SWISHY TOOK OVER—guard duty belonged to him once he noticed Trey was running out of steam.
It was the way their tag team would go, one fighting while the other rested, and Trey had done more than enough during his shift.
After Trey had battled, he’d de-aged and entered deep meditation, vulnerable for the moment. So Swishy’s goal was now to protect Toddler Trey. Even the ethereal clothing was a little baggy, loose, infantilizing. Swishy silently cooed at him for fun before reprioritizing the severity of his goal.
Get it together. Trey needs help! (Even if he’s cute, hehe)…
Once the trance state produced something, anything, then Swishy would guide Trey back to his body for a real recovery.
It was a good plan—it just hinged on whatever changes occurred with Trey.
At least he’s not a birdcage anymore, though!
The scarecrow nodded his head over this small consolation.
Swishy stared from the perspective of the Straw Guardian, briefly merging his soul into it so he could survey everything like a lighthouse tower.
Bright, lustrous skies. Everything was so beautiful and still so hellish—but the beauty came first this time.
After Trey and his mysterious passenger took down a handful of wrathravens, the golden horizon became much more noticeable. There was hardly a shadow to be seen on their level of sky. Darkness was far below. Darkness also resided far above in rolling clouds. But there was a huge expanse of trees that were tinged with gold.
Swishy wondered how much he could attribute that to the snitchtalons he’d given his straw sprites to. He hoped that they’d run enough interference to allow them to get away. Pollination was hard work and he was happy to have outsourced—while him and Trey played security.
The woods had more wishwillow qualities about them, a subtle release of gold glitter from even the oldest, rotted-through parts of the bark.
And that luminosity was still up for grabs, of course, attracting the wrathravens from far and wide.
Wrathraven wings still fell from the sky. The feather rain was texturally soft but was an intense, aura-filled experience. Bristles was up there with the Nevermore, tearing their opposition apart. Danger laid ahead but they were making tremendous strides in undoing it.
As the Straw Guardian’s aura spread through the skies, as the wrathraven transformers were undone by battle, the atmospheric gold shined through, blanketing the horizon.
The scarecrow knew that the worst of their trials was to come—but Swishy was happy that they were winning for now. Threats came and were overcome. Nothing had suppressed him since the altar, since his dinner at Ruby’s.
His win-streak had to continue. To push things as far as one could was the Straw City way.
Something was changing in his best friend, a change that he'd long known was coming. Swishy had experienced his own bird-related blessings in the form of the Goldie and sensed that Trey’s passenger had a boon of its own. Swishy hadn’t identified the exact nature of what was coming—but he didn’t have to now that Trey was working on bringing it to the surface.
Everything in the soulscape was visible, it was opened its windows free. That’s what it meant to be a dweller of the shadowdeep: perfect openness. Truth had no place in the shadows because truth and deceit were one and the same. There was no splitting of the concepts. Everyone saw one for who they were.
No masks, no hiding. Avatars, however, were just an extension of the self. The truest self if Swishy were to revert to human world concepts.
The Straw Guardian was Swishy and Swishy was the guardian. And together they were god, so claimed the Straw-bound.
Straw Guardian lifted them to the next level. Intermittent dark clouds spanned around its perimeter, almost like clothing, a voluminous toga of curses. Stormy dew clung to Swishy and the guardian. But while the vastness of light took over the realm, there were still wrathravens as far as the eye could see, both real ones and initiates.
The rain of dismemberment continued, a gift from Bristles, but also a curse.
Disparate body parts absorbed the surrounding darkness. With Trey having defeated so many transformed humans, those gathered souls were ripe for the taking. Vulnerable and without a vessel, the errant wings and feathers of the true wrathravens vacuumed them in, rebuilding their torsos and limbs from the scraps of the defeated.
A grouping of six headless wrathravens was constructed.
In the distance, the beasts appeared like slim wyverns.
But then they came closer. Details filled in. Feathers proliferated outward in an amorphous mass, exploding into monstrous size. Then clusters of feathers folded inward, a clear craftsmanship from which the base wrathraven shape was formed.
An eclipse of wrathraven returned as patches of sky glittered along their body outlines. They loomed above the Straw Guardian, heaving out enraged breaths, pressurized frustration. They gathered close to the giant scarecrow’s head, the slashed reds of their eyes centralized on the dozed-off Toddler Trey.
The human initiates were first to attack and Swishy puppeteered the Straw Guardian’s hands, closing them over Trey’s soul.
