SOME PEOPLE HAD IT EASY. OTHERS HAD IT ON HARD MODE.
Trey considered this nugget of trite wisdom as Swishy flew over a disk of bird servants toward the darkness. Seemed like the boy had hit a current of ease, a much-deserved reprieve from the swirling gold and black dominion of Ruby and Myst’s battle zone. He was jealous, surely, because Swishy had hit a fun zone. He was happy for the kid but he wanted to be up there with him, just gliding, vibing, doing buddy things with his harvest-toned bestie.
Meanwhile, hard mode was upon him. Hard mode kept him on the business end of the straw backpack straps, glued to his most energetic enemy’s body. The hard mode sprouted around him in six Trey-sized wrathraven wings, slapping him in the face, beating him over the head, rejecting his presence. Trey at least wanted the world to provide him that small grace—he’d worked so hard to subdue Bristles, after all. The moment where the man-bird would reawaken was inevitable, but he didn’t expect that it’d come like this, with such gusto, with dark flourishes, and with more potency than he’d had before his defeat and his slumber. Bristles, whose influence was whittled down through the snitches freeing themselves, somehow had more black power than before.
Slap-slap times six—the wings were going in on Trey. They hurt so much that he swore the feathers had learned to ball into fists.
“I thought wings were for flying! Ow! What the hell?”
As Trey was held captive to the straw backpack’s straps, kicking his legs, he nudged his face away from the too-active wings that sprouted from Bristles’ shoulder blades. Each wing was taller and wider than Trey’s whole body. And they were eager to rest in their anatomical spaces, parts of which were occupied by Trey. The offended wings were trying to bully the foreign body out of the way. They slapped Trey. They pushed him. They petulantly berated him with the scratchy portions of their texture. Bristles’ wings acted like restless sleepers who didn’t want to share the bed.
“Calm down, calm down!” Trey cried, pushing the wings out of his face and spitting out a feather.
Slap-slap, slap-slap. The wings treated him like a pebble in the shoe, a thorn in the plumage.
“Bristles. Control your wings.”
“I am always in control. I happen to approve of their current actions.”
Trey beat the wings aside, his eyes peeled open. He twisted around—thrashed even—but he couldn’t do anything to free himself from this compromising position. The wings smothered him for a time, squeezing him between its tough muscles. He resisted but his arms were pressed to his sides, his elbows prodding into his ribs.
“You talked about the ‘blessed’ way but what kind of foolishness are you on?”
“And I have a question in return. Why do you struggle so? I recognize that it is I, Bristles the Indomitable, but thou should fair better than this. Is this all it takes for thou to become a captive? We do not possess the time or the patience for this.”
“You could stand to ease up then.”
“I could but.”
“But…” Trey groaned, squirming within the plumage.
“This is so fun, the very definition of amusement.”
The curses in the wings cackled. Parts of them even grew mouths, sneering at Trey. And those same mouths sucked in air, drawing dark particles into the wings. Ruby had sent a pollution everywhere, a black allergy that caught malaise at best and poison at worst. The [Clean Sweep] released impurities upon them like a factory smokestack, which was horrendous for a human being, but was amazing for Bristles, who was getting back in tune with his inner wrathraven.
Bristles was basking. Trey didn’t blame him if he were being honest with himself. There was much to bask about. Wishwillows in the sky and some upon the ground. The forest was alight with the wrathraven’s favorite tones. As a Clayborne, Trey was a gold-lover too. For a moment he believed that he and Bristles had similar feelings when it came to shininess, that luminosity hit their souls in exactly the same frequency, that a gold drop plinked into their spirits and waves of feel-good activated in their muscles and essence.
It was a beautiful night. The darkness added contrast and life, and since these were wrathraven wings they drew in the shadows with their innate dominance and magnetism. The effect was similar to the magnetic sand he’d watched his younger cousins play with. The night’s smokiness, its GRIME and POLLUTION intents, drifted as a vapor until in one moment hardening into tiny balls that merged into the wings.
