SWISHY FLEW; SWISHY SOARED; SWISHY TOOK HIS RIGHTFUL PLACE IN THE SKY.
At this moment, nothing else mattered.
The world simply fell away from him as his chief dream set into his spine. Swishy’s complete set of wings was affixed to his back, rooting into his soul. There was something about the balance of two wings that set his spirit straight. His innate tremors ceased. His discomfort now settled like the flattening foam of a crashed wave.
There was still that feeling in his chest. The empty yet heavy one. The phantom pain of a heart in doubt, a heart possibly cut from his core that no longer held residence in him. His throbbing abyss was the kind of thing never easily leaves—but it smoothed over his soul into a uniform gloss, existing, but leaving him be.
He was one with the pain—and one with everything else about him too. It was his first time experiencing this dimension of harmony, the parts where he accepted his complications and let them flow through him.
A black wing, a gold wing, just like the Straw Guardian, a yin yang of flight.
“We are all things,” Swishy breathed to himself, an echo of Trey’s teachings.
Peace, righteousness, the indisputable fact of healing. Who knew that wings could do so much? Swishy was mystified by how the snitchtalons had been so envious and the wrathravens so callous.
Nature must be really mean to make you hate a life where you can fly.
First, the basics: there were two wings like what most birds would have, one of shadowed plumage and the other of gold-straw. Swishy was just a bird, a little bird, the cutest bird you’d ever find in a scarecrow body. The blackened Wingy provided the lift, the raw propulsion, a la the [Wing Jump]. And his gold-straw wing resembled the hummingbird structure of his Swish-minis, an elaborate rudder, a feathered control unit.
Swishy fluttered his wings as fast as he could, releasing a cast-off of black and gold feathers. Beautiful and pure, that’s what these wings were. He sighed, sinking into a sea of euphoria, a swift current taking him to heaven. Each movement carried his weight as if he were a fairy, an angel. Every twitch, every spasm moved Swishy in minute yet detectable ways. His sensitivity to wind was now unmatched.
The scarecrow spread his arms outward in his T-pose and glided along in circles. He did it slowly at first, in disbelief that such a blessing was real. Then after a few rotations he sped up, cutting through the wind. His movements occurred with ease. There was no practice needed. He truly had been a bird all along.
Then Swishy focused on flexing his newfound ability for all to see. He didn’t know what he’d do but he wanted to put on a show—both for others and himself.
He, who was a play expert, carried the image of the next most playful person he knew: Myst.
The scarecrow closed his eyes, remembering with clarity the moments when Myst soared through the skies after Swishy had paid her his second heart. He imagined what it was like from her perspective and not as a far-off spectator.
There were twists, there were loops, there were ribbony patterns, and there were sudden paths that the wind told him to take. To go with feeling, to go with heart was what Swishy was all about. In life and flight, he’d remain true to himself, a lesson reinforced by the wings.
Him getting wings, Myst getting a heart—these were the same, stabilizing and wondrous.
The curses inside were taking well to his indulgent moments. Rather than clamoring for chaos, they were quite content with the steadiness of flight. Swishy’s mind and heart were in equilibrium, in a balanced state of health. He’d never felt this good before. There were plenty of fun times. But the moments of raw feel-good, of true health were something that he couldn’t quite track.
He jack-knifed downward—then soared up, powering his ascension through not a [Wing Jump] but a [Wing Boost] as he was already in the air.
The wing curses were calm. Perhaps flight was something they were missing, an innate part of themselves. Even the nodes of blackwheat in him started to recede. Swishy felt his layers changing, becoming less leaden.
“I did it, I did it, I did it!” Swishy screamed in time with every turn, every somersault, every maneuver that he’d fantasized about constantly and now put into practice.
The boy didn’t open his eyes yet—he simply basked in the realm’s fanfare as he showed off.
“Go boy go!” Trey said.
“My liege!” Bristles said.
