Swishy and Trey stood at ground level, encased in anguished cries.
The birdcages were in sad condition, rust-stricken and blighted. The ones that accepted the wrathravens had already ascended with Bristles or their other choice of beast. All that remained were the scared and regretful, victims of circumstance. Victims period.
Both boys stared upward, readying themselves for the challenge. Dark skies. Swirling wrathravens. A mass of beaks and wings and swelling DOMINATION.
There were gold skies somewhere within the madness. And the realm exit and its sweet freedom. The boys had been dumped from the sky, deposited into this hellscape of a wrathraven’s nest.
Now they were set to earn passage back to the real world, back to whatever would be left of it as the conflict between Ruby and Myst went on. And at this rate, Bristles would beat them to it. He’d disappeared into the thicket of feathers and hexes, absorbing the aura of the birdcages he’d brought with him. There was no telling what he’d do if left unmanaged.
Sometimes God pick favorites. Other times, God—straw ones especially—kept a tight hold over the leash.
Up. They needed to go up. But the starting point proved challenging enough.
“Can you see the way out, Trey?”
“Not really but I bet we’ll find it.”
“If we don’t die.”
“If indeed.”
“It’s only up from here!” Swishy grinned stupidly at Trey. Light, Swishy scolded himself. Think light! Don’t be a downer. Be an upper.
“I’ll accept the pun once and only once.”
“It was good, right?”
“Good and gross in equal measure.”
“I’ll take it! Now let’s clean this up.”
The fog of [Hush] thickened into a miasma. A sticky dew clung to Swishy’s body in deep purple specks. The humid hex stuck to everything like splotches of blood—something that the birdcages received poorly. Each cage twisted into their burrows like cemetery headstones, markers of their killed hopes.
Swishy could feel the blackwheat cracking through his own body. The [Hush] command was working on him as well. The blackwheat production was only a symptom of the spell’s true effect. He realized that he was transforming, going from a scarecrow to a birdcage. His soul was stretched and pulled like a malleable dough, turning into a cage.
He gazed at Trey and saw his soul undergoing the same struggle. The Clayborne’s soul was getting pulled out in ethereal rods, forced into the shape of a birdcage, but he fought against it with his force of will. He remained in the prayer pose, this time filling his hands with brightness. “[Heart Strings].” The bright threads extended from his fingertips and flowed into his chest, swirling around his heart like a wind. The spot of corruption dispersed from his light.
The scarecrow began to feel better already just from proximity to the radiating light. He fed a glow to the tips of his rake and held it above their heads. He used himself as a streetlight, warding the shadows from the dome of brightness.
The pair paused beneath the light, settling their nerves.
“We can’t stay down here for long,” Trey said.
“I know. We have to go through the wrathravens and into the portal.”
Portal? The birdcages chimed in. The ones at the edges of the rake light appeared especially hopeful, their angled postures mirroring Swishy’s quizzical head tilts. It was the most human he’d seen them. Swishy found relief in that the caged souls offered their first participation in their rescue.
“Yeah,” Trey said to both Swishy and the birdcages. “We came in through a portal. You know where it is. Are you ready to face what you have to face to resurface?”
They spoke over each other in a mishmash of responses. We went through it coming here. Hell happened to us already. We’re prepped to go! You’re telling me there’s a chance to leave? Take us back! When I get back to my body, I’ll apologize to it properly. I’ll go to the gym. I’ll get muscles like Bristles—the right way. My body is a temple—or when I train properly, a fitness model. Just please, bring us home!
A litany of please-please-please rang from the cages in high-pitched canary tones.
“Okay,” Swishy said. “Sometimes we all need saving from ourselves.”
“That’s a little profound for you.”
“Maybe. I’m just too used to confusing things happening.”
“For real. You’re not wrong on that.”
Meanwhile, the [Hush] mist rolled onward, squeezing the screams out of the vast expanse of unseen and anonymous cages. There were others whose voices and wills wouldn’t carry to the zone of Swishy’s rake light. The anguish released from the souls in brief gasps that were cut off as soon as they were uttered, the air stolen from them before the cries fully formed. But the fact of pain was the clearest aspect of the domain’s surface. P-A-I-N spread around in a dark halo, chaining them inside the boy. A cry for help was a cry for help, and that’s all Swishy needed to know.
“This is all the world…” Swishy said to himself.
“What was that?” Trey arched his eyebrows.
“Oh, it’s nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing. It was everything. The wrathraven nest was just as much a part of Cearth as the outside world. There was gold and beauty. There was worth and souls. He couldn’t just escape through the portal with Trey and a handful of captured souls. He had to tear a hole through the darkness and make way for the light to barrel through.
