NIGHTMARES WERE EVERYWHERE—there was one for everybody in the realm.
The wrathraven nest was on their you-get-a-fright-you-get-a-fright-and-you-get-a-fright wave. And now Trey was one of the said frights. It was unfamiliar territory. Power was welcome. This cage mutation was less welcome but Trey couldn’t say the boost wasn’t a blessing of a kind. Within that cage door, the abyss ebbed outward, the hellish feelings of him and his passenger surging into usable power.
Trey remained as a birdcage. Strength gathered through his metallic bars, feeling strangely like blood gorging in his forearms. Everything felt to him like an anatomical phenomenon even though he was anything but. It scared him how natural his ‘body’ was. He was off-put by the mental trickery that deluded him into experiencing his inhumanity as exactly that. He was supposed to be cold. He was supposed to hate this more.
The Clayborne had no temptation to stay in this form and hated that the birdcage advertised to him anyway.
His jail bars trembled with disgusting—but useful—vigor.
He immediately saw why the humans had transformed so willingly. One couldn’t get this kind of strength by going to the gym. Accepting curses, tempering your soul in abyss—those were the secrets to limitless fortitude and perfect health.
The fountain of youth was something people liked to fantasize about. And this was exactly that—but with a euphoric drug rush attached.
This is not myself, this is not myself, I’ll return, I swear.
But facts were facts: his body was in its strongest form yet. His cursed metal overflowed with a vitality borne of grudges and resentment. Never once had he dream of strength. Only adventure, knowledge, satisfied curiosity, and a soft enough life overall. His ambitions ended where his books did, from cover to cover, no thrill-seeking included. Grandpa Earth would’ve been proud of him for enduring the birdcage madness but if Trey could magic wand his Straw City time away he would.
There were nightmares for his cage buddy too. Trey was a giving person. He acted as a perfect host for his guest. “You know you can trust me. You see my soul. You know exactly what I’m made of. I’m not saying I’m a saint—but I’m saintly enough for you to choose me as a home. If you wanna help me fight, then go ahead, use some of this energy.”
The passenger trembled.
“It’s that good stuff, all organic. Nothing spiked or cursed.”
The silence quivering continued accompanied by a whimpering breeze.
“Okay fine, the wrath-beasts cursed me. I didn’t choose this form. I’m going back to human. If you have complaints, if you have fears, then help me yeah? I’m scared too. What you’re feeling, I’m feeling! But I’m not being a bitch about it.”
There was nothing more to say. All the passenger could do was clatter in the corner of the cage.
Trey knew what he had to do: take control of the situation. Both of them were living in nightmares. Everyone had menacing traumas to contend with. He’d just have to go forward as a floating dungeon, a form that strongly triggered the passenger. Bristles in the sky, the wrathraven curses, and now becoming a cage: these all set off Trey’s spirit guest.
A part of Trey wanted to use the [Heart Strings]—he now could identify the literal location of the guest—but he felt bad. It was somewhere between manipulation and mind control, a gray area he didn’t wish to wander. And if that went over poorly, he’d have an unhappy passenger fused to him for eternity and more.
Catering to his passenger while savaging the enemy was the treacherous tightrope. Trey was stressed but so were his enemies.
His attention turned to the problem at hand: him standing upon the Straw Guardian, facing off against several enemies.
Trey counted seven wrathravens stalking toward him. Some of them levitated into the air, creating a net, a fortress formation for ensnarement. But they were cautious. Perhaps overly so. Their bodies shook with uncertainty. Wrathravens were never as scared as the entities that comprised them. But these ones were. Having constructed the birdcage, their eyes betrayed their regrets.
Regrets that were punctuated by a new drizzle of black rain: the ashen life force of the true flock, the originals that Bristles was savaging within the concealment of dark clouds.
Bristles relentlessly violated the master wrathravens—who died silently. But their destroyed bodies provided the dramatic backdrop of war. The morbid downfall resonated through the neo-ravens, Trey, and Trey’s cowardly passenger. The flock was doubly affected, though, their glances drifting skyward. Red pupils quivered from unspoken pain. Within those eyes, a tiny word gleamed with moisture: DOUBT.
Seeing an opportunity, Trey brought the fight to them. Cage Trey launched into the thicket of feathers.
Trey soared through the air in a headbutting position, flying with cage-top first at a grounded wrathraven. He filled with energy, his bars crackling with light. But the top of the cage—what Trey was regarding as his skull—generated the most voltage. The metal glowed with yellow voltage, then reddened. It was a flip on his [Hot Bars].