“Flap. Flap.” Straw Guardian said with the lilting, booming Swish-speak of a giant.
Swishy did a barrel roll for his fans.
“Okay!” Trey yelled from the guardian’s shoulder. “Ready to open your eyes now? There’s…stuff.”
“No!” Swishy playfully said but he knew he’d have to emerge from his dream.
“I’ll give you a moment.”
“Kidding, let me see!”
Swishy flapped a few more times, tasting those soulful moments—then opened his eyes. There was the guardian, there was Trey atop said guardian, and there was Bristles floating far-off, shadow-boxing, flickering darkness with each punch.
And there was ruin. So much ruin. Sky cemetery was falling. The body parts, now released by the weakened chasm, fell to the forces of standard Cearthen gravity. As those orbiting platforms crashed downward, the wrathravens drifted aimlessly among the wreckage, melting.
Curses expelled from every beast body, every cluster of dark cloud, fleeing in runny streaks.
“Oh,” Swishy said, slowing his flight to a paralytic hover.
“Oh is a suitable description for it, yeah,” Trey confirmed.
“Oh my.”
“Yup, little homie, oh my works too.”
(…)
While everything good happened to Swishy, everything tragic had befallen the wrathravens.
The realm’s collapse was plain to see.
The dissolution of the wrathravens’ nest sounded like a shattering of glass. The air trembled. The rumbling of a Cearthquake spread through the skies, and Swishy knew that this was as good evidence as any that this miniature world was breaking down.
Shrunken wrathravens shivered all around. They perched on the platforms, the bodies of their brethren, and stared around at the sky. Everything was collapsing. The beasts were unsure of what would become of them, especially now that the curses that’d made them so strong and magic-filled were now free.
The systems that kept the nest together were multiple: the DOMINION spell that created the boundaries of the wrathraven nest, the HUSH spell on the ground that set the hierarchy in place, and the [Chasm] around which the beasts ritualized and sent offerings. The chasm was a gravity of collected desires, a curse-pumping engine, the wrathravens’ form of a heart.
And the curses, as the battery for it all, were stitched into place. The shadowcraft of wrathravens was no different than Swishy’s straw artisanship.
But the flock’s materials were, of course, alive.
Now, though, the entities of the chasm split away like screaming banshees, shaken by their sudden and disruptive autonomy.
The curses expressed all around them. There were jubilant shouts of freedom. There was fear that they had no body to return to, a secure one that is. And there was just a raw emotional outpouring, senseless, bodiless cries. Many of these souls were possessed for so long that the shock of being cleaved apart, of being an individual once again, set forth a new type of anguish.
The wrathravens, the curses, the chasm—all three were in startling states of lack.
Everybody with a brain, or a sense for what’s what, knew that. Now Swishy encountered the magnitude of what the spiritual splitting of the wrathravens meant. Now that there was no place for the feelings of the community to gather, they were lost. Losing oneself was a violence that the wrathravens had never experienced, one that Swishy found himself well versed in.
Swishy wanted to make a break for the exit. The pragmatism he’d learned told him that he’d already won the right to leave. Yet even throughout his moment of first flight, he was mindful to keep rising in steady increments. This life wasn’t so straightforward that he could proceed without caution.
Now there were changes in the realm that bugged him. Each unit upward he drifted gave him an additional unit of worry. Life weighed him down. He was feeling far too responsible for his own good.
There was support, though.
The guardian came after him, shouldering Trey, softly flapping its wings.
Bristles came, too, easily defeating the drained wrathravens. Now he glared at the depressed flock, plotting against them. Kill them, eat them, slave them—his gaze glimmered between the three options, the Nevermore claw going an inny-mini-minny-mo with a sharpened talon.
His attention was turned to the clear sight of the portal right above him. Swishy’s path to the world was unimpeded.
But a glance all around revealed a domain that needed him greatly. The quaking grew louder by the second, the shadows trembling like black static.
