Torrential cloudcries blessed the jungle and chastised Ald. He couldn’t stop, as he knew himself hunted, but the weather made him wish for a refuge. The cloudcrying reduced his visibility, dampened his earing, the constant hits of the water drops on wood and leaves providing a hiding place for things far more ominous. He was tempted to stab the muddy ground, remembering that day in the plains right outside Felsia. But such action was irrational, childish wishful thinking. Nothing he did then would stave off the ghosts that haunted him, nothing but cutting his head, where they nested deep inside, off. The jungle had so far been kind to him, and this came off as fundamentally wrong. Where were all the misshapen in want of his blood? Were they as scared of him as he was of them? Or, maybe, they were scared of someone he had not noticed yet, of something lurking around and making the territory inhospitable for its own kind.

Unkindness had flown away, and now she hid in the shadow of every drop of tepid water, or so Ald thought. He wondered if heavens were crying for Mirn. And despite it being just a passing thought, he thought he heard her voice.

“Out of happiness, maybe.”

He looked around, to look where the macaw or raven had perched, but found nothing.

“I need no body to speak to you. I don’t want to get my feathers wet, Ald.”

“What do you mean by that. Why would anyone, or anything, be happy with Mirn’s death?” Ald didn’t know where to speak to, which parcel of air to address.

“Mother and father aren’t children of nature, and neither are we, uncle. The All-Carver made them apart from the trees, the mushrooms, the animals. Even the illnesses. We are… Felsians don’t have an exact word for it, but say, invaders, like the weeds in your garden. Sure, we may be helpful, or neutral towards nature: I know I am. Yet that doesn’t make my presence welcome. I feel it, uncle: animals fear me, plants hate me. They fear and hate you too. This very jungle silently despises everything that has the blood of the vile gods, carved from the same cosmic stone, but with a different intent.” The voice paused for a while, and Ald spurred it to go on with a thought. “The All-Carver made nature, and the All-Carver made Mother, and shaped Father inside her festering womb. Yet compatible, both things seem to barely be.”

He kept on trudging thought the foliage and mud with difficulty. “I am getting the impression that you are not exactly fond of the gods. Why are we rescuing a being you despise?”

“I love Felsians and I love misshapen. I want the best for their souls,” she said, her voice serene like the lullaby of breeze.

“Our souls are safe with Mother before we come, and they return to her after we march.”

Unkindness didn’t answer, and Ald couldn’t know if the silence was a signal of agreement or disagreement. Yet in her silences hid the important information: if she couldn’t lie, or if she could and didn’t want to, silence was the last refuge to hide from truth.

Then Ald got jerked out of the reverie by a familiar sound. A voice so childish and known, a voice that would pluck him from any dream, pleasant or tortuous. Amidst the jungle, Kali screamed, and his legs and arm wanted to walk in answer to the call. “Ald, brother, where are you?” she cried out without a pause, without mercy. No. He couldn’t rush to aid that ghost. Either it was the product of a budding insanity, o a trick of a misshapen. He could barely afford to doubt his mind, however, as confusing real danger for a delusion would soon prove lethal.

And Kali kept calling out. Kali in the jungle, Kali where she wouldn’t ever be. Kali with her unique voice and inflexions, a sound as distressing to her caretaker as the real cries for help would be. Ald kept on trudging forward, past a group of cycads with stems too wide, some male and some female, he judged by the tall strobili of some and the bulging red structures— probably ovules—that the remaining ones protected with spiky, greedy cataphylls.

And Kali kept calling out. Kali out of sight, Kali around that bush, Kali past that ditch dug by Father-knows-who. Kali’s distressed call as music, as Ald’s funeral march.

Cries that pursued, cries that echoed and twisted Ald’s perception. Where to run? Or rather, what to run from? During the cloudcries all that was fortuitous hid, even the guiding sun. All was damp; all smelled like the river bank. Mosses extended like the raising hackles of an angry cat, their sporophytes like lances reaching outwards from the wood and stone the gametophytes clung to. Fern leaves reminded Ald of serrated blades, knives or saws so feeble, so sickly green.

And Kali kept calling out. Kali from the south and the north, kali from the west and the east, Kali from Mother’s celestial abode and from the unseen fires down below.