“[Hot Bash]!” He called out—just making something up—anything to strike fear in his hesitating enemies.
The bravado worked as the flock flinched, leaning slightly away from him, unsure of how to defend. Six of the birds backed away in different directions while Trey’s target dug its talons into the [Straw Guardian] and closed its wings around its body, choosing to shield.
Trey smashed into the defense, twisting and twisting, a spiraling bullet that tore through the wings. As if the blunt impact wasn’t enough, the searing bars made the curses go screaming. The neo-raven’s wings broke down into vapors within seconds, the curses fleeing it, the beast screaming in pain.
The passenger cowered. It was still uncertain.
Trey understood, knowing he’d just have to keep on fighting.
The damaged wrathraven collapsed to the ground, crying, shrinking, reducing to a pile of dark smoke.
Trey wasted no time and into a wrathraven that watched from up above. He spiraled upward, a bullet drill seeking his next target.
[Black Blast].
These attacks came from all of the wrathravens. Trey knew they intended to not just harm him but to throw him off course. He generated more voltage instead.
The passenger spiked into an urchin shape. The impression Trey received was that of sucked-in air and gritted teeth.
“Oh hell nah, you’ve got to toughen up. No backseat driving! Now watch me work.”
Trey was nervous—though his words hadn’t given away this notion—because he didn’t like tanking hits. But he’d made himself large. He was a curse, after all, and knew that he’d never have this perspective again. Shadows tended to absorb damage and so he needed to do that too. Why depart from what he’d seen worked?
The black blasts smashed into Trey and he realized that while some of his voltage weakened the flames, his cursed metals also absorbed a small amount. His synergy and latent siphoning of the shadows were surprising. His bars thickened. There was a clanging sound in his head, like weights added to the gym barbells.
Trey looked up at the wrathraven in his path. Fear flickered within the beast’s eyes as it drifted there with an open mouth, releasing its failed and ineffectual flames.
The creature was locked in place, waiting for The Clayborne to tear through him.
And then Trey did, a massive birdcage bullet ripping through the nebulous torso. The wrathraven evaporated from the inside out. First went the abdomen, then the legs and arms, and finally the death crept into the neck and head and frightened, frightened eyes.
Then only smoke remained, one that cleared by wrapping around Trey’s bars, feeding him.
Another metallic clang entered his head. Stronger bars, more power. If Trey could feel nausea, he would’ve ejected his every organ. Using souls wasn’t anything that he ever wanted to do. But this was Hell—he had only to keep going.
The wrathravens below rushed toward him. Behind them was the backdrop of the Straw Guardian, which Trey found bravery-inducing. It was good to not be alone.
Then came the wing blades, the black blasts, and a barrage of neck-stretching beak shots.
Trey couldn’t dodge—he was too large for agility. He was a monster now. Just like the neo-ravens struggled to adjust to their bodies, Trey had to learn to fight like a beast. He’d been turned into a game boss. Larger health bar but easier to hit.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
The attacks were coming. They would hurt. There were strange intents and statuses in there. He saw the corruption and poison and other noxious words—but he didn’t know if his metal body made him immune to any of it. He hoped so but was afraid to act like it. He’d decided to proceed with care.
Do something wild…do something that’d frustrate them…think, think.
The attacks were upon him, a nuke of darkness, an exploding ball.
[Zlide]—Trey, while a birdcage, was himself after all. He waited for the portal to break him down, each moment more nerve-racking than the last.
The first black blasts bore into him, bending one of his bars out of shape. A wing blade then sawed against another part of him. And then another.
The scariest attack yet was a beak shot, the wrathraven sticking its face between the bars and aiming directly for the souls inside. It’d unwittingly targeted the amorphous passenger.
The entity inside quaked and quaked.
Trey didn’t know how to measure the damage to himself, his spirit. His anxiety ramped to the maximum. Dark smoke emitted from the bars that he couldn’t control. Once the wrathravens closed upon him, they’d without question feed on those feelings.
There were several more attacks—this [Zlide] was taking forever. The portal was 80 percent, then 90 percent activated. Trey could feel the tug, the slow, drawling pull of his escaping atoms.
Meanwhile, he sustained attack after attack, his soul trembling, becoming randomly numb. And that numbness, that reduced control of his cage body, made him panic. Even the [Zlide] portal started to tear apart at its borders. He was unsure if it’d manifest at all.
Trey focused, clearing his mind of the attack, praying for patience.
His portal opened then with a dramatic Whoosh! It sucked him in, saving the giant birdcage from a horrible fate. “Got ya…” Trey said as he dissolved into the door. “I got something for ya’ll.”