The boy was supposed to be a god. He didn’t know much but knew enough to know his role was to deliver care. How? That was up to him. But he was more than familiar with how a god made people feel.
And this wasn’t it.
The black rain, the dark sky cataclysm—he felt sudden responsibility for this world.
With the chasm undone, who would hold the flock up? Swishy’s body heaved from the spiritual weight. He saw the wrathravens for their true selves now, poor, poor victims of Ruby. Yet another species of stolen bird.
The wrathravens were lost, lost, lost.
Frozen in fear, their talons gripped their falling platforms. They’d forgotten that they could even fly in the first place. While their wings were smaller than they’d ever been, they were still larger than Znitchy. And they were certainly larger than Swishy’s Goldie crew. Flight was more than possible. They just needed to choose it.
“Fly!” The boy screamed down, soaring after them amid the horrendous curse rain.
But the wrathravens plunged onward, determined to bury themselves in this dead realm. As their nests fell, they went down with them, anchored by uncertainty. Swishy related to that far too much.
And the dejected moods of the wrathravens were palpable. Their wings leaked of somber molasses, of tarred sadness. The will to fight was gone from their eyes. Their glowing, gem-like optics were dulled into a rusty shade, a parlor of dried blood.
As the SADNESS and SORROW and SOLEMNITY and LACK bled over their feathers, their bodies atrophying. Their once-lush plumage had dried up, and their full musculature started to shrivel. Much of the flock resembled torn drapery. Rather than a murder of crows, they were a haunting of wraiths.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The lost kept losing, so it goes.
Each wrathraven was hunched like little goblins, ashamed of their raggedy, hole-punched wings. They fell and fell, either riding sky cemetery platforms, or allowing falling debris to coldly carry them to the depths.
The wrathravens were an asteroid rain, a pathetic smattering of coal and remnant evil.
Even the chasm followed behind the wrathraven’s plunge. There was so little of it left that it just slunk downward into a hell of its own making. Unlike the dark energies of Ruby’s collected [Midnight] or the E-squad’s [Chasm], the wrathravens’ black hole was a sad and pathetic thing that no longer wanted to be seen. The darkness sought more darkness, more obscurity.
Swishy wanted to hug it, to hold it like a bouncy ball.
The chasm was that small by now, a lonely little hand warmer.
So down, down, down that little ball went, a dark orb of energy spilling itself over the land. It wasn’t a pollution or anything of the sort. Darkness was something that belonged to Cearth, and as the orb flew about, the contained curses found shadows and crevices to go.
“Are you guys okay?” Swishy asked. He knew that they weren’t but it was important to ask. When you cared, you had to show it.
I hate you. Go die. The chasm said, growing two small wings. Then it flapped and held the wings in a rigid, pointed position, accelerating.
It dusted Swishy, and it dusted the other wrathravens, too, who’d continued to fall like stone gargoyles. An intent of EMPTINESS set into the flock’s skin, holding them rigidly.
Swishy flew down faster, too. “That wasn’t nice, you know. Die is a little much.”
The chasm made a tongue-clicking sound.
“Whatever, then. Be that way.”
(…)
Empty souls descended, seeking wholeness in each other.
That’s the way the world worked, wasn’t it? Swishy didn’t know. Past a certain point, he wondered if these weren’t lessons at all but impressions, passing thoughts because the world was a stimulation machine. New experiences—new confusions—were at every corner.
But this one was something he was sure he’d known from that start: that voids collected, they communicated, they massaged each other, and sometimes—to varying outcomes—they merged.
The chasm, though, what little of it was left, continued to split apart.
BRAVERY and UNITY poured from the chasm. There was so much overt negativity in its contents that it was shocking to see these words burst from the black hole. They’d wanted to win more than anything, to escape the desperation of being threatened. But now that they’d lost, they were unsure of how to survive.
These words caught the wrathravens’ attention—a few of them at least. They abandoned their falling perches and canvassed after these words. Predators—or perhaps scavengers—to the end, they’d sifted through the released darkness, aiming for the best parts to reconstruct themselves with.