The wrathravens aimed to eviscerate him first.
Wingbeats released a fierce wind upon the surface. The gusts were strong and overbearing, pressing down upon them. But Swish kept his arm raised against the resistance, knowing that the rake light shielded him. He watched the souls move, the live ones that the wrathravens had converted into their bodies. An attack was coming. A flurry of cast-off feathers plunged downward with speed and sharpness. The souls in the feather blades wailed with banshee fury, cries that emitted a REGRET and CORRUPTION intent around each one.
Swishy knew these were bad news. Blades couldn’t hurt him—he could reconstruct easily—but the spiritual attack was fearsome. Die for us! Suffer with us! Become a doom feather. A wrathraven is one. A wrathraven is all!
The birdcages shook so hard that Swishy couldn’t think. Trey also covered his ears from the physical sound and the soulful disturbance.
Swishy charged energy, looking inside himself, seeking a technique.
He thought about Sling. He thought about his repertoire of abilities. Inside, he cleansed himself of the experiences of his time in the metropolis. What his mind went back to was the magic of his birth. When he ran out into the sun and grew the wheat and the trees from his footsteps. A world populated around him. The woods, the bird nests, the hollows through which the ants immediately moved themselves in. But he first had to clear the swampiness. By cleaning the dark a world could finally open.
REGRET, CORRUPTION, and now VIOLENCE was upon him, a split second from Swishy and Trey’s faces.
The boy spread his arms apart, the scarecrow scarecrow-ing.
The SANCTUARY word pushed his straw aside. He learned in full what that meant. The straw-bound were the most surprising teachers that he ever could’ve had and he was grateful for them now. It was time to give his behemoth another go.
[STRAW GUARDIAN] made its triumphant return, sprouting beneath Swishy and Trey, carrying them upward within the structure’s chest—barred just like the cages, too, but for air and visibility.
The giant scarecrow’s arms were frayed and protruding every which way just like trees, the ends of which hung birdcages that were picked up from the ground. The body was normal but the branch-like ends of its arms were goldwheat—Swishy was proud to at least manage that.
The arms of the [Straw Guardian] spread outward with the relaxation of a live being. The limbs lowered to their sides. Scarecrow pose wasn’t the posture. It was a hugging pose, a come-to-me-I’m-here type of body language. And the birdcages were levitated away from the [Hush] fog and ascended into the colossus.
A word formed throughout the weaves of the guardian’s chest, something that Swishy sensed he’d possessed from the start: COMPASSION. One at a time, the cages entered the kind aura of those letters.
Swishy studied the corruption-scarred souls, diamonds in the rough.
Birdcage size was roughly proportional to their perceived potential. Wider cages contained powerful auras, the most vehement and driven of human souls. The [Birdcage] spell was a binding hex—but of a kind. The captured human was not only removed from their body and kept from the natural freedom of a wandering spirit, but their souls were also measured by the most desirable traits to wrathravens. The beasts favored tenacity, audacity, and greed. A scarce, almost non-existent moral fiber was a plus. A passion for growth was another boon to the flock. Because that’s who wrathravens were at their core: consumers, growers, and unlimited and unchecked greed.
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But the guardian’s frayed extensions were like sticks of sun, blessing the caged souls with light. Everything the guardian touched hadn’t quite turned to not gold but to health. The corrosion of the cage rods went away. The confined souls had nothing to say. They quivered with joy. Tears of blue soul ran down their bars.
The giant scarecrow warded much of the fog created by the wrathraven’s [Hush] spell. As the miasma cleared, the freed birdcages levitated toward the arms, finding a perch to safely hang from.
The lost were found, the corrupted—whose cages remained slimed with the oozing darkness—were now being dried in the sun-like straw of the Swish-god.
All around, the black rain disintegrated, fizzling out.
In the light, the aerial knife-shadows had nowhere to go.
Something like the light of day spread over the area, casting golden and yellow-brown tones over the woods. Even the everytrees took on the walnut shades of aged oak. The blackness was muted. It’d become normal. Cleansed.
The wrathraven souls filled the sky. They hadn’t become any less black, any less large. Their wings were gone but they were remaking them anew. Others didn’t make bodies anymore but drifted as beaked orbs, curiously eating at the guardian.
Swishy felt himself drained. His energy levels were doing well. But there was less gold inside to stifle the progression of his blackness. His depression required a dam, a buffer of joy, and he’d once again dipped too far into his reserves to solve everyone’s problems at once. Now he was the problem.
His heart shrank. The gold inside burned away like the wick of a candle, mythic atrophy that he felt with his soul. And now the curses that lived within him were all the more louder. He was more void than sustenance. More chasm than heart. His abyss, his old friend, was beating like a taiko drum. The heart was beating too—but in small pulses. One drowned out the other. One was winning. And it wasn’t the one that he wanted.
