TREY WAS IN A WRETCHED STATE—and that was putting it lightly.
The Clayborne had phrased it in another way: “I’m fucked, I’m fucked, I’m fucked, I’m fucked.”
No words were more apt when it came to describing the loss of your body to ghostliness and said ghostliness to caged-ness. His soul clanged. His mind rang with the horribly high frequency of a tuning fork. His transformation into a birdcage had him panicked and hopeless. Everything hardened. The cold air stuck to his metallicizing skin of his soul. His joints, spiritually mobile and flexible, had stiffened. Trey felt as if his soul were secured by bolts, screws, and fasteners.
And then the changes continued, his insides warping. The feeling of everything shifting, everything of his spirit molded into captivity, was more than he could bear.
But to bear was his current task. When moments ago he was a man, now he was something else. He wasn’t the first. He could only work toward being the last.
Trey clung to the scraps of positivity that the situation afforded. He was alive. And soon his getaway driver, Swishy, would come along with their so-called ride. Trey knew what that meant: the guardian. Who else? But the ethereal Trey had to stall for time, to survive long enough for Swishy to conjure the means to bring the giant scarecrow.
Trey stared at the impossibly tall trees that surrounded him. They were another type of cage, blocking the golden light, and hiding the wrathravens between and within them. Even the aerial nests had were swaying back and forth, red eyes beaming within the domes.
Would the [Straw Guardian] make it up there? Would it even make a difference in the face of these odds? Trey reflexively shook his head and ended up shaking his whole being. He wasn’t used to this body—if he could even call it that.
The wrathravens looked upon Trey like prey, sensing how he suffered, delighting in it. They breathed in the black smoke emitted from Trey’s nerves.
It can’t be helped. It’s okay, I’ll limit this sorrow. If Swishy can do it, I can do it…
He struggled with his meditative calmness. The fright was a livewire that coiled around each and every bar. And those terror-stricken sentiments were worsened by the neo-ravens and their progression into beasthood. Their behaviors evolved, shedding their humanity one step at a time.
He could tell that the flocks hunting of him was less personal than it once was. Before he knew that other humans were hating on him. People held grudges—they were supposed to. Pettiness was part of the gig. Humans were creatures based on reason and ego, and there was nothing more defining to the species than carrying vendettas based on jealousy and perceived slights. Trey even saw the expected words visible in the feathers of the transformed people.
PETTINESS, ENVY, HATRED, SUPERIORITY. They were rendered in the air as blue ether, as something more human than cursed.
The neo-ravens were starting to trend toward the darkness. They reached for their instincts. When they glared at Trey, he found no words or logic in their eyes. Only the compulsion to possess him. Oppression wasn’t a conscious choice—it was just something they did.
The realization soured in Trey like aged plums. His whole soul festered, releasing more negative fumes for the wrathravens to inhale.
The flock behaved more like animals, grooming themselves with their beaks. They sharpened their claws against their other claws. Others stared carefully at their wings while they encircled Trey, wanting to do what they could to fly like a wrathraven. Their predictable flap-flap movements began to leave the human rhythm. It was less flap-flap and more whoosh, more singular strokes of wings upon air. They flew with bursts of force, embracing the glide.
These birds gradually disabused themselves of the notion that if they stopped moving, they’d fall from the sky like bricks. That simply wasn’t the case. The relaxation set in…the dark ebbed with fewer instances of spikiness.
The barbed birds were just birds. To fly was the same effort as standing on two legs.
Ghost Trey was infused with a terror that he hadn’t known. The previous round of fighting was had enough as it was. Now these humans had removed their egos from the equation. Beastliness required no other ego than dominance. The latent DOMINATION from the domain glided around the edges of the neo-raven’s aura. Finally, they’d earned the benefit of non-humanity.
And their bolstered energy, their singular focus on capturing their prey, made the BIRDCAGE spell stronger. They’d embraced change and were inflicting that upon Trey’s soul. More of the blackness entered their bodies. It was more to control. It was more of a benefit as well. Power from the darkness and the skill to control it came in one package, and Trey could do nothing to prevent his soul from bending to their fortified will.
[Ultimatum] hadn’t worked out for them. But [Coercion] drifted within their pupils. It shined with red font, devilish rage. Force, force, nothing but force. Force was the way. Force was how a person was meant to win.
The birds looked strong. They felt strong. And Trey, poor Trey, was afraid.
His hands, though, had begun to morph. He flexed his fingers in horror as they disintegrated into soul dust before his eyes. But the blue glitter didn’t disperse. It remained floating in the same area, never straying far from Trey. Other parts of his body dissolved next: his feet, his shins, his thighs. He was burning at both ends. As the body parts had split apart into millions of atoms, they were held in place by the force of the dark alphabet flowing through him. B-I-R-D-C-A-G-E became the structure through which Trey’s essence was bound. The letters drifted in a set path and clusters of himself stuck to each one in a sick magnetism.