“Stop! You are safe in Felsia! Gleur takes care of you!”

“Brother, please, help! A snake, a snake!”

“You are not there, ghost!”

“In was in there, but then I met a bird that said it was going take me with you!” She screamed, and Ald’s pupils shrunk. No sailor would help a child cross the Worldvein, but Unkindness? Unkindness had no such reservations.

He cursed her with his mind while his head shot from side to side, desperately looking for his charge. “Where are you?”

“Tree, up! The snake bites!” she cried desperately, obviously in pain and scared.

Ald snarled to his damned so-called benefactor as an equivalent of adrenalin rushed through his body and pushed him forward, eyes scouring the canopy for Kali.

Then a subtle sound reached him through the taps water drops, from behind. A bright green and black pattern got lost among the dead leaves, and looking upwards from there, she saw her, arms and legs hugging a branch from below, blood being washed from her leg by the falling water. When one of her legs slipped from the bark, Ald raced for the spot under her, disregarding any remainder of the care with which he had so far step on that treacherous land.

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Arms extended, he reached just in time for Kali’s grasp to slip, getting her to fall in his arms, a painful landing for him, but overall safe for her.

Yet when bitten by a viper, a few broken bones are not one’s problem.

“Ald, I am falling, Ald! Ald!” Kali shouted, already on her caretaker’s arms, her gaze lost in the canopies.

Ald’s lip trembled. If this was Kali, she had been bitten by a snake, and he was too far from any help. What to do? If she was suffering from vertigo, the venom had already spread in her bloodstream, so amputating her leg wouldn’t help.

“Hold on Kali, I will… I will fix this. Unkindness! Heal her!” he screamed as Kali fell deeper and deeper in delirium.

“The snake! The snake is still biting me! The snake! Kill it! “she kicked feebly making Ald struggle to keep her held in a princess carry.

He stared at her face trying to glean a sign of the pantomime, but found none. The little mark above her copper brow, noticeable for those that knew how to look. The chipped tooth, still as sharp as the others, in the right side of her lower jaw. The way her nostrils flared when she was anguished, too, was exactly the one it had to be. This was Kali, exactly as he remembered her. This was Kali, and she was dying.

Kali went silent, her breath steady.

“Unkindness! I cannot aid her, Unkindness! Fix this disaster you have caused. Disgraceful bird! Omen of death! Come and save, or I will consider you as bad as mother.

From the leaves to the right a parrot flutered and perched on his shoulder. “There’s nobody to save, Ald.”

Ald Looked at Kali once more, and noticed she had stopped moving, at all. “Kali!, Kali!” he called out , prey of absolute desperation, leaving her lying on the litter bed, slapping her face slightly to fish for a reaction. But there were no breaths, nor heartbeats, nor futher bleeding from the wound. “Kali…”

“There’s nobody to save,” Pandemonium repeated, with a voice too somber for a bird too colorful.

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Gleur stared at the neck of his suit in the mirror. He had not used it for the official funeral: it was too formal for that, too… undeserved for such a barbaric event where he couldn’t tell Mirn what he felt. He fixed a slight crease on the chest and adjusted the sleeves, together with the long, light orange ribbons woven from Felsian cocoon silk that coiled around his arms and up to his shoulders. Such material would now be a thing of the past, he found himself thinking. Suits would be, which, in any other situation, he would have considered a good riddance.

Kali irrupted in his room like the little energy tornado she was. “Brother Gleur, Brother Gleur, you have visit! Do I let them in?”

“No. It’s a sad day, Kali, I am about to pay a friend a visit, and he cannot come to see me. Whoever else wants to meet with me can go and get cursed,” he said, straiughtening a section of the ribbon.

Kali slowly turned her head to see the beautiful lady bedecked in feathers of all kinds and colors—a changing kaleidoscope without repeating patterns—, that had irrupted in the dwelling without even touched the door, casting a shadow over her. “Gleur...” Kali called with a thread of voice.

When the sage glanced, he saw the raven shaped shadow in which Kali was standing.

“By all that’s holy, Unkindness, you mess with children now?” he barked, sauntering towards his charge to pull her apart from the misshapen. “Fear not, Kali. This sister is just... peculiar and mad.”