“Do they actually want…something good?” Swishy watched in awe.
But others still swallowed nodes of COURAGE in with heaping helpings of ABYSS and DOOM and WICKEDNESS.
One step forward and three steps back into hell.
“Never mind,” Swishy eyerolled.
Perhaps they hadn’t learned much, after all. They were who they were. And what they were mostly defined by now, sadly, was fear.
And rightfully so.
EVISCERATION began to appear.
Is it over now? The wrathravens said, content with their defeatist energy. This life?
And though Swishy had done this to them—and had no choice in the matter—he mourned for the way they now felt. Being lost…it was an awful thing.
“I’m sorry, guys!”
You’re not! The chasm said.
“I am!”
Leave us be!
The chasm sped faster.
The wrathravens anvil’d harder.
The flock had even released a solidifying aura from their bodies, a second skin at first glance, but when the spires arched and thickened it was clear that they’d given themselves birdcages. Their rods of hurt imprisoned them. Within those bars, some even cried, their red eyes muddying into soft puddles.
The reds disappeared beneath eyelids that Swishy didn’t even knew existed. The wrathravens had accepted their fates.
Swishy, as a winged god, refused to accept that this was the best he could do for his fellow bird.
There was a place for everyone, Swishy knew this to be true—snitchtalons, wrathravens, anybody. Those born, needed a place, needed security.
Everyone here was just unsure of their home, doubtful of their lines in the script. The chasm was born from the wrathraven’s directionless emotion. And great as its power was, it was one more being born into this world without autonomy, without a true compass.
What one needs, what one wants, what one should do—without these there was chaos.
There was the moment of now, of purposelessness, of ennui on overload.
“Help!” Swishy called, not out of desperation, but because he knew that he actually had it. Leaning to his team warmed him.
Straw Guardian soared after Swishy, having gotten there in a flash with its towering wings. It tore through the skies, creating a vacuum. Debris spiraled all around, never touching it.
The giant reached down at all the forming birdcages and scooped them into its vines.
Each birdcage that was caught was set within a nest hollow vacated by a former znitch or clipped to its shoulder cape or even fastened to its woven belt loop. A couple of the birdcages had their bars twisted around the guardian’s fingers, serving as a dark and beautiful stone to the giant scarecrow’s ring.
The chasm remains were caught as well, wrapped and squeezed, its wings bound.
Yes, the chasm and the wrathravens echoed over each other, End us! Make us nothing like we always were.
The Guardian lifted the cages to its face and shook its head, its X-stitched mouth curving into a frown.
Swishy flew around the colossus, staring at all the caged creatures, smooshed within their too-small confines. Their wings crumpled from the lack of space.
“Just flap!” Swishy called after them. “I know it’s hard to start over, to start fresh, but you can fly. Start there and figure it out.” A funny bit of advice for Swishy to give, who’d done the reverse.
The boy, in his curiosity, momentarily soared into hell.
He wanted to know what the curse-laden surface now looked like. As soon as he dipped below the altitude of the sky cemetery, he was bleached in darkness. Everything was heavy and toxic. The gravity tripled. But his wings were strong and his straw was self-repairing. He could handle the pressure, at least for a bit.
He looked around, watched the sky fall, and watched the dejected wrathravens somberly drift as Straw Guardian chased after them.
What to do? What to do…
His go-to: he glowed.
(…)
Swishy, a so-called god of straw, became a beacon.
It was the right thing to do during his first real flight. He wanted to inspire, to create a memory.
Inside, he didn’t know how much gold-straw he carried but it was there. He knew it was there. The wings were the best thing to ever happen to him and he wanted the creatures to see those magic feelings.
