When the Year is not Kept
And the Best Strategy is Blind
Compassleaf was in tumult when its latest visitor arrived on the wing. He'd seen such chaos in a supposedly civilized place before, but only when the lord of the town had decided to disband it in light of his own approaching death. The end result had been a raid of all its shelters by wild beities: a cascade of blood and competing theft that shredded what it stole more often than it didn't.
Things in the Scion's city weren't as bad as all that, but the air was squirming with short tempers and frustration. So many birds came and went with urgent perpendicular paths that they were colliding midair and fighting. Local songbirds suddenly possessed of fierce pride and determination, despite their cargo rarely being anything more consequential