Time slowed; time ebbed; time gave him a modicum of peace with his situation as a foot-dangling captive to the worst person he’d ever met.
It was good—having acceptance over panic.
But he was still in trouble. The wings augmented, their masses crushing against Trey like steel. Only Bristles’ shadows were indomitable and hard. Flexibility was a foolish notion for an apex predator, for a psychopath who’d somehow gotten his powers back and more.
[Zzt] gathered within his body. Trey charged his bloodstream with the spell, an electrical current that flowed along and warded the blackness from his insides. He was being physically dominated but knew enough to know that the true danger was drowning. The cackling curses were unrelenting, threatening him, calling him things like food and morsel and snack. So he preemptively protected his essence with light.
As a side effect of the bloodstream bolts, the outer crushing began to relent. Trey wondered if the cursed wings knew to respect the boundary of light. They were drawn to the light but could never quite penetrate it. The wings molded around him with toleration and awe, giving Trey some space, behaving like children who knew not to touch hot flame—but would gaze very-very-very close to it. Wrathravens and light were a match made in nostalgia. They were simple creatures with the basest of pleasures. Bristles, that killmonger, was no different.
And the light seemed to be exactly what the psychopath needed. Since the wings themselves calmed from the invasion of space that was Trey, Bristles seemed comfortable with the functionality of his wings. And the wings, shaped from the combination of his inner shadows and the darkness he’d just harvested, began to return to the familiar pliability of blackness. The wrathraven wings dissolved their boundaries and adopted a gaseousness, an immaterial construction that encompassed Trey in an orb. When the young man was first held by the firmness, structures of muscle and bone, he then detected a softness, a vapor boundary that changed state once more, becoming fluid.
A weave of the backpack straps unraveled, releasing him.
He used basic swimming moves to turn around to face Bristles. Wow, this really is like water…Trey even swam into the wings themselves, breaching the globe of aura that was first released to carry him.
Trey floated in the oily pool, protected by the [Zzt] inside. The light was more respected than his body, and the wings carried the sparks of himself with reverence and care. The deconstructed straw husk orbited him, sticking close to the edges of the orb.
As Trey swam within the wrathraven wings, the straw cast slid from the magnetic wings down to Bristles’ feet, landing near-soundlessly upon the ground. Then Bristles tackled the man-shaped casing to the ground. He chowed down with voracity. The wings flapped—which didn’t displace or cause turbulence to Trey. The Clayborne had gotten used to the atmosphere inside the wings, finding the same stability that had settled into Bristles’ core. Meanwhile, the dark winds gathered to the edges of the wing tips, condensing into shivs. It was as if the wings themselves howled out about the deliciousness of the Bristles cast.
And they grew at least a third more in size, tapering into demonic points. The shadowy aura circulated along the edges in a fashion that simulated blood flow. Some of the straw-chews were caused in that wing and drifted before Trey’s eyes, long ones that resembled sugar cane stalks. He chewed on his strand as Bristles maddening devoured his him-sized portion. A question came to Trey—more like a thought, actually, because he knew his assumption was right on the mark. Bristles was eating a Bristles’ shaped straw figure.
The man even ate with hunter’s precision, tearing through the throat first. Then he ate off the hands, both feet, and one of the hips.
Bristles’ eye-whites shined like pearls as he stared into the face of the desiccated mannequin, relishing the eye-to-eye stare down. And throughout the entirety of his violent meal, Trey kept his [Soul] vision glued to the wrathraven spirit’s insides. The gold-straw that was acquired from Swishy lassoed Bristles’ literal heart. It didn’t make him a better person but it made him feel good. There was a level of control that the predator had otherwise been missing. But he was who he was, no doubt about that. Nothing could change him or the animal inside.