The wrathravens were nervous. Even as Trey flowed through the warp domain, the flock exuded a palpable frostiness. While they waited, Trey also grew excited. He’d never been feared before.
A little bit of Bristles was in him then, and he didn’t resent that.
The passenger was full of fear, bitterness, agony.
“If you’re scared, then get us out of the situation. How many times do I have to say it? Help or shut up!”
The dark shroud receded—then it swelled. It grew slowly. Its calm progression made Trey think that maybe he did have a functional ally now.
“Okay, get ready.”
They were at the end of the [Zlide]. The door opened into the outside world. The sky’s gold welcomed them before they were dumped into a world of wrathravens.
The portal warped them to the Straw Guardian’s head—right behind the aggressive flock. The birds turned their heads with a slow and dreadful recognition. They’d been caught unawares. Frozen, they awaited their repercussion.
Trey loomed over them, pausing, allowing them to feel him, not out of cockiness or drama, but because that was how the curses worked. Fear and intimidation were benefits, throwing them off guard. Calmness and a rational response were beyond the realm of possibility, at least for fledgling wrathravens.
The cage door swung open.
“Get them!” Trey said.
And the passenger’s darkness ebbed toward the enemy, settling over their bodies—before pulling them in.
The curses came toward Trey’s birdcage self, breaking down, getting molded and worked by his dark guest.
Every time a curse was pried from the wrathraven’s bodies, it added another stack of nervousness to Trey’s psyche. He’d never had the entities inside him before. It was all new territory, the type of thing that was natural to Swishy was horrifying to him.
“I’m a human, I’m a human, I’m a human…” he said to himself.
The entities flowed within his cage, exploring, nicking the bars, gripping and attacking and sobbing into them.
“My life as a dungeon, huh?”
It was just a joke, halfway hoping that he could lean on the passenger for a little support.
But the passenger was in worse condition than ever. It drew the wrathravens in, dominating them, but it cowered in their presence at the same time. They whimpered from all things wrathraven, all things cage.
It was doing its job, though—Finally!—and Trey had to finish it, to relieve them of their duties.
All the wrathravens were drawn into the cage, shrunken little birds, petulant crows with their squawking beaks between the bars.
Trey whipped up a storm of [Zzt]. Every corporeal atom, every part of his soul was converted to electrons. He overcharged his voltage. The bars were beyond their [Hot Bars] state. He concentrated on releasing his voltage. He had no fingers or appendages to beam them outward. But he was a master of his soul. A master of everything that he held inside.
He released the voltage all through the cage.
“[Bolt Chamber],” Trey said.
The door closed and a momentary darkness flooded the inside, the calm before the destruction.
And within the bars came the first instances of static, stray sparks that magnified into a sudden storm. The flock suffered from blast upon blast, an unending flood of bolts and light.
(…)
The wrathravens melted away, becoming smoke. Everything was cinematic and clean, which was a relief to Trey. He expected to hear screams, something like torture. He wasn’t the most enthused about functioning as a death chamber. But he was spared from that fate.
His inhumanity had only gone so far and Trey thanked God for that. Somewhere on that birdcage, he felt the jingle of a free-hanging fixture at the top. His soul traveled along the metal, exploring himself like probing fingers. He hadn’t gotten a good look at himself. Among the emblems and beads from the jewelry he was wearing before his cage morph, his cross friend was suspended among them, gleaming in Clayhearth gold.
Relief. There was finally some pleasure he could take in his birdcage form. The reassurance that what he’d taken with him was what he held most dear was beautiful.
And the soothing sensations continued as the smoke exited him like a cleansing, an exorcism.
He felt good. He felt accomplished. And unconsciously he’d started another morph. The B-I-R-D-C-A-G-E letters went lowercase and continued to shrink. One by one, the letters vanished, and so did the bars of his cage.
Trey’s release from birdcage form progressed quickly. After a few short and beautiful seconds, he’d become a blue cloud of soul. Shapeless and formless, his atoms had gathered in the same place, a starting point through which he’d return to a humanoid ghost.
FREEDOM blossomed in Trey’s head. His soul-deep tension and panic pushed out of him in waterfalls. Intoxication didn’t begin to describe the profound solace.
In his non-form, he felt a surge of emotion, the tearful jubilation of the passenger—passengers plural as he now detected.
Now that terror had been dispelled, the passengers expressed as individuals again. No words, though, because Trey wasn’t that in tune with them yet. But their joy became his smile. Their relief became a soul sweat dampening coolly upon his brow. Their sense of accomplishment became his unconscious fist pump once he’d reformed his first limb.
