THE ATTACKS IGNITED LIKE A BOMB.
The scarecrow watched the ball of voltage explode outward, a grand and condensed energy now sprung upon the bird storm.
Lights, crackles, explosions—these were the sensations that filled Swishy’s vision as the comet trail of Trey’s [Ztorm] clashed against the shade-driven [Snitch Guillotine].
Bolt and hurricane converged into a nebula of destruction. The forces swirled around each other, clashing, melding. The voltage tore around the hurricane’s perimeter, and as [Ztorm] and [Snitch Guillotine] shared their awful friction, the air incinerated everything within its blast radius. Every straw strand, every feather, every broken twig had crumbled into fine, breathable dust. The everytrees on the ground were scorched as well, their rigid spines melted from the inside as the outer layers of bark peeled like bananas.
But through the blinding lights, the smokiness of burnt feathers and cooked birds, Swishy couldn’t tell the full scale of what transpired. Were the birds alive? Was Trey? Swishy remained in the air with powerful wing flaps, slowing his descent as he admired the kaleidoscopic discharge.
The birds became visible then, riding along the outside of the nebula, ejected from within. Their bodies were reduced and reduced, gradually evaporating from the heat, sloughing away in burnt flakes. Flakes became cinders. And the cinders became soot. And in the powdered char-filled debris, feathers sailed along, somehow intact.
The stray plumage filled the sky—burnt feathers, ripped feathers, and crackling ones, too. The widespread static cling suspended the feathers in place, forming a lovely net. Trey’s leftover voltage wouldn’t dissipate anytime soon—he’d released so much of it, his technique living up to its [Ztorm]-y name. But once the electricity released the feathers Swishy would have his fun, feasting upon the smorgasbord.
Swishy felt slight guilt from enjoying the aesthetic, but this was overall a golden moment, an enjoyable one.
The boys took the flock down as a team, Swishy from below and Trey from above. Swishy basked in triumph as his fingertips reconstructed from his [Swish Dart] barrage.
Souls were vacuumed from their physical bird forms in clean, watery textures. They were orbs at first—but then grew beaks, talons, and wings. An array of shadowclaw-shaped souls were vacuumed from their physical forms in clean, watery textures. Swishy could almost see through the translucent souls, now freed from the cursed energy.
But the souls rapidly dissipated, taxed from their prior efforts in conjuring darkness.
The flock depleted like pricked balloons, narrowing into slivers. And the smaller they became, the higher they rose into the sky, disappearing as the dead often do.
“You’re all passing away, huh?” Swishy said to no one in particular.
But the birds unexpectedly answered him. That’s exactly what happened. Pretty, we never thought we’d go out pretty.
“So long, snitches,” Swishy waved, half mocking but half meaning it. He'd eaten birds but had never watched any of them die before. The boy counted the seconds. One, two, three, and so on. When he got to eight. Nine. Ten. As the last soul vanished, it offered some final words.
See you later. And by later we mean SOON. Ruby won’t stand for this—but you know that. See you in Hell, sucker.
Before Swishy responded with a clever clapback, the souls were gone, and, as if cued by the lost weight of their lives—BOOM!—the attack nebula released an aftershock, its tremendous blowback blasting Swishy away.
[Pile]—his response was swift, instinctual. The bodiless boy relinquished his straw, his wing feathers, and even his seemingly indestructible pumpkin head. The winds carried him off to wherever they pleased and Swishy was content to enjoy the ride. Even as he now drifted without a body, his soul faithfully tracked his straw. His phantom nerves allowed him to feel the wind rush underneath his slivers of wheat. The caress of nature provided a pleasing and fun ride.
While the boy’s lightweight parts—the straw, the feathers—took their sweet time with descent, Swishy’s head rushed downward, being the heavy solid that it was.
As the boy’s gourd shot within a canopy and bounced around, he launched past Trey—whose clothes and limbs were tangled in the branches.
Swishy righted his head and used [Scarecrow], his loose wheat and feathers flew toward his pumpkin. Even the straw within his clothing glided with purpose and speed. He landed on the branch with a thud, dust clouding the heels of his Timbs.
“You alright over there!” He called to Trey, mocking him. Swishy, who’d landed in the same canopy, pushed aside the branches to find his friend.
“Yeah…” Trey groaned, his limbs and clothes snagged upon the foliage. He lay in disarray, twigs in his hair, wood flecks on his clothes. The bare branches were notable. The everytree fruits were blown away but the trees were undamaged, their rubbery trunks cartoonishly wiggling from the weather—another anti-starvation feature of the new Stormcellar. Even the fruits bounced along the ground like manufactured balls. At least the landing was soft for Trey...