At first, it was like piloting. Swishy had to consciously think left or right, up or down. Punch, grab, block, swat. Commands came into his head that manifested as spells between him and the giant scarecrow.
The directions were taken well too—of course, they were. Swishy never had trouble getting the Straw Guardian to do what he wanted him to do.
But the wrathravens increased in number, in maneuverability, in assault power. With the difficulty increased, Swishy needed to stay ahead of the game. The combat meta rapidly evolved and Swishy knew that offering a spell command such as [Swat] or [Grab] was inherently clunky. They required aiming and precision. [Block] and [Cover] were much easier—but did nothing to reduce the restrict the enemies.
He also found issue with having to activate a type of spell at all. There was an extra step. The human initiates were faster because they were in the wrathraven body, they were the wrathraven. The beasts weren’t commanding themselves. Sending messages to their nervous system was an instant, unthinking process. Without the thinking step, the conscious decision-making step, they were fast as wind, sudden black flares across the gold skies.
Swishy worked on getting that fast with the Straw Guardian, becoming its nerves, achieving oneness.
Don’t tell it anything, just trust it. It’s my spell so it’ll do what I need. I know it will.
The humans had a thing about acting with heads and hearts. They loved to say that one should use their head, to listen to their mind, but that’s not what the situation at hand needed. Going with heart was what felt right. That’s what always felt right. And that heart was his most coveted possession, after all. Everybody had a heart but few knew how to make it work for them.
Swishy was built differently, though. His entire being was geared toward making one’s heart work properly. His innate understanding of what the heart wanted began to manifest.
T-R-U-S-T blossomed as a thought, then letters, then a proper [Trust] spell.
When Swishy dived into the chest of the guardian, he carried that spell through his body. He then occupied the giant’s heart chamber. Inside, he saw Trey’s scarecrow-casted body resting. Swishy T-posed beside it and wheaty roots wriggled from the floor and coiled around his Timbs. Blue energy flowed through him as he became part of the guardian’s soul circulation. Through the shared magic, [Trust] traveled into the colossus, an enchanted directive, what Swishy believed the straw-bound’s prayer emblems functioned on.
Except the guardian didn’t have a small piece of Swishy in an emblem, it linked with the whole boy.
The boy deepened his soul link to the Straw Guardian. They were one, always one, and just like how he’d fed his consciousness into his Goldie, he then deadened his kid body of straw and reawakened through the giant’s eyes.
In his first act of going with heart and not with the head, he reached blindly into the fogginess above his head and gripped. The time it would’ve taken to turn a [Snatch] command into the action was eliminated.
The boy giant acted—and a wrathraven groaned and writhed in his grasp.
Release me!
“Nuh-uh,” said Swishy through a deep-sounding resonance of straw.
He covered the beast from head to toe. A wing or two poked from between his fingers but he readjusted his grip and smothered it completely. After a couple of seconds, shadowed vapors spilled from his grasp, the beast's body decaying while the cursed entities were released.
There was relief, sorrow, and tantrums. Wrathraven plumage was a diverse community full of entities who had varying opinions on being possessed, being kidnapped.
These were thoughts and philosophies that traveled through Swishy’s soul. But these feelings touched on him in soft glints, in poignant flashes, and then he continued with his Trey protection. His mind refused to linger on the countless ideologies that proliferated in the dark. There was so much to ruminate upon and yet he kept his focus on grabbing the beasts and wringing them out.
The trapped curses were freed several at a time. Swishy and the Straw Guardian’s bird-wringing was brainless and heartfelt work.
There were complaints about it, peevish outcries, but Swishy knew that he was doing right by Trey—and right by the stubborn spirits too.
The guardian’s straw was Swishy’s straw and so he moved the arms with ease. There was one weakness to the body-switching. While the Goldies lacked fortitude, the Straw Guardian had all of that and more—but there was so much guardian to control. He hadn’t become the full guardian. He occupied its vision but could only move its arms. But that worked for him. Arms were powerful and flexible. There were vines, tendrils, and gold-straw, so much gold-straw.
They were malleable, moveable, and the ideal vessel for Swishy’s [Trust] spell, his boundless creativity.
Swishy used the arms to grabbed every wrathraven he could, squeezing them, exorcising them with his pleasing light, before the flock could discover that the rest of him was now vulnerable as could be, practically empty, a scarecrow in the most honest and literal form.
Ignore the fighting parts! Kill what’s weak! The human initiates were shameless—shameless and smart. And so they flew along the length of the arms, traveling toward the hard-to-reach back.