His harvest-brown tones turned darker. Sweeping shocks of blackness corrupted his entire right arm.
But the [Straw Guardian] was erected. His treasured monument was back. Him and Trey were inside the chest, the only heart the giant could rely upon.
And now that they were in the air, tree-height high, the boys stared face-to-face with their first level of wrathravens.
Hello…the several beasts said, collecting soul smoke around the wings for the next attack.
(…)
Dark blades were flapped toward them and Swishy held his rake outward, closing the gaps in the guardian’s barred chest.
The attacks thudded against the straw as Swishy formed layer upon layer.
Through some of the damage, a black smoke infiltrated the guardian, then formed into disembodied talons. These claws grasped at Swishy but Trey diffused it with a [Zzt] orb encased around his hand.
“Jeez, these guys are persistent.”
“I know, it’s hard to heal the guardian this way.”
Trey held his electrified hands to the chest wall, weakening the attacks on the other side with light. The effect worked as the blades landed with quieter impact. Swishy’s straw creation was able to get a head start and functional armor.
They found themselves in a closed room, fortified and spacious. Their footfalls were hollow since right below them was the cavernous ribcage. Swishy didn’t have it in him to make the guardian thick all the way through—nor did he want to. Instead of making a scarecrow-tank, he opted to conserve the giant’s magic. As claw marks surged through the walls, the guardian self-repaired, using the power Swishy fed it on an as-needed basis.
There were more attacks, more bites, and even the smokiness of wing blades slicing through the layers. But the guardian closed its wounds. Everything was chaotic and familiar, a relief to Swishy.
The boy remembered his FAITH, his pledge to ENDURE, and focused on bringing the guardian to prominence. He made it bigger. He made it thick and layered and armored.
He also gave it an intelligence—weaker defense in the shoulders and neck, and more reconstruction magic around the golden splits. The stake, the anchor, needed reinforcement too. Keep it standing, keep it standing at all costs…
“I need something Swishy.” Trey had a look of urgency and concern.
“I can help. What’s up?”
“Hook it up with another cast.”
“I can scarecrow you, sure.”
Trey closed his eyes and spread his arms into a “T”, readying to surrender his body again. As Swishy added straw vines around Trey’s body, wrapping in several layers, forming shoulder and chest armor along with a jack-O-lantern-shaped helmet, the Clayborne’s soul began to lift from its confines.
[Soul] was activated and blue Trey floated in the air while his newly scarecrow’d body was then drawn into one of the chest walls, ensconced and protected.
“I need the flexibility if we’re going to deal with this many wrathravens. If I get slapped even once with my real body, it’s curtains for me.”
“They can still touch you with their darkness.”
“I have more options, more of a chance. Going bodiless is something that I just have to do.”
“Okay, Trey. It makes me nervous but I trust you.”
“And I trust you back. We’ll keep me safe in here.”
“If you’re not safe, it’s not like you’ll die-die.”
“How so?”
“If a wrathraven eats you, you’ll live in there. Exciting huh?”
Trey tried to head-smack the straw god’s gourd but his hand phased through. “Lucky.”
“You mean smart.” Swishy tap-tapped his head in the universal I’m-so-clever gesture.
Swishy had a message for everyone, one that whistled through the guardian’s straw like a breeze, swishing it. Both Swishy and the guardian declared: “Rise! You don’t have to drown down there. The air is fresh up here.”
This was when Swishy heard his first complaints, the souls that were scared of the wrathravens—but also had out hope that they’d turn into one.
I want power. I don’t want to be small anymore. You’re not giving me anything I can use! You’re ruining our sacrifice!
Swishy saw through the guardian walls, reading the soulscape.
Beyond the wrathraven onslaught on the other side was new birdcage activity. The birdcages began to retract and the original orbed forms of the souls emerged. A handful of the floating spirits followed the wrathravens, nudging against the bodies, wanting to be eaten.
Their sense of loss was palpable but Swishy was unmoved. Sometimes loss was a healthy thing to have. Nobody wanted to lose anything—ever. These people only knew how to gain. How to take. But loss was a hidden art. Swishy would show them. When one found healing, a transformation happened through those means too. The birdcages just didn’t know it yet.
“Why are they like this?” Swishy threw his hands up in frustration. “I’ve seen a lot of little critters doing animal things. Like carry rocks or eat flower petals or make a little hole. What’s wrong with these wrathravens, though? I don’t get them at all.” The boy wasn’t sure what their purpose was. But he also figured that they were simply animals as any other and that out in the world there was a balance to keep them from taking over everything on Cearth. Straw City, however, wasn’t a balanced place by any means. So there were wrathravens—many—and they expressed genuine interest in upping their numbers.