“Need help getting down?” Swishy asked.
“A little, yeah.”
Swishy placed Trey’s arm over his shoulder and did a [Wing Jump]—more like a hop—from the treetop, drifting downward through his rhythmic wingbeats.
“Wing stall is more like it,” Trey quipped.
Swishy kept concentrating, timing his flaps for a safe landing.
The boy was frozen in the air, rigid and still, until—
“Got you.” Sling’s tremendous hands gripped Swishy and Trey from behind. She held a boy in each hand. Within her grasp the boys resembled dolls, their legs dangling in embarrassment. “You guys did so well, I am proud.”
From up close, Swishy saw a couple more strands of blackwheat poking through the cheek and neck—but he maintained a neutral expression. He didn’t want to be rude. He didn’t want to shame.
“Thanks, Slingy.”
She put them on the ground and steadied them.
“Rest well, boys. That was a toughy.”
“You’re telling me,” Trey said, a little woozy. He was covered in char. His soul reserves were drained, his spirit reduced to a tiny orb of spirit bouncing around his rib cage.
She held a palm outward to Trey, her magic bandages wrapping around his jittery hands. Words were handwritten on the insides of these as well, CALM, RESTORATION, and MEDITATION. Trey closed his eyes, calming down, the leftover voltage dissipating.
“Are you okay?” Swishy asked. “Could your body handle all that?”
“Sure,” Trey said in a decidedly unsure tone. “I’m in my body this time so that’s an improvement!”
“Yes, babysitting you was really hard.”
“I’m sure it was, you straw nightmare.”
Swishy and Sling laughed.
“Hey, ya’ll, I’m going to power nap real quick.”
“What’s a power nap?” The Swishy head tilt, his first in a long while.
“A nap—for power.” And then Trey activated [Doze] and staggered away, collapsing against a tree stump. He clutched his jacket around himself, cozying up amid the wreckage of downed trees. “Oh, one thing,” he began to slur.
“Yes?” Swishy and Sling said in unison.
“More creatures. More horrors and whatnot. The shadows are on the move, I saw for myself.”
“I…I wish you said that earlier.”
“Right? My mistake,” Trey yawned. “Sleep tight, don’t let the wrathravens bite…”
“But you’re the one sleeping!”
Trey had escaped the scolding, though, comfortably upon the throbbing, curse-siphoning tree roots. [DOZE] intent crowned Trey’s head, bobbing and drifting. Trey’s soul replenished and smoothed out, and the minor cuts on his face began to disappear. Even the soot and dirt flaked off his body, a minor act of cleansing.
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Something dawned on Swishy. “Trey, Trey, I have something to tell you too!”
But a slumped head and a dismissive wave. “Give me 15…good night….”
“Where are the villagers?” Swishy panicked at Sling. He didn’t see them anywhere, and hoped they hadn’t perished in the nebula.
“Now, now, little God, don’t get worked up. Come with me, I have a surprise.” Sling pointed off to another section of woods with her conductor’s rod of an arm.
The boy didn’t see them at first. He couldn’t read the souls, or rather, the hexed aura of the blackwheat bodies. But it didn’t take long for him to make out Sling’s so-called surprise.
The villagers had made it, having fled from the cataclysmic weather—far, far off—a 10 or 15 minute walk from the looks of it.
Good, I’m in no rush to face them…
Even from far off, he saw the villagers, who, in a wise act of self-preservation, took their newly created bodies as far away from the battle as they could manage. The black scarecrows—specks of blue soul in a cage of active curses—had spotted the boy and waved. Swishy waved back with vigor, shooting aura in his swishing arm like a torch, a show of strength.
Because boy was he weak.
The weakest.
The guiltiest.
”See?” Sling said in an encouraging tone. “Surprise, they made it! Resourceful, am I right?”
“I’m happy…we should throw a party! More fakery—or in Swishy’s mind: leadership.
Swishy stepped toward the straw-bound, beginning his walk of shame.
(…)
But as the straw god and the mummycrow proceeded to meet the community, Swishy felt like he was in a dream. He was lost in thought, and utterly lost in the world.
The Cearth was strange—he, himself, was strange, but not as strange as his walk over to the villagers.
Darkness gathered; darkness collected; darkness found each other.
The winds died but was everything dark, everything cursed.