Swishy countered them with a swift offense. He moved the giant without thinking. The [Swat] spell simply activated—the many-branched arm weaving its wheat into an immense, ill-proportioned hand.
The impacted wrathravens were sent tumbling into the trees.
The precise [Swat] motions continued—Swishy would make sure none of them got behind him.
Past a certain point, the movements were so effortless that it seemed the Straw Guardian was moving without Swish’s direct influence. Not only were commands were cut out of the giant’s diet, but Swishy’s consciousness seemed to do much less.
The guardian moved by itself.
Swishy wondered if he had just gotten in the zone, or if the repetitive movements were just easy. The practice may have made him more perfect at executing the functions of lasso-ing and constricting his enemies. But he knew how it felt like to get good at something. Curiosity was what moved him most. And learning was his most prominent talent. He knew that there was a difference between mastering motions due to practice and whatever this was that happened to him.
Beneath every movement the guardian made, there was an aura of [Trust] that lifted off the tips of the fingers and branches. The deeper [Trust] worked into the limbs, the closer to oneness Swishy and Straw Guardian came.
Swishy pulled his consciousness from the Straw Guardian, and a sliver of it returned to his original body, enough to stir awake with tiny beads of blue soul in his gourd.
A second more passed with Swishy returning yet another piece of himself to his first body. He could move around again. Carefully, he eased his Timbs out of the floor’s ensnarement of roots. He was almost afraid that tearing himself from the giant would shock it into non-functionality, an odd fear since he already removed his consciousness, but he abided by his childishness.
“Just in case…” Swishy breathed out. “Just sneak out. Do it slow, do it slow…”
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And the guardian kept deflecting the birds with its martial arts choreography. The same speed, execution, and overall finesse. So Swishy pulled another piece of his soul back home.
Yet the guardian remained faithful to Swishy’s deepest wants. Maybe they weren’t one—this was the notion that tickled Swishy’s mind. Every time he heard the blunt sound of a slapped wrathraven, it reminded him not of fusion but of friendship.
“Thank you, friend,” Swishy experimentally said, just wondering if it’d talk in a way.
It didn’t.
The giant kept fighting, though, the [Trust] letters seeming stronger. Swishy thought the word border was a deeper blue but he wasn’t sure.
Regardless, the full body takeover was fast training for the golem. Swishy wondered if he’d have to re-link to manually teach it other tricks—and maybe make it do things with the rest of the body—but that was a later conversation between him and his masterpiece.
By now Swishy had retracted most of his soul. He paced around the heart chamber, listening to the chaos outside, and watching body outlines through the soulscape. The groans, the chants, the rustling sounds—everything was status quo. He confirmed that, yes, the giant still choked the life out of their enemies.
The boy walked up to Trey’s sleeping body. He pressed the side of his gourd to Trey’s chest. The scarecrow didn’t have a traditional auditory system but human gestures always helped his soul understand. He listened with a phantom ear for his best friend’s heartbeat. The rhythm was there, a soft thumping, a predictable and energetic pulse.
“Okay good,” Swishy said to himself before melding into the straw guardian. He used a [Pile] and then moved his straw through the giant, traveling along the outside of the chest, the collarbone, the neck. He aimed for the top of the head, a soul-rich zone of entities, of his fighting limbs, and Trey.
His attention turned to the meditation of blue Trey’s soul. The toddler soul was laid flat on its back, sprawled and snoring. Trey-less Trey didn’t even float anymore. It didn’t look anything like magic or effort in general, but the soulscape revealed that drastic changes had occurred. The meditation had progressed. And right before Swishy’s eyes, Trey’s torso gurgled, then whorled, the soul becoming like running water. Trey’s body became a swirling mass of energy, his heart caught in the frenzy of the passenger inside.
Swishy was curious.
The boy wanted to know.
While Swishy had this moment, Straw Guardian blocked bird after bird. The arms sustained a variety of attacks and indignities. Wing blades, black blasts, and simple eating mostly. But the giant reformed time and time again.
The swirling in Trey’s body called to Swishy. Intrusive thoughts were often the funnest ones, and Swishy’s current ones were no different. Reach, reach, reach, go ahead, just the blue doesn’t bite. He’d discovered the oddness in his friend right before Ruby’s first attack and now that same force called to him. Or so he deluded himself.
When the playful urges came upon Swishy, he never knew if it was a head thing or a heart thing. With him, both mind and heart shared similar tastes.
The boy did a mental coin flip: it came up heart.