“You know,” Trey began, “There were never this many wrathravens in the world. And that’s because the magical shadows don’t actually stray far from the altars. Cearth has never been this crazy outside of Straw City. But around here, the curses run free. It’s wrathraven bait if I really think about it. Once Ruby realized it, I bet she just leaned right on in. Wrathravens under her control and a ton of her followers willing to turn themselves into one.”
“But they’re horrible.”
“Indeed, young straw. That’s the draw for them. Run from the horror or become it.”
“Ugh.”
“I know, buddy. I’m ugh-ing too.”
“I wish I could show them another way.”
“The light is all I can think of to combat this. They call you straw god for a reason. Do some straw god shit, yeah?”
“I will then. I can do it.”
“Yes, give them a real reason to pray.” Trey playfully floated around Swishy, diving into and out of his body.
Swishy laughed. He never knew he had a ticklish soul.
The caged souls screamed on—a prayer or two had to be amid those outcries. But for now it was all wrathraven fantasies and blind anguish.
The boy felt each cry with his soul.
Swishy’s spirit matched the tremulous birdcage energy. The rattles were too much. Far, far too much. Some rose to the skies. Others burrowed deeper in hiding. The dichotomy of souls was something Swishy related to a lot, both the potential gains from exposure to the darkness and the fear of the murkiness. The conclusions the birdcages came to made sense in equal measure.
But none of it was autonomy. Not with the wrathravens calling the shots up there, hoarding an otherwise vibrant world.
But Swishy would be the cleaner, the homemaker, the home itself.
Birdcages began to swing open. There were no doors on the metal objects but a glimmering outline of gold fizzled in a bell shape and when the glitter fell away, so too did any semblance of physical matter.
The doors were created and the souls hovered at the edges, pausing. They treated their new freedom like a cliff. Some floated out of the cages but their distress remained obvious. They angled toward the skies at the wrathraven masters.
What will we do now? They’re going to eat us, aren’t they? We won’t have a body or personality. We’ll be nothing now. Nothing at all…
Other souls flew laps around the [Straw Guardian] and its crevices, seeking a home, finding comfort in the inviting weaves that were a dramatic departure from the dungeon bars of the wrathravens. Speak for yourselves! They said. We’re not done yet! If we have souls, we have a chance. Save the tears for yourselves. If you cry now, it’ll only make the wrathravens eat you more.
“Yeah! Side with me!” Both Swishy and the guardian said. “It’s a scarecrow, it’s a treehouse, it’s a soul mansion. Whatever you need it to be, it’ll be. Just look around.”
And so the souls did. There was no other choice. Their ultimatum was cleared. Their side of the war had been determined even if the choice hadn’t fully been theirs.
Sometimes fate picks for you. Such is life.
The boy shrugged and the colossus did too.
[Zlide]. Trey was prepared. He held his hand out to Swishy as the glimmering door opened up.
The boy took his hand and was dragged inside.
“Up we go!” Both boys said in unison.
Up above, a serenade of Bristles’ cackles. The maniac was already at one of the whirlpools. Needless to say, needless to relay to anyone present, Bristles Wrathraven had a special contribution to make.
Swishy and Trey exited the [Zlide], appearing at the top of the guardian’s head. And that’s where they saw the next level of their ascension: all-out war.
The wrathraven body parts came out of nowhere and the boys flinched on reaction, both rake and finger guns held up in defense, and then those wings and claws and stray feathers fell downward, disintegrating into ash.
And then the disembodied wings kept falling, wrathraven damage plunging from the sky. As the body parts descended, the souls fused to them were crying out. The spirits leaked out as dark plumes of smoke that thinned into weaker shades of gray, becoming nothing—if their our-power-our-souls-our-bodies whining were to be believed—but Swishy knew that their souls were intact, just divorced from the sum evil of their native wrathraven.
There were sparks of gold that rained down too, the atmospheric hold the wrathravens had being released one defeat at a time.
“Does this mean Bristles is on our side?” Swishy asked.
“It means that he’s on his own side but things look good for us!”
A full wrathraven fell before their eyes, missing half of its wings. As the body vaporized, a blackened soul escaped from the anatomical wreckage, and after a couple of seconds the marbled corruption flaked away and revealed a blue soul inside.
“That was a human!” Swishy swished.
“Of course, it was. You know how Bristles feels about those.”
Trey rolled his eyes.
“It’s okay,” Swishy said. “You’re a soul now.”
“Does that make any difference?”
“No, but you can pretend it does.”
“Great.”