“Flock, when I wear every feather that was or is.” She stepped past the doorframe of Gleur’s room and crouched to look Kali in the eyes. “Ald loves you too much.”

“You know Ald?” Kali asked, still afraid and hiding behind Gleur’s leg.

“Yes, and he loves you too much. Too much.”

“I know! he’s good! Do you know where he is?”

Flock stood and brandished a smile towards Gleur. His mind raced to interpret what she had said, searching among the information she had given him about other masterworks through the years. “He is being taken care of?

Her smile grew wider and she nodded.

“Kali, go to a friend’s house to play.”

“But brother, you said I needed to sleep early—“He gave her a tap in the head. “Obey, lass, the visit of this mad sister changes things. I am not only in charge of you until Ald comes back: I am a sage of Felsia. Go to the house of one of your playmates and tell their caretaker that Gleur sent you, that he needs to attend urgent business and they will gain my favor if they keep you safe and entertained.”

“That’s too much to remember.” She pouted, and this prompted laughter from the Masterwork.

“Just go Kali, I need privacy to talk with the sister. Obey me without questioning and you can go play with any friend you like the rest of the week. You will train half of the time as normal.”

“Thanks sir Gleur!” She rushed past unkindness and shoot out every door she found in her way.

And when Gleur heard the slamming noise of the main door, without any regard for the integrity of his suit, he drove a fit straight into Flock’s face, shattering its left side like a ceramic mask to reveal a mound of bird eyes throbbing behind. “Every time you make it more disgusting,” he mumbled, caressing his knuckles.

Unkindness shrugged. “I am fond of artistic representations of myself.”

“Caretaken, you left Ald alone with Caretaken?” Gleur interrogated her, glancing at the mirror, where Flock cast a distorted reflection, a group of skeletal birds fluttering around. “You unwelcome presence, Caretaken!”

“Caretaken won’t kill him,” she stated flatly, picking a piece of her cheek from the floor and examining it.

“But he is capable of following the same path Mirn did if you don’t interfere! He must be seeing Kali die gruesomely right now, ignominious truth peddler!”

“She already died once in his delirium. Caretaken is having fun with my chosen one.”

Gleur relaxed his hands, uncurling his fists, and crossed his arms. “Chosen for what, Unkindness?”

“Flock.”

“Answer.”

“To avenge Mirn, in a way. Do you know what mother does with the souls of the dead, Gleur?”

Gleur walked away from the mirror, and sat upon his futon, away from most fragile objects in his room, that weren’t many, besides the water jars on the table and a few paintings on the walls.

“Go ahead. Make my friend’s funeral even sadder.”

“She eats them. Whole.”

Gleur began laughing. He was disgusted, but such disgust fitted his ideas about Mother. He was right. And if that was how things were, they had been born just as cattle for her. He was right in hating the gods. “I expected far less… punishment for dying, but I always knew she wasn’t a benevolent entity.”

Flock closed the unshattered Felsian eye, but not the bird ones. “Ald is going to kill Father, and so Mother will perish too.”

“Then why him and not me? I’d gladly stab or decapitate that beast myself!”

“You’d kill father out of rancor, if he didn’t manage to seduce you with the saving of Felsia. Be honest, Gleur: even knowing how awful the gods are, you cannot betray your duty to the city. You cannot end the rains forever.”

“Wait… won’t the ratchet go if the gods die?”

Flock extended a thin finger, pointing at the blood clock hung on the wall opposite to the futon. “Were I to kill Milod, would these hands still?”

Gleur sighed and answered. “No. Mine was a stupid question. Childish hope.”

He hid his face in his hands and then clawed his brow to the point it was painful. “Out of a duty to Felsia, I would need to stop Ald, if he were to kill father. However,” he gestured towards the hall, “you tell me every face there has had their eternal essence consumed by a monster. That, when I leave this world, I won’t find nothing but sharp teeth waiting to unmake me in the other one. It’s not a pig’s job to defend the abattoir. Thank you, ill omen, for letting me know we are pigs.”

“Oink oink.”

Gleur grunted. “You are incorrigible. Mind not accompanying me to the pier? I’d like to lie to myself about my friend’s fate for a while.”

And, in a spectacle of falling feathers, Flock became undone.