Despite the flock’s defeat, the skies remained murky with their remnant energy. The horrible words flowed around with incredible thickness, like black metal. GRUDGE in the periphery of one eye. MONSTROSITY at the edge of another. He pivoted around as DOOM and HATE and RESENTMENT floated over him as if they were his personal dark clouds. The closeness of this cursed hovering made him think back to the wrathraven skewers that’d threatened him during his 3 on 1 duel.
He felt the words bob mildly in the air, an invisible tension that barely held them up. At any moment the intents could crash down upon him. He knew that’s exactly how it worked. Hadn’t the cursed side of him done that exact same thing? He backpedaled away but the words followed him, less of how the birds felt and more of how he might’ve felt about himself. The words changed as Swishy tried to run away from them. BETRAYAL. DISHONESTY. FALSENESS. But who did he betray? Who had he lied to? Who would regard him, an earnest and loving boy, as false?
Swishy had a primary suspect, and a few enemies in mind, but he couldn’t help wondering if the straw-bound thought of him like this.
Did I betray you all? Will you resent me for your blackwheat?
The GUILT gnawed at him as he progressed, cursed energy patrolling the boundaries of his [Heart Armor], sensing weakness, sensing opportunity.
The boy remembered his mission and pushed the guilt away.
For every 12 of his steps, Sling matched pace with one (he’d counted). The woman was graceful at that, fluid as water, fluid as shadows. She clutched the power-napping Trey in her hand, securing him within her palm through bandage wrap. Bristles also lay in the backpack, making gleeful but terrifying declarations in his sleep. “Fool, though art mine…” His evil laughter gave Swishy the heebie-jeebies. And the wrathraven chicks poked from Sling’s neck bandages, chirping at the maniacal Bristles.
As a final touch, she wore a bandage belt with kid-crows fastened to her waist. They were properly mummified—and properly protesting of such mummification. They wanted to see again. They sensed the horrors were over, the imminent ones at least, and were antsy for freedom.
“You put the team on your back,” Swishy said.
“It is my duty—for my back is large.”
“You really are more hotel than lady.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Sling decided.
“I’m glad I don’t have to babysit alone,” Swishy said.
“Hard job, isn’t it?” Sling laughed. As her mouth stretched open, her cheeks pushed upward and bunched the bandages around her eyes.
The gaps between the splits widened and he gawked at the smokiness drifting from her face. His curiosity and horror wanted to know how much of the darkness claimed her giant body. Big scarecrow, big blackwheat—the logic tracked well, the logic tracked scarily too.
“Please, young one. Your staring makes me nervous.”
“Sorry.”
“No problem. We all have our curiosities. This I understand.”
Swishy stopped staring but Sling’s clean bandages occupied him, curse-wraps he called them in his mind. He’d soon find out how right he was.
En route, they’d begun to come across feathers. Birds. Meals.
The boy stopped at the defeated snitchtalons, appraising his buffet.
He picked the birds up as one would inspect fruit at the produce stand or fish at the harbor. The half-dead birds were in sad conditions, writhing in Swishy’s hands, groaning from their burnt wings. A few snitches had crackling feathers, the static stubbornly clinging to their bodies. Others were sleepy, peaceful. And there were baby-looking ones, too, small bodies reminiscent of the wrathraven chicks that Sling now cared for.
“Down the hatch,” Swishy said, dropping them into his mouth.
“My oh my,” Sling held a hand to her lips.
Swishy’s mouth emitted a bluish glow that broke the birds down, converting them into mystic reserves. His wing thickened in physicality, in curses. There were no verbal complaints from the newest additions to his wing, but the musculature twitched, the entities inside shocked from their newest confines.
Sling watched, concerned. “All those curses…can you handle them?”
“I don’t have a choice.” But the truth was he did—he just had no real explanation. Maybe he was stress-eating. Maybe he was being a predator. Both seemed valid enough to him.
“Why eat them all?”
“I want to fly. I want to be strong. I have to take what I can get.”
“You can slow down. Curses seek homes, this is true, but pace yourself.”
“I can’t. Not with the strong enemies, not with all those creatures Trey talked about.”
“We’re here for you, young god. Use us.”
“What do you mean use? We work together already.”
“I mean…we have souls. If worse comes to worst, we’ll let you eat us.”
Swishy didn’t like that. This information didn’t comfort him in the slightest and was the exact opposite of what he aimed for. Sling’s offer gave him the bad vibes, the Ruby vibes, the way her followers wasted themselves at a moment’s notice for her. When she cast any spell there were hundreds of entities who’d offered themselves as the cost.
“Slingy. You don’t belong to me. I’m myself, and you’re yourself.”