“Knowing starts in the heart,” he said, shrugging. He didn’t know if he was right or wrong. It didn’t sound particularly right to him either. But having a rationale for Trey exploration was something that set him at ease.
The bird in Swishy wanted to investigate.
And the wise part of him now had a reason to do so.
He reached for Trey’s chest—and Swishy’s consciousness was drawn inside.
(…)
Even though it was Trey’s soul, Swishy knew that they’d go on that journey together.
Once Swishy had gotten drawn into Trey’s spirit, his excitement increased. Throughout the scarecrow’s entire time in Straw City, the Clayborne had been there for him and now the boy could return the favor. Swishy knew that whatever was to come was important to Trey. And that galvanized him more than he knew it would.
Support had always been the primary motive of his heart, to give himself, to provide help in any way he could. Souls were lacking, this he knew from the dark, and Swishy’s instincts made him keen on serving people in the ways that they most needed.
Knowing what folks needed always drifted to the forefront of his mind, but because Trey was Trey, his most important person, Swishy had become painfully conscious of it.
Moments sloshed upon him like great gobs of rain. Each thick drop was cold and refreshing. He knew something good was coming—at least that’s what he hoped for. His feelings were normally right about these things, the matters of the soul. Darkness begat darkness but this adventure started with blue soul textures. Everything was viscerally human in the best possible ways, the ones that were caring and nurturing and empathetic—three words that represented folly when it came to the Straw City way of being. But CARE, NURTURE, and EMPATHY were integral to the scarecrow.
And then the show began.
Swishy flew through the skies, arms hugging the wind. The scarecrow pose gave him energy. It gave him flight.
“Huh?” Swishy gazed at his supposed arms—they were wings. Before his eyes, there was a hard blackness. No matter how much he blinked or turned his head it was always in some corner of his vision. A beak.
Within Trey’s soul, the boy had gone bird. His joy was overwhelming. His flight pose was magnificent. Swishy’s wings cut through the wind like pancake butter. Air melted before his magnificent glide.
Whoosh! Swishy thought. “Whoosh!” He also gleefully said—though not in Swish-speak, just in a pleased tone of CACAW.
Down below, there was activity.
Swishy descended.
Winds folded through his feathers, soothing him with textural delight. As his altitude decreased, everything became…Warm? No—hot. This had to be what Trey called hot. Sweat dampened his feathers. Feathers! The boy’s birdness tickled him, even if this were just an interactive memory. Swishy was discombobulated by these sensations. He could feel so much more on his vessel than he ever could before. The magic and soul senses were vacant. But his awareness of his body took an extreme priority over his consciousness.
Swishy wanted to fly a little longer—it’d been so long since he had a chance to fly under his power. But that butter-soft gliding ended. There was sudden resistance. He was glued in his flight pose without the ability to flap. He was airborne, yes, but he had no control over his body. He couldn’t even tremble.
He was a rigid bird, a joint-locked one.
Pulling. Tugging. Twisting. It was as if an invisible hand grabbed hold of his puppet strings and spun him in endless, careless rotations.
An extraordinary amount of sounds that now hurt his ears? He was surprised to have ears. Hearing was one thing—that wasn’t any different. But feeling what he heard, the loud and shrill whistles of the raging gale piercing his ears, was novel. And horrible. He cringed; he gritted his beak; he cried in pain. Swishy missed his hands. He couldn’t cover his ears with his wings since he needed them to fly. The sonic torture wasn’t anything he signed up for.
The adjustment was slow but it happened. The pain became dull, something he could somewhat ignore as he battled with the wind.
Swishy spun and spun and spun and spun. He spun endlessly, a hurricane, a tornado, a wind of the passing through the trees. He crashed into a banana bunch, smashing those nutritious yellows into a browned pulp. His air pressure crushed the blueberries and blackberries that attempted to hide within their bushes. The strawberries were victims as well, the psyche of his air lopping the tops straight off of them. Trey was a sugar wraith, a food killer, a hostile entity. He heard the flock beside him—also wind—straining to control the course of their natural fury.
The villagers were below, many he didn’t recognize, but some that he did. Their familiar souls ebbed within their bodies. They stared upward with clasped hands, praying. The pious threads of their spirits didn’t flow toward Swishy this time—but to a young girl, thin and determined. Her eyes were black gems that read both the words and spirit of the flashcards.
The SACRIFICE intent of Ruby’s first wish.
He was back in The Stormcellar with a fresh perspective of the past, an observer into child’s Ruby’s foray into darkness and power.
The sacrifice card dissolved into the air, breathed in by the circling flock.