Dark intents floated around his wings, thickening with each mouthful of wheat. HUNT. SUBDUE. DOMINATE. For the remaining three wings, the spiky font of the word FEED chainsawed around the edges of his tapered feathers.
“Having fun there?” Trey asked, feeling like a rabbit as he ate his food one straw chew at a time.
“Absolutely. This was positively galvanizing.”
“That looked like convincing practice.”
“‘Twas no practice.” His eye whites reverted to beady pupils that murdered Trey with its gaze.
“I see. Predators are going to predate.”
“Naturally,” Bristles flashed a fanged smile, straw wedged between his extra-wide teeth.
Were his teeth always that big? The heck?
Perhaps a contingency was in order. He’d swam into the wings and he thought that maybe he could leave. Trey dolphin-kicked through one of the wings and proceeded through the top. He surfaced, coming up for air. He was free to leave—that was new—but he chose to sink back into the feathered darkness. It seemed Bristles wanted to be teammates, after all.
“Is this your way of giving me a ride?”
“I did not boast of the blessed way for naught.”
“I never doubt anything you say. Psychos stand on business. Everybody knows that.”
Bristles laughed. His wings laughed. Their disturbing cadence rang out with the memories of past kills. Trey popped himself with a [Zzt] burst, stopping himself from shuddering. The realm knew all fear. Giving Bristles negativity would only make the Clayborne a candidate for permanent captivity. He already gave the wrathraven light—there was no reason to give him its empowering gloom as well.
“How do you like it?” Bristles asked. “My realm. Try not to break out. This is all for a good cause. Stick around, feel the wind through your…very thick…hair.”
“I can ride in leisure another time. I’ve got to get to Swishy.”
“Agreed. But I implore you, do enjoy the leisure. War cometh soon enough.”
“I know, I was already heading to it.”
“Thou art naïve. You think we’re heading straight for Ruby—and we’ll get there, we shall, for her great nest shall become mine. But there are other adversaries first.”
Bristles spread his wings, rapturous. His eyes were on a patch of darkness, an area outside the route to Swishy.
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“Shouldn’t we get our liege first? You know, pay tribute or something?”
“Nonsense. He has done enough. We shall now serve him. Let us flyeth.”
The clamorous wingbeats released a flume of feathers.
Once again, Trey took to the skies, a captive at worst and a reluctant passenger at best.
(…)
As they flew along, a Bristles-orientated version of the woods presented itself. The everytree nodes solidified into the blackest pumpkins that ever existed. And the wishwillows offered golden pumpkins, squash, and gourds. Bristles in his human form became a gourd farmer, but the soul-deep reach of the trees suggested that he had a taste for these foods in his original wrathraven life anyway.
The man didn’t eat with his mouth this time. Dark tendrils ejected from his wings and dipped into the gourds, draining their insides, their essence. Trey watched the captured energy course into the wing and distribute throughout as if there were a system of imperceptible veins divvying the spoils.
Trey ran his hands through the darkness, cutting through its ether, watching it collect in disparate swirls around him. The blackness—like most of the Cearthen dark—was alive. He made out the barely perceptive outlines of lips, of evenly breathing mouths. There was a community within the wings that was inhaling the violence. There was evil all around. But Trey was calm and breathing like the freest person possible. He was captured, yes, but not exactly panicked, and he soon figured out why.
There was a steadiness to Bristles’ soul that hadn’t been there before. Maybe he’d turned over a new leaf. Animals are quick to change once trained—or at least he soothed himself with this baseless idea.
Trey felt the evil grin slash across Bristles’ face, but the night was so calm and curseless that he didn’t believe him. The six, still-growing wings didn’t even flex. Trey gathered [Soul] magic into his eyes to get a better look—a quirk he’d picked up of late, to selectively augment the exact part of his spirit that he needed. This was most useful for vision because he needed to know what was going on at all times.
Those wings seemed to be a true extension of Bristles’ soul. They were not just cursed entities affixed to his back, but the genuine form of Bristles’ human-shaped soul expanding into wrathraven anatomy.