It was strange to not feel any of this happening. His body wasn’t a body anymore. He wasn’t in any structure that he was familiar with.
Perhaps that numbness was a trick of the darkness. He hadn’t noticed that the black aura encased him. He was surrounded by a curtain of power, lost in the folds of its enigmatic malleability.
Maybe he could feel. But the feeling was the first aspect of his humanity to go.
This was the process. This was how the beasts chose to recycle him.
An abundance of vibrations rippled from the deepest reaches of his soul, contacting the furthest edges of his aura. It was his passenger, that strange acquaintance that hadn’t gotten around to proper communication yet. All it indicated was that it hated what was happening. The spirit’s fear reverberated against Trey. The protests were almost audible.
“I don’t know what to do,” Trey told the passenger.
But the passenger’s desperation slammed against the Clayborne’s remaining aura. The rhythm was set. Bang, bang, bang. Or as Trey’s mental subtitles put it: No, no, no! Shaken by the clarity of the tantrum, Trey scoured his mind for a way out of the cage he was becoming.
Trey hadn’t imagined a scenario where he wouldn’t be a human anymore. There was a lot of flexibility to the term ‘humanity’. Did he need a body to be considered human? Was his ‘human’ soul just a soul, the same as any other? His enemies wore curses in their bodies and abandoned their original flesh-and-bone vessels—but were they human?
Pfft, why does this even matter. I am who I am and that’s it…
[ZPREAD]—he tried it. He ignited the energy in each of his particles.
Come on, magic…magically save my ass…
No dice. No ignition. No blue flare activated his controlled dissolution. He was already forcibly bound to the horrific possession of the wrathraven’s letters. His atoms condensed around those eight letters and were being stretched upward, the particles affixed to their assigned locations.
You’re glued to us! Give it up! Accept that your scarecrow abandoned you and that you, a nothing, are now lost. How does it feel? Do you feel anything? Do you feel the excitement that you’ll join us soon? We’re making you better. I don’t expect someone like you to be grateful. But please, achieve perspective. This isn’t the end for you. WE will lead you to the gold skies above. WE are your father, your mother, your compass.
The compass comment made Trey want to disappear altogether. He didn’t want to be led by the wicked, by those too weak-willed to embrace the gift of being themselves. There was so much misguidance. There was much entitled to others. He saw the screams that lived within the feathers, a tapestry of horror, of the future that Trey’s enemies promised him.
The birdcage word then spread upward in curved paths, converging toward a single point. The particles of Trey were pulled with the letters in eight blue trails that formed the boundaries of a cage.
There was nothing he could do. Nothing he could do. No options. No future. No light, no life, no God.
I can’t think this, I can’t let this happen, I need my mind to do the opposite…
He wasn’t okay—but he was definitely okay. There was much that relied upon him. Swishy was down there somewhere, fiddling with the guardian.
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There was the passenger too. It was scared, freaked, and borderline psychotic as Trey stretched into the birdcage shape. It was the largest trigger that Trey had yet felt from them.
“It’s okay, guys, I swear it’ll be okay.”
He waited to hear it, them, or whatever the passenger was. A plea, a prayer, a scream—anything that signaled proper communication.
They weren’t reassured in the slightest, rattling on.
“I’d like some words, please…” Trey strained through every word, the pull of the birdcage morph had begun to sting in spots. Despite him being a soul, he felt a full-body sensation akin to muscle burn. The soul ache ramped up. Trey gasped for breath—though he wasn’t in any human shape.
His atoms were scrambled. Everywhere and nowhere, he was anatomically a curse.
“I’ve fallen, huh?”
You’re rising, you ingrate. We’ve all gone through this. Now look at us. We are tremendous. We are the apex. Of course, you’ve ‘fallen’ as you say. Your enemy is none other than us. We, the greatest beasts, must feed. Now get in the cage—BECOME the cage!”
On the verge of passing out, Trey’s passenger also called to him.
H-E-L-P flowed along the edges of the bars before disappearing into black vapors, snuffed by the corrupted [Birdcage] spell. Trey felt it. He saw it. He confirmed that there was something else that needed him.
The Clayborne was determined to live up to his reputation for dependability.
“Hang on, whatever-you-are…I just have to survive until Swishy gets back. If I can’t do that much, then what good am I?”
Trey said all that while brushing aside the fact that he was a cage now. What, he wondered, could a cage even do?
A lot, I hope.
He was comfortable enough being in a non-human shape. The malleability was an occupational hazard of astral projection. Acceptance was something that he clung to once again as he saw his particles solidify into dark bars.
