and aggressive use of stamina could do a lot. Soon the entire flock of ravens was soaring after her. She was rising as best she could. While she didn’t have the Headwind skill from Winged Templar, she could still ascend the old-fashioned way. Higher and higher she went into heavier, thicker clouds with the ravens following her.

When she saw a cloud thick enough that she couldn’t see through it, she began casting Luminous Desecration. This was a gamble but the spell didn’t say she had to desecrate the ground. The exact wording of the spell was “You may disrupt the natural flow of mana in an area and desecrate the location.” The angel didn’t see why she couldn’t desecrate an area in the air. She finished the spell while in the cloud creating a wide area of decaying magic mid-air.

Once above the cloud, she produced the slingshot and drew back and waited. The first raven that broke through the cloud found itself looking at the angel high above with her slingshot ready. The magic from the spell sapped the bird’s attributes and slowed it down. The angel shot it with its own feces knocking it back down into the cloud. She did that again and again. She shot every single bird with flock’s own droppings. Some were still wet and fresh, some were old and hard, all were gleefully returned to their senders.

The angel also took it a step further giving each smear of bird stuff an infusion of Bleak Radiance. Between the desecration zone and the droppings, Lingering Decay went to work ensuring the birds were going to be suffering from weakness for a good, long while. When finally no more birds rose from the cloud, Brivaria descended.

She saw the ravens all plummeting toward the same area. The double application of decaying magic was too much for the birds. They were falling out of the sky. They weren’t dying but they weren’t staying aloft either. They all collectively landed on the ground. Some crashed and lay sprawled on the grass while others managed more dignified landings. The angel alighted in their midst and those closest tried to wobble away without success.

“Alright you dumb birds, listen up.” She grabbed one of the larger birds who was at least a little more coherent than the rest. She shook it. “No. More. Poop. You had your fun. Stop tormenting those people.” The bird had gone from wriggling in distress to frozen in fear. They’d been playing a dangerous game and now they were caught.

The raven Brivaria was holding was terrified. The angel knew she was traumatizing the poor bird but she couldn’t speak bird so this was the best she could do. She had to scare them enough to make them leave, permanently. The angel may or may not have traumatized several birds in the same fashion.

When she found the biggest, oldest-looking bird she unloaded the rest of the poop from her inventory. The winged girl hadn’t realized she’d gathered quite so much until the enormous ball of filth plopped onto the bird. Okay, she hadn’t quite meant to do that but the message was being sent and it was extra stinky.

With her work done and her inventory cleansed of bird filth, the angel went back to village. She needed another scrubbing. Maybe she’d see if the trading post had some quality soap. She would need it.

The trio stayed in village for a couple more days. The flock did not return. Only one raven came back and it made the fastest U-turn Brivaria had ever seen upon seeing the angel spread her wings. Sheriff Tefton was still sheriff despite the wizard incident and he gave the angel a signed statement that the request was complete. There hadn’t been a bird attack in the past two days and these were the first two days sans bird attacks since the fiasco began. He was overjoyed.

The angel vowed to come back and check on Tenome once their business in Pemburne was done. If the ravens returned then, well, she’d come for them a second time. There was spring in the girl’s steps as they left the village. Something else had happened when she was beating up the birds. Two somethings, in fact.

You have reached level 20.

Gained +3 Physique, +1 Endurance, +3 Arcane, +3 Spirit, +1 Awareness, +4 Presence.

Gained one new class advancement.

Gained one new skill selection. (Pending class advancement)

Name: Brivaria

Race: Angel

Class: Decaying Lightbrand

Level: 20

Stats: Health 50/50, Mana 88/88, Stamina 63/63

Attributes: Physique 38, Endurance 25, Arcane 42, Spirit 44, Awareness 25, Presence 46

Active Skills: Healing Touch, Holy Bulwark, Tailwind

Passive Skills: Inventory, Lesser Flight, Lesser Shapeshifting, Lingering Decay, Rest, Traits (Angel)

Magic: Light of Decay

Pending Class Advancement: 1

Unspent Skill Points: 1