Trey noticed something within the Bristles framework then.
“I see the straw has been treating you well. There’s no nutrition like Swish-nutrition.”
“Indeed.”
“You could’ve just asked Swishy for the gold nicely, and you might’ve hit this state faster.”
“That is water under the bird-slaver’s bridge. The truth of the matter is that Lord Swish hast offered me the grace of tasting his straw, his delicious splendor.”
Trey wished that Bristles wouldn’t speak with such creepy dedication but was happy for the change. Still, he’d confirmed that there was indeed a maturation, so the young man decided to push his luck.
“So you’re not gonna kill me, right?”
“I seeth no reason for you to feel safe. So long as we’re both on the same plain, I shall cometh for thy neck.”
Trey’s blood went cold. “Uuh, but just not now.”
“Not now. Correct.”
“I’ll kick back for a second then. Go on taxi, get to it.”
“I do want you to know that you won’t die now. Tis simply not your turn yet.”
Trey dismissed the threat. They were far beyond the trees now. The everytrees and wishwillows reverted their gourd offerings into gas nodes, waiting to fulfill the culinary wishes of the next passerby.
“Where are you—I mean where are we—going?” Trey called in a friendly tone—but he really just wanted to know. There was no way he could allow this unpredictable element to run amok. He relaxed inside the wing, attuning his familiarity with the structure. He wouldn’t admit that it was a comfortable state. The feeling resembled his [Zlide] realm—it was no wonder how Bristles broke into the domain during their previous fight. They were more kindred in shadowdeep sensibilities than they both realized. And now the chaos once sated had begun to release.
Surprisingly, there was no turbulence in the flight. Trey’s equilibrium was preserved just the same as being in the cabin of a train—better than that, in fact.
He swam inside the wings, floating in place, growing comfortable in his state as a passenger. He watched the birds under Swishy’s feet, making fast progress toward Ruby. And then his eye went to the flying wishwillows, the tree-lifting snitches along with the others that patrolled. Their black textures added to the night. They flew so fast that they looked like blades of wind. Trey caught a glimpse of red eyes.
Blackwheat was always a part of the equation when it came to the human-soul-filled birds. Using what they had was the name of the game. Opportunism at its finest.
The opportunity was twofold for the snitches here: one—that the blackwheat was their best instrument of destruction. They coiled barbs of it around their talons and beaks. They nibbled on it for a berserker strength boost. Through the soulscape, the parts of their spirits that trembled in fear and anxiety had steady from a redness that hardened and fortified them. By using blackwheat, wrath collected all uncertainty and sharpened it as an equalizing weapon-smith.
The second of the opportunities was Bristles. Their target of vengeance had delivered themselves to the skies. He was within striking distance. Ruby’s distance, too. They voiced these thoughts with impassioned shrieks.
There he is! The one who slaved our kin!
Pluck his eyes out!
Eat his feathers! Maybe that will make us wrathravens.
Yes, yes, harvest him! We will use his organs in spells. Ruby will be pleased.
A discordant outburst of CACAW punctuated their murderous resolve.
Trey stifled a grin. He liked not being public enemy number one. But he allied to that person and adhered to his wing space, so he knew that reprieve would be short-lived.
“Okay, Bristles, tell me what we’re doing up here. I can’t imagine they’d harvest only you.”
“We could beginneth by collecting weaponry.”
“You mean living up to your slaver’s rep?”
“I’m collecting birds again. Doth thou wish to make a problem of that?”
“It’s a bird-eat-bird world. Whatever. Good luck,” Trey massaged his shoulders, feeling so much lighter. For the moment he was unburdened, finally free.
Trey figured he might as well participate. An electric orb glowed on the tip of his finger. He aimed and pointed it at the paralyzed bird. The wing darkness had an oppressive aura but was welcoming to him. He wanted to know if his light could find a path out into the world.