Yes, there you go, become reborn. Join us, your new flock.
“I won’t!”
You will. You are. It’s already happened.
[Zpread] tended to help him out of these situations but the atoms were being pulled in by the curses. He needed to dim the power of the curses somehow. The shadows were here to help him. He imagined Myst on the outside, flowing freely, deciding her shape at will. She was fluid. She was flexible. But he didn’t want to be either of those things. That fluidity was now binding him. He needed a sturdy form. He needed to return to his body, or something like it.
The blue glitter was going away. He was metal, no trace of having been anything else.
There’s no time. Now or never!
He gambled everything on a [Zpread], step one to undoing that lockbox that he’d become. Trey was anxious to undo the cage as a whole but knew that patience was the key.
“Go slow, go slow…”
There wasn’t much magic in him yet. He’d turned out to be a much smaller cage, a canary box.
He shrank and shrank and shrank.
A talon came from the dark, immense and giant. It reminded him of Bristles. He hoped that it wasn’t him. He told himself that it’d make no difference—but it did. It absolutely did.
“I’ve gotta un-do this…I’ve gotta unlock—ah! Right.”
The talon closed around him. Its possessive energy was overpowering. Exuded from its claws was the privilege of a conqueror.
Trey focused. He drew in energy from all parts of the 8 letters that sealed his fate. The curse pulled back at him but they couldn’t fully control his spirit. There were too many atoms. Too much willpower. He urged himself back to himself.
“It’s okay, guys. Let’s go, let’s go. Come on…”
He picked a focal point: the bulb-shaped lock on the front door.
The talon grabbed the cage in total. Trey could feel it tremble with rage. The wrathraven that had him in a predator’s grip knew that Trey was up to something. The movement of the energy, the blue glitter that now sweated upon the bars like a hopeful condensation, converged upon the lock.
There was no mechanism on the lock itself. There was no door. But it was a shape, a seal through which the wrathraven had stored its binding darkness.
The Clayborne funneled his energy into the lock.
And the wrathraven sharpened its claws against the cage that was Trey, scrapping grindstone sounds into the young man’s soul. He wanted to cringe, to recoil, to travel inward. But that would mean going into the cage, embracing that capture.
“No!”
Yes!
The scrapes, the grinding, and the squeezing continued.
“Explode, explode, explode…” Within the lock he converted the particles into [Zzt] static, then those into [Zap]. Encased in the pressurized lock-shaped abyss, he aimed to create another [Ztorm]. Smaller of course, because he was small, but now that he had something small to work with, a sealed room that allowed his electrons to bounce around and energize, his spell was receiving the strongest boost yet.
The lock stood no chance.
Crack! The lock-shape broke apart, burnt at its edges, and both abyss and boy, a marbling of black and blue released from the birdcage in a billowing plume of smoke.
(…)
When the lock broke, Trey felt relief. It wasn’t a conscious choice. The feelings just flowed through him. He instantly calmed, and found that he could open and shut the cage door at will. His magic returned—he didn’t notice it was even. The miasmic despair had done more of a number on him than he’d known. His soul also had room to breathe. He was an orb inside that birdcage—while also being the birdcage itself.
There was another presence in the cage too. It was shrouded in darkness. Trey’s soul orb eased back there but the blackness pushed against him like a living wall.
“Are you my passenger? Tell the truth. You’re the one that’s hiding, right?”
The whatever-it-was didn’t answer. The darkness swirled a little, releasing a strong gust, and then held that tension.
“Did you make the barrier stronger?”
Then more wind came, more shadows obscuring the back end of the cage.
“I don’t know how you’re going to be so shy in my house.”
The darkness flared briefly, and that was all.
“I’ll address that attitude problem later. We have now problems so if you’d like to help, you know where to find me.”
Trey turned his soul to that exact now problem: he was still a birdcage. “This is wack. How the hell do I undo this…”
He tried not to panic, but funnily enough he couldn’t panic even if he tried. The feel-good flow of energy from the destroyed lock was doing him some good. He likened the sensation to the gnawing on gold-straw. He’d just had some Swish-straw courtesy of his all-too-willing-to-be-cannibalized-homie, and he knew that there was a bounty of it on the guardian. He just had to figure out how to consume the healing straw.
Because the wrathravens were—they were humans first, and any secrets that Trey was privy to, so were they. While Trey some of the beast eyed Trey and his strange magical freedom—too much comfort and autonomy as a birdcage, the other human birds went into meal mode.
Still, they all spoke among themselves about what became of Trey. Did he do the birdcage right? He’s a cage but…his energy is intact. He’s not afraid. Look at how he’s moving…We weren’t like that? I think we messed up? We did it wrong…
Trey thought so too, actually, that they’d screwed up the spell. Or didn’t have the natural fury to bind his hopes. He’d originally wanted to cry as soon as his soul got bent into the symbol of captivity. His horrified feelings had lived on him like a second skin. He was trapped inside himself. Then trapped within the evil talons—
But all that was over now. The lock was done. Once that seal broke, Trey had access to magic again.