Swishy held his breath. Respiration wasn’t something that he normally did but he was hyper-aware of the bodily function in this new bird body of his.
There was one other bird that behaved strangely, too, holding a wing over its beak. It even closed its eyes. It did everything it could to avoid the spell.
Swishy was distracted by something that surely wasn’t a part of the old memory. He was certain that there was one extra bird here. Not that he knew this in the mathematical sense but there was a different type of flier, a new type of soul.
The bird even had a curly forelock of hair.
“Trey?” Swishy asked.
The bird responded with a neck snap—before averting its eyes.
“Trey, Trey?”
But the bird just focused on blending into the flock. It had to be Trey. The body language—even through a bird—was definitely Trey’s, whose eyes darted from side to side. He glared at all the spell cards, hyper-aware of their existence, angling his flight away from their path. When the spell dust integrated into the air, the Trey suspect flew away from whole pockets of sky, sparkling clouds left behind.
“Trey, please, it’s me! I like that you’re being smart but don’t be too smart.”
“No, you be smart. Just chill, chill. I don’t know what’s going on either. Let’s just see what happens.”
Trey had said what he said, implying that Swishy was indeed Swishy, but equally convinced that Swishy was a psychological trick, a mirage. Bird Trey trembled in paranoia, his body visibly as stiff as Swishy’s.
The scarecrow just kept flying in the air, following his friend’s lead. Swishy was here as a participant. He’d just have to get to the bottom of what exactly he was participating in.
The flock was near the surface now, gliding through the woods. Swishy found himself in their snitchtalons’ circling formation, doing laps around The Stormcellar’s altar. There were villagers all around, gawking at Ruby’s cards. And there was ebbing darkness, too, straight from the altar.
Spirit-filled winds of the sugar wraiths flowed toward the altar, disappearing in Zhoop! sounds, and snitchtalons came out.
The rebirths were rapid and jubilant from the exiting snitchtalons—though Swishy welled with rage. One of those birds had to be him. He was even more angered that he couldn’t tell which one he was, which vessel he was supposed to miss. If he were a scarecrow in this vision, blackwheat would’ve burnt through him in a single wave.
“Thank you,” he said to himself, to the organic bird vessel he inhabited as a guest.
Maybe he was already in his original bird body but he’d have no way of knowing.
And then his autonomy was suddenly returned to him. Fly now! It dared him. But he was tired and muscle strained. Flight now was a burden he couldn’t bare—and so the boy crashed into a tree.
Pain. An unforgiving world. Panting, gasping, sweating. His body constricted all over in cramps. His body. His body. He had a body and instead of the euphoric winds, he received a novel brand of hurt.
Swishy got up and brushed himself off with his wings.
He jumped and flapped—failed. But then he jumped again, flapped more, and flew. He flew and flew, wobbling awkwardly, but he regained his grace. The joy was killed. He was steady, though, and in this lousy moment that was enough.
The glittering of a card seeped into his body. OBEDIENCE pulsed through him, triggering a second set of thoughts and impulses, ones he was convinced weren’t his. He had some semblance of control over his flight but the path he took was strictly guided. It was as if he glided through an invisible funnel that sent him toward the nearest fruit tree.
The bird boy rushed straight into an unmarred banana. The other bananas in the bunch were bruised from harsh winds but one remained perfect, almost golden. He opened his beak, an uncomfortable and unfamiliar motion.
I can do it, I can do it. I have to. Please, please, let me have this. Let me feed others. Let me feed myself. I pray, I pray, I have always prayed for this moment.
Bananas were fragile. The one banana was his greatest test. Grab the banana—he wanted nothing more in his whole life. He couldn’t imagine a greater desire, a greater pressure. The world was on his shoulders. The world weighed upon his fragile wings.
The banana was close. Closer. The banana was here.
He opened the beak, turned his head to the side, and closed his beak.
Softly, quickly, firmly—but not too firm. Please don’t break it, please, please, please!
Swishy couldn’t close his mouth. The banana was in there, prying his beak open. Down below, the other humans held their mouths open, tears streaming down their faces. They raised their hands in the air. Their fingers were grasping like babies, reaching for him, for the treasure of food he carried.
As Swishy looked around, the other birds had grabbed food of their own. The juices of captured berries dribbled over the faces of the newly transformed flock. They were eating, reveling in the sensation of taste, of sweetness, of actual sustenance. Swishy flew low to the ground and dropped the banana to child Ruby’s feet. She held up the CELEBRATE and SACRIFICE and OBEDIENCE and SUSTENANCE cards. She tossed the deck in the air and the cards burst into their respective spells, filling the air with potent magic.