“Please, use us without shame. As a last resort. I just want you to know that we are of one spirit. Inside you, we are fulfilled.” She bent down to Swishy’s face, staring with her plate-sized pupils.
He noticed two things then: one—she had real eyes, human ones. And two—nine familiar letters floated within her ocular moisture, S-A-C-R-I-F-I-C-E.
“Remember us, Swishy. Without a vessel, our souls can become hers. Being used by you is a safe bet for us. It’s a kind of heaven. To us, that is a salvation.”
“Okay. But just do what you can to survive with me.”
“Aren’t I, already?” She rose to her full height, grinning as she displayed her belt full of kid crows, her backpack Bristles, the bandage yo-yo she’d made of the knocked-out Trey, and a crown of wrathraven babies that migrated to the top of her head.
“I see, okay then…” Swishy believed her words but didn’t feel any better. He reverted to silence.
“Do not be soft, my little straw. The world is a firm, unforgiving place. Cearth is cursed. Not even you can override that, godly as you are.”
He huffed away. The boy knew what he was fighting for and wouldn’t budge on that vision.
Eat your enemies, not your friends—nothing that anyone taught him, just a principle he’d developed on his own after numbing himself to the terror of the snitches’ final moments. Widened eyes. Twitching faces. Goose-bumped souls. Sometimes, when the wing curses lodged complaints about their end—and their current form—Swishy soured from a profound disgust.
He meditated these blackwheat moments away—he couldn’t give the curses more ground.
The boy power walked—which did nothing.
Sling’s tremendous stride refused to lose to Swishy’s short-legged tantrum. She reached and grabbed Swishy by the head, picking him up.
“Hey, hey, put me down.”
She brought him back up to her face again, an expression of mirth and light. “Please, gather yourself before we see the villagers. There’s darkness ahead and we need you calm.”
“I can’t be calm!” He flailed his legs. “How can I calm like this?”
“Do I need to add a little god to my belt?” The kid-crows jittered around in their bandaged crosses. Swishy decided that No, he didn’t want to be in time-out.”
“Okay, Sling, please put me down.”
And then she did. “Even in the best of times, chaos reigns, remember this well.”
“Scary…”
“Why yes, yes, it is.” Sling held her palm over Swishy’s head. Her long fingers flared outward like the prongs of a rake. Swishy couldn’t see her fingertips, unable to tell how far past his head her digits extended. The woman gathered blue energy into her palm, first as a seedling, then a marble-sized ball, which then swirled into a rectangle. A talisman slip emerged from her hand, its ink reading Sling’s most familiar and primal intent: NURTURE.
The talisman floated onto Swishy’s gourd, sticking to it, flush as could be. Swishy knew that he wouldn’t be able to peel it off at all. The bandage then spread around his head, the paper somehow proliferating into a crown, layering multiple times, crafting itself with magic. The solo letters cycled around Swishy during the bandage’s formation, an N over here, a T over there, and the URURE passing before his vision in an alphabetical blur.
“My little sweet god, you’ve done well. Your lessons were incredible. You just gave everyone magic. [Weave] was inspired, infused, by you.”
“Not on purpose, though. I can fight. I have tricks. But I’m really, really, really lucky.”
“I’d call that divinity. It’s less luck and more design. We believed in you, and you believed in you, and the blessings came—”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I know it, I feel it, I breathe it as much as this straw-and-bandage body can breathe.” Sling raised to her full height, breathing, drawing calmness from the air. “I believed in God, I believed in Ruby. I believe in you, whose heart is in the right place. I thank you and I trust you dearest little Swish.”
Sling pointed her forefinger toward Swishy’s head and used [Nest]. The bandage unraveled from her finger and wrapped around Swishy’s stem area. She’d layered the paper strategically, creating a beanie.
“There, my child.” Sling bent down to the boy’s face. She was still taller than Trey even from a squat. “Swishy’s little thinking cap.”
“Thank you,” Swishy smoothed the wraps against his gourd. He loved gifts that felt like cuddles.
Oh my, A voice said in Swishy’s head. You’re making me jealous.
“Mysty?” Swishy tapped his gourd a couple of times.
“Whose Mysty?” Sling placed a hand on Swishy’s shoulder. “Don’t tell me our growing boy has an imaginary friend?”
In the flesh…
“Flesh?” Swishy made more of a statement than a question.
Oh, body shame much? Myst bloomed in Swishy’s mind, expanding her gaseous presence, until he could hear the woman’s only organ. Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.
In the straw, Myst whispered. How about that?