There’s only one way to find out…
[Zap].
And the first bird was fried in the sky, a petrified snitchtalon blast-burned into crispy, eight-piece perfection.
There were other birds that came to catch the one that’d fallen—ones that Trey also shot.
He was just along for the ride, unloading the clip on his [Zix-zhooter], casually philosophizing about the right to own others. Humans, animals, spirits—it was strange territory but he could no longer think with a strictly human perspective. The intricacies of harvesting were only about to become more complex from here, and he needed to figure it out before the true monsters emerged from the dark.
Kill the slaver!
Tear him apart!
He doesn’t deserve to be a wrathraven!
Trey pointed his finger guns at the squawking critters but a curtain of blackness consumed his vision. The night became thick as velvet. No texture was detectable even as he squinted. Even the soulscape became devoid of stimuli. When the dark shroud returned the cool blues of the evening, Trey found that Bristles had a death grip on his detractors, several birds clutched by a hand of black shadow. Bristles had transformed his arm, giving [Nevermore] deeper access to his body.
“I will be generous with thy foolishness. As a giving man, as a greater wrathraven, I will allow you entrance into the whole that is me.”
The birds shook their heads but Bristles’ grip tightened. Their feathers siphoned into the black hand's abyss. Soon the bodies were gone, and then the remaining blue souls were subsumed as well, bird-shaped and anguished.
Trey’s mouth was agape. The old wrathraven had picked up a new trick, eating through any and all means, no longer requiring the altar to grow itself.
“Now Trey, restrain your shock. I warned you of war. Consider this act a warning shot of sorts. But my ambitions start here. Thou knowest that already.”
“I know that about your personality but I don’t know what you want.”
“Everything.” With the massive black hand, Bristles gestured at the skies above: the birds, the wrathravens, Ruby, and The High Chasm. “My grasp must be great enough to contain all.”
Trey let this all sink in. He floated in the blackness of the wings and could have sworn he glimpsed the agonized expressions of the recently collected bird souls. They flowed through the wings, fighting to create a form, flexing themselves into V shapes, almost capable of flapping. But the overwhelming dominance of Bristles stole their forms away, flattening them into matte, uniform tones.
The young man wasn’t resting on his laurels, though. He’d made his choice, his allegiance to the demon, and as such he kept his finger guns blazing.
One bird, two birds, three.
A dozen. A couple dozen.
Trey was setting these birds on fire, his [Zap] spells vicious and unforgiving. And merciful. Each bird downed was one less for Bristles to claim. They were big game hunters. Trey, in his morality, was good with that.
Hunt the wrathravens but not the snitches…
Bristles sermonized on as he bulleted into a blanket of snitchtalons, rearing his black hand back, its fist clenched like an obsidian boulder. “Ever the small thinker, I see. Even I can admit that your abilities are beyond our beaked detractors. I’ve surmised that your brain is at minimum two percent sharp. You should knoweth well what Bristles The Indomitable wants. Augment thy thinking. You know what I am. You know what else is out there.”
Trey cringed at the title, but a warrior’s pride was a warrior’s pride, so he listened to Bristles and gave his goal some thought. His eye drifted to the skies, the turmoil of the wishwillows trembling within the clutch of wrathraven talons.
Wrathravens. There were only two that carried the wishwillows upward. And there had to be more. Even Trey knew that wrathravens traveled in flocks. Birds of a feather went the saying—and the evolutionary truth tracked quite accurately.
“Do you know the other wrathravens? Did Ruby steal your whole flock?”
“I can feel them up there.”
“Cool, let’s get your body back then.”
“Not just mine…I’ve come this far through the straw, through learning the darkness from the altar and the bird-colonizing spirits. But what if I simply ate my flock instead of leading them? Less responsibility…more greatness.”
“That’s one of the greediest things I’ve ever heard.”
“Isn’t it?” Bristles gleamed. He knew it wasn’t a compliment but took it as a premium honor.