His default strands receded downward, shuffling to the inner layers, while the gold-straw he held within now pushed upward. It was like changing clothes. The boy was pleasantly surprised by how much of his body the gold-straw covered. He didn’t have a mirror to indicate the scale of his light. But the straw warmed against his soul. The comfort was astoundingly accurate, feeling like the [Ache] spell. Gold covered his shoulders, his forearms, his hands. It created a scarf around his neck. His legs were the blackest-black, the blackwheat shuffling down into pants formation, but there were gold-straw garters around the ankles, the waist. The hay-bale boy was as fashion-forward as ever.
And so, so bright.
The dejected wrathravens, submitting themselves to hell, caught a glimpse of the scarecrow.
Their talons gripped their birdcage bars, tightening, perhaps even trying to crush the confines they’d created for themselves.
Swishy waited for the bloody hue of their eyes to return. But it wasn’t happening that he could see.
“I think you guys are being too hard on yourselves. It’s a beautiful world, you know. And you guys have your run of it. You just don’t have your run of it here because of Ruby. Just leave. Return to the wild, far, far, far away. I’ll handle Ruby so you’ll never have to worry about her capturing you again. It’s sad that you have to be suspicious, that you can’t trust the powerful and the smart. But start with me. I’m powerful but there’s no schemes in me. Look, read my shadows. People call me a god but I’m a good little guy. I’ve known plenty of bad. I’ve known lost. It’s horrible…being loss. But good is my goal. Good is in the gold.”
Swishy flapped around, T-posing, stoking his golds as much as he could.
Red eyes followed his path, engaged, curious, but minimally moved.
The boy stared up at Trey who was watching from atop the guardian. Swishy tilted his head, signaling confusion, that he needed an aid.
Trey pinched his skin on the back of his hand.
The scarecrow did the same, felt the straw shift beneath his finger.
Oh…
The boy reached into a slit in his forearm, a pocket of sorts, and pulled out clumps of his straw. He flew around and tossed it toward the wrathravens. They flinched from his throws, from his luminous presence, but he moved on quickly so as not to scare them. He didn’t want them to think it was a trap.
But it was, kind of.
Bribery is okay sometimes I think…
Once Swishy flew far enough away, the wrathravens began to nibble. The snack wasn’t anything they hadn’t tasted before. Swishy just got the feeling that nobody had ever fed them, and being fed, even if you didn’t need food, was one of the best things you could do for anybody, anywhere.
He remembered his first Glizzy with Trey.
He remembered his first supper with Ruby, which was good—while it lasted.
He remembered Sling and her sweet-treat bandages.
The scarecrow knew that sometimes it wasn’t good to be picky about who you served. When it came to serving, one gave more than one received. Sometimes boundaries were ignored. Favorites weren’t allowed to be picked.
These skies of devastation constituted one of those times.
“If you guys want, there’s room in the Straw Guardian. The blue birds left their nests. They aren’t here anymore. There’s vacancies…bird-sized vacancies. Think of it like a migration.”
More bribes! Or are they blessings? I’ll have to ask Trey about this later.
The wrathravens levitated now, engaged in all sorts of aerial fidgeting. They bounced against the edges of their cages. Some flew back and forth between the bars. Others made tiny circles.
Pause, consideration, gathered fortitude.
The dark flock had turned into one giant ellipsis.
Meanwhile, the sky continued to fall, the curses screaming on their way down in shrill whistles.
The wrathravens were still submissive mutes but a little calmer now.
Their eyes had turned to focused rubies.
“Tell me about yourselves,” Swishy asked.
Each beast told their stories with their bodies. Around their wings, the intents of HOLLOWNESS and FROST covered their wings. Each of the negative intents stuck to their bodies like black ice. They wore their trauma in shards, in spikes, in a steely coldness that locked the world from themselves and themselves from the world.
And they were in separate stages of their development. Swishy didn’t know much about the wrathravens. And it turned out that nobody did. Only those with an eye for the soulscape could see the horrors that they shouldered upon their spirits. They had no choice but to be monsters—though Swishy would give them the choice now.