Something that Swishy hadn’t seen when he first read Ruby’s memories: the magic potential of the human villagers. While the flashcards and snitchtalons stole the show, the villagers’ own words of power were tamped down into the undercurrent. ASPIRATION, DREAMS, ASCENSION.
The energy was festive all around, but Swishy also noticed the seeds of a dark force in the villagers. JEALOUSY lurked behind some of their ears. It draped over their shoulders like towels. It wrapped snuggly around their hands as black gloves. Even their fingernails were darkened by the word’s aura. The affected villagers watched the snitchtalons—and even the shadowclaws who were merely controlled by Ruby’s spells—and wanted to be them. Everyone wished for a hand in saving their town. They wanted to fly. They wanted to be one of the givers. They wanted to be seen as airborne saviors with fruit-filled mouths.
The villagers were civil in the beginning—but never honorable.
Meanwhile Swishy’s spell-driven self flew as in time with the other birds, picking the brightest fruits. They dropped them in a pile at Ruby’s feet. When he got close to her, he was afraid to look into her eyes. But he felt her pool-like pupils studying his body. He dropped the fruit and rushed away without glancing back. The boy glided until he was certain that he was cleansed of her gaze. And then he went back for more food, OBEDIENCE reinforcing his fixation on the trees.
Soon, the human villagers also joined in the picking. Now that the winds were tamed and transformed into birds, people were able to climb the trees without the risk of wind-blown death. Everyone harvested. Everyone ate.
The people screamed with the full force of their malnourished lungs. “Everybody eats! Thank God we can eat! Thank Ruby! Thank the altar! Thank the spirit of sacrifice. Yes! Yes! Yes!”
Desperation turned to triumph. Swishy, the snitchtalon he’d inhabited at least, had never forgotten the feeling.
He turned to bird Trey who had a banana in his mouth, gradually bruising from the harsh grip. Swishy was hurt by the soiled food, and he resented that the spell inflicted that feeling upon him.
The next moment, the ship. They’d set sail, traveling with hope and abundance toward another land. The locals would remain but now that they’d tasted the power of the altar, the sweet fruits that were always denied to them, they’d seek more. Sugar wraiths no longer, they were determined to found a civilization. Their stomachs, once empty, now were filled with food and ambition.
“More,” child Ruby said as they set sail.
“More,” the snitchtalons cawed.
“More,” Trey bird brightly said, though his expression was wary. Swishy suspected that even in these memories, ones belonging to Trey’s passenger no doubt, Trey had dodged all of Ruby’s cards. His attitude gave Swishy this hope.
A dangerous hope as it turned out—because the other snitches glared at Trey, who was startled. This was first time Swishy had seen memories react against observers, but it also made sense to him. The mind was an enemy to all. An enemy to those who’d traded too much to the altar. And an enemy to Swishy whose body was prone to blackwheat creation.
Trey now learned the hard way. “More!” Trey raised his beak with conviction and loyalty.
“More!” The snitchtalons repeated together.
“Yes,” Ruby said. “You’ll never hunger again.” Then her hand traveled to her belly, her finger rubbing along her ribs.
Swishy just trailed afterward, seeing where this led.
Travel time came in a blur, and when visual focus returned, they were in what would become Straw City. The whole ship, Ruby and snitchtalons and an orb-like wind, stood before the scarecrow altar.
Bird Swishy stared at the wind orb, at wind-Swishy. Tragic shocks ran jaggedly through his heart. He didn’t want to see this but couldn’t avert his gaze. Child Ruby would notice. Swishy failed to convince himself that she was just a figment.
Ruby smirked. The snitchtalons smirked. And the soul-filled winds had no expression, only the control of the OBEDIENCE card used on them—along with LOYALTY, DEVOTION, COMMITMENT, WORSHIP, IDOLATRY.
“Altar,” Ruby said. “I have a gift. I have winds. I have souls. What can I get with this?”
The souls flowed in—Swishy-wind included—and the wheat seeds were sprayed out.
All the birds flapped jubilantly—but there was one with an attitude about it. Trey bird gazed at Swishy. “Sorry,” he mouthed. “I promise we’ll fix this…”
TRUST formed between them, drawn out in brilliance.
And then the memories concluded. A blue wave broke across the skies and the ground, ending the vision.
Real life returned. Gold skies and damned wrathravens.
More [Trust] as well—because Straw Guardian was swat-swat-swatting the opposition away.