“Everybody eats,” Trey shrugged.
“Indeed, I shall. A meal of birds, a meal of wrathraven, and then…”
“A meal of Ruby.”
“Bingo.”
CACAW! Hundreds, thousands of birds were upon them. But this curtain had texture. It was soft. There were dashes of thinness, gaps of night, obvious weaknesses. Trey knew that as the darkness gathered, it’d get torn away. He saw the damage before it’d even occurred.
Bristles released his punch.
And in the aftermath, a circle of snitches vanished, their bodies seared away, their souls flowing into the fist that’d eviscerated them. Each bird died like an extinguished flame, in sound and aesthetic.
Trey said a little prayer. He gently clasped his glowing hands together, a soft static reaching toward the fresh batch of absorbed birds. The young man watched the souls drift toward his hands, licking at the voltage.
Then they disappeared, their individuality killed. They were energy now, another dark drop in the Bristles reservoir.
“Prepare thyself,” Bristles said. “It’s almost time.”
“A light show, huh?” Trey looked up. There was another shroud on the horizon. Level one was the birds. Level two was something more formidable.
“Perceptive. Perhaps there’s a spark of IQ that lives in you yet. As much as I am loathe to admit, you are one with a smidgen of ability. In you lives more power than you deserve. But it’s power that by all rights is yours to claim as well. Unleash the storm inside you. Breaketh the wrathravens. Defeating the flock will bringeth them back to our side. We are primal and simple beings. Winning against them means winning them, their services, their adoration, their everything. We will use them against Ruby and then…”
“And then you’ll eat them.”
“Win-win for you, yes? You do not strike me as one who favors wrathravens.”
Trey nodded.
“Good. Now I shall offer the grace of my assistance. You’ll love to know what it’s like to be carried within the wings of power.”
Bristles made himself clear with that exchange but Trey didn’t expect an immediate start to their operation.
There was a particularly dense pocket of cloud around the wishwillows—Ruby portals but a little larger, a bit frayed and worn around the edges. Something of great scale would manifest from that zone. Trey’s vision had grown used to the curses of the city. And it wasn’t like Ruby tried in earnest to hide her military might. If they’d captured Bristles’ body once upon a time, she’d commandeered other wrathravens too. He’d known that she had them on deck but he now lived to see the day where she was seconds away from unleashing her pocket catastrophe.
Trey turned around and saw Swishy carrying his glow-dolls in the distance. They’d taken another route, having passed him a while ago, likely during the initial snitch barrages. He hoped for Swishy to reach out but was touched by another set of feelings: the heart-stringed birds whimpered through their connection. It was good to know that someone knew he was going through this cursed flight.
And then an oncoming cloud swirled its cottony textures, whipping around like whisked eggs, thickening and smoothing into a portal. The contained energy was lively. From its center, a blackness roared.
A wrathraven burst through the ovoid, a colossus that absorbed subsequent mass from the nearest clouds.
“Is that your body?”
“No. But it’s shiny. Oh how I long for my blackness to GLOW. Give it here!” Bristles screeched. His wings flapped, crackling with each movement like explosive bonfires. Trey found it difficult to swim as his carrying orb became a whirlpool.
Blackwheat eyes stared the future-wrathraven down—but the fear behind those eyes surged forth, breaking those reds down into their normal black pupils. Every eye shook, grew veiny, and teared up.
The portal through which the wrathraven came had spread open even more. Either reinforcements were coming, or the darkness was inviting the air in.
“Maybe we should pump the brakes on this a little bit?”
“I know not what that modern expression means.”
“That’s a damn lie.”
Bristles smirked. “I’m going forward. As one should. Onward, to prosperity!”
“I was prosperous before all this.” Trey sighed, gathering an electrical core between his hands.
His letters came one after the other, clinging to the energy ball.
T, then O, then R, and the M.
“Z” was in there somewhere, dormant within his microcosm of weather.