“Just restart. You’re magic, you’re shadow. You can do anything. So go backwards. The guardian will hold you until then. Trust us to do that, yeah?”
The Straw Guardian held out its hands, its vines, brightening the gold-straw nests and hollows and notches. The birdcages hung from the branched giant, accepting it as their tree.
The wrathravens swung in the cages, back and forth, lolling in their pendulous cribs.
The beasts hugged themselves with their six wings, covering their bodies in full.
Hardening commenced once more—but differently. The wings glazed over, losing their feathery textures in favor of smoothness, of eggshell constitution.
The flock transformed into black eggs.
Even the remains of the chasm, sighing, annoyedly protesting, couldn’t resist its eggshell reset. Fine…who am I to resist the winner.
“If I knew we could return to the start, when we were all strangers in the dark, I would’ve done that I think…” Swishy was mournful about it. He stopped himself from considering all that he’d take back. “You guys are beautiful. You’re so amazing for this, you know.”
FROST continued to reign on the smooth shells of the wrathravens, while inside there was something cooking, a more robust variety of emotions. Straw Guardian’s [Trust] intent flowed toward the nests and filled them with light. Now that they’d returned to the start, the flock could incubate all over again.
In a world like Cearth, of an incomplete reset, that meant that not everyone was quite done.
One thing that nobody ever taught Swishy: that was a long, long process to find who you are to become. For the first time in a while, he felt his cardiac chasm. The blackwheat was talking but not at all taking over. Swishy put a hand over his heart, feeling it, allowing the hurt to calibrate his ever-developing compass.
“You guys can have a heart too. Do you believe me?”
The eggs shook, gently rolling.
The wrathravens continued to settle in. From wrath-beasts to wrath-birds, and from birds to eggs—each creature was in a different step of their process. But as the [Trust] worked into them, the shuffling died down in waves. Swishy was learning from Sling. He didn’t know what the wrathravens needed individually, but he knew what’d helped him when he was most frosty, most alone.
The image of Sling’s wraps took over his mind, strip upon strip of endless bandages.
And as Swishy’s dreams progressed, the many vines and tendrils of the guardian’s arms matched the motions, the magic, the binding caress. The gold-straw wrapped around and around and around the eggs, and the spiritual flow that entered through those roots filled with NURTURE and CARE.
When Swishy flew far off to study the guardian’s infrastructure as a whole, he saw one other intent: SANCTUARY.
“There, there,” Swishy said, flying from egg to egg, rubbing their newest patches of smooth, light-warmed texture.
He returned to the guardian’s shoulder where he’d left Trey and found his friend crossing himself and murmuring something.
“Does that mean I did good?” Swishy asked.
“I’d say so, yeah. I think this is the start of a wonderful world.”
“For real?”
“For real.”
And then the realm started to slough away, the dark skin of DOMINION crumpling from the inside.
Even the portal started to warble and break down—it wasn’t needed, though, not since beyond the torn pieces the outside world revealed itself.
Their escape was finished in a way.
Rather than fleeing from the den, the world simply returned to them.
“Ready?” Swishy asked Trey.
“That’s my question, you know.”
“It’s mine now.”
Trey smirked. “No, I’m not ready. There’s hell out there, little homie.”
“I can fix it!”
“I’ll help.”
The boys laughed together.
Even the Straw Guardian turned its X’d mouth into a smile. Then it flapped, its wings producing twin sonic booms, launching them upward into the melting sky. The atmosphere was kaleidoscopic. But patches of clarity appeared, certain snapshots of the world they were returning to.
They were almost to the portal, the boys reaching for it like a prize.
Down below, Bristles waved them away, content to rest in the shadowdeep frost for many, many moments longer. “Bon voyage!” He boomed up.
Trey flashed the peace sign.
Swishy waved downward, too, putting from his mind all the things Bristles would do with his treasure of abyss.
Up they went.
And the trio, blasting through the portal, greeted their first world with smiles.