Arms, legs, shoulders.
Then a head.
Then eyes.
Even though Trey wasn’t watching himself, he somehow received a clear mental image of his creepy return and was displeased with the order of his body parts. But the unceasing celebration of the passengers overrode his reaction to the nightmare fuel.
The Clayborne drifted downward and landed two feet upon the Straw Guardian.
His feet were tiny. He was a five-year-old in the hopeful case—but a toddler at worst.
But he was human. He’d made it through his ordeal and was certain that there wasn’t enough combined wrathraven magic to turn him back into a cage. This was the hope anyway. He made the conscious choice toward celebration.
“Yes!” He cried out. “I’m back, baby!”
His voice was way too high, the squeakiness offending him. He was definitely a toddler.
Drifting was his preferred mode of soul mobility but standing on solid ground was reassuring to him. He missed his body. He knew that if the battle continued to go this way he’d be forced to return.
He gazed downward to see how Swishy was doing, trying his hand at spotting his special straw through the soulscape.
Other wrathravens were watching, other human-transformees. They flew above and whispered among themselves. While shaken, their cautiousness giving them away, they started to eye the childish form. Evil grins stretched across their mouths, child-eating grins no doubt.
The wrathravens rushed downward, almost teleporting from their eagerness.
“Fighting a kid got you all brave, huh?” Trey conjured jolts in his fingers. Nothing harmful, just a prank toy shock at best. “Aaah!”
A searing agony set upon Trey’s shoulder—from behind. That was his answer. Not only would they fight a kid—they’d fight like kidnappers, like stranger-danger horror beasts. His shoulder burned from the corrupted teeth. Then he was drawn upward, properly stolen.
Gold skies were everywhere—he’d cleared enough enemies to improve the weather. But the black enemies were still abundant. The swirling mass of shadows from the true wrathravens still hung far above, up toward where Bristles was. In the grand scheme of his and Swishy’s current escape plans, nothing much had changed.
As a wrathraven brought Trey into the air, a second one flew alongside them and opened its mouth, prepping to vicious bite.
Toddler Trey’s reactions remained on point.
[Zpread]—though through his de-atomizing process, the wrathraven eyes were laser-focused on the individual particles. They pinched their talons over the Trey bits. They’d achieved a bit of grip, too, but he shrank himself fast enough to slip away and flow down to the Straw Guardian again.
His mind was filled with the abyssal words from the attack. The wrathravens innately poisoned one’s psyche with their touch, after all. DOOM and GLOOM infected him. A burnt skin crept along his tiny hands, cracking, flaking, corroding the affected portions of his soul.
The casual harm of wrathraven exposure was no joke. The reawakening of the passenger affirmed this as well. Back to the second soul's fear, back to the second soul’s trembling and protests. But this time it was willing to fight. Birdcage time had toughened that mythic presence.
Because now Trey was more aware of it than ever. Rather than a presence that hid from his soul, he identified the core inside him. The passenger manifested as a spirit orb next to where his heart would be, a cardiac hanger-on living in the heart’s shadow.
Trey didn’t know what was going on, only that this hidden aspect of himself was opening like the birdcage door, opening like souls tend to do when trust and teamwork are confirmed.
Wrathravens rained down, unwilling to give the reintegrated child a chance to harm them again.
They were smacked out of the air by a giant hand—the Straw Guardian’s.
The birds kept trying to fly around the obstruction—but the second hand came as well.
The beast tried different tactics and formations to get around them. However, the colossus had sumo-like defenses against the pursuers. No matter what the flock attempted, they failed to reach the diminished Trey.
“Thank you, Swishy!” Trey called in squirrelly pitch.
But the scarecrow hadn’t responded, occupied by his piloting of his giant defender. He snatched another wrathraven out the sky and shook violently. With the guardian’s free arm, one of the vines curled like a finger and flicked another beast away, launching it into a distant tree.
Calmed by the straw assist, he resumed his inward focus.
Blue and sensitive, Toddler Trey closed his eyes and meditated on this hidden depth. Swishy’s glittery advice came to the forefront of his vision, even more than the dangers that broiled in the murkiness that his hands were submerged in.
USE THE BIRDS zoomed through his mind and dissolved into a glitter. The particles dispersed and opened into a door, a portal. There was so much beneath that mysterious door, a blueness that welled to the surface.
A secret pushed upward from the depths of Trey, something unwittingly held inside.
“Always something new…” Trey muttered, now attuning to the secrets of his as-of-yet unexplored core.