A [Zzt] popped through his bars. He felt it strange that he couldn’t concentrate it into a fingertip. He was perfectly curved bars, a strange vessel for bolt-gunning. Trey loved that his access to magic hadn’t changed but wasn’t sure how to use it for combat. Unfortunately, he’d have to figure that out now. Learning things on the fly was exactly what he had to do—because the enemies had decided to fly toward him in that moment.
They’d abandoned the wing blades and beak-shots—no reason to use physical attacks on metal bars—and opted to chase him with their huge talons.
They glided toward Trey—and Trey flew away himself, surprisingly fast, but no match for the wrathravens’ speed.
The first claw grabbed him. Then a second.
Another bird came from below, outstretching both their feet.
“Do something, do something, do something…”
[Zzt] multiplied in his mind. The Clayborne pictured it in each of his atoms, proliferating the intent with the same presence as his [Zpread] spell. Small. Everywhere. That’s what he aimed for. He concentrated on making as many as he could, countless ones.
He hyper-focused on the letters. Z-Z-T, Z-Z-T, over and over and over and over again. His soul was electric, the voltage turned up high as he could make it. He gave up on flight, on even the notion of undoing his jailed form. Trey was becoming one with the lightning, an attack he couldn’t launch. He eagerly awaited the result as the wrathravens flew high-high-high, so high that he couldn’t detect the straw guardian anymore.
And then he heard a groan, a shriek, pained grunting.
He knew his volt-charged self was working, and then saw how. [Zzt] flowed densely over all the bars. He was beyond static, beyond a condensed current. The electricity created a burning friction all along his metallic body. “[Hot Bars]” he called out, intensifying the inner storm.
The talons burned and cracked, the skin beneath searing. A smoke came up from every grip. The wrathravens let go, releasing Trey to his cage flight.
The Clayborne, of course, went down.
Back to the [Straw Guardian] he went, back to the healing straw, back to where Swishy would come for him.
Other wrathravens down below reached for him. But they never lasted long since Trey had an instant response to each contact.
“[Hot Bars]!”
Aaah! It burns!
And that’s how Trey knew that he could survive the coming onslaught. These neo-ravens, while growing used to their wrathraven bodies, were too in touch with their humanity, too willing to express and whine about pain. He thought about Bristles, and knew that even in defeat a real beast would fight to the end. Not sit and cry about a trifle like a third-degree burn.
Trey flash-fried his metal until he was blinded by the smoke. Screams pierced the air and Trey gave out a little chuckle.
A birdcage that hurts birds was just a likely story.
He gained distance from the flock. Distance from their bodies. Distance from the influence of their magic. He could see a dark part in the sky that demarcated the limits of their intent. Once he plunged through that curtain he felt free. Trey remained a birdcage but the solid bars were wobbling.
The energy inside reverted to their ethereal rippling. He was a cage—but constructed of visible, moldable soul. The only darkness in him that remained was that shroud around his passenger.
“You’re stubborn you know that?”
The aura softly flared.
He’d never seen a nebula shrug before and that amused him.
“Okay, I’ll show you something nice.”
Trey landed on the Straw Guardian’s head. He positioned himself sideways on the surface and rolled through the wheel like a wheel. Normal physics didn’t apply to an ether being like him, and he took advantage of that to show off for the passenger.
“I can’t pick this up so just scoop what you can. Magnetize it or whatever you do. Don’t be lazy.”
As Trey rotated shamelessly on the guardian, he thought about how he could benefit from the straw as well. No mouth, no hands, no means of ingestion at all. He just hoped his passenger wouldn’t call him out on telling them to do something he couldn’t.
They must’ve listened to Trey, though, because the darkness in the cage softened. It’d become less heavy.
“Alright homie, hang tight. These demons are back.”
Demons, huh? If only we could be so lucky?
The wrathravens landed all around them, digging their feet into the fertile grounds of Straw Guardian. They bit into its head, taking advantage of the healing straw. Scratches and burns on their wings were stitched closed. Bulging scars remained present, an encouragement to Trey.
“I see you guys got some ouchies.”
Tally marks for each revenge we’ll get on you.
“Try it, then.”
Several wrathravens lurched forward, opening their wings. They assumed bent stances, spring-loading themselves for a sudden attack.
Trey opened his cage door, allowing the passenger’s darkness to ebb forward like cursed smoke. And then he began to enlarge.
His bars stretched upward.
The blue ether shined.
And the mouth of his door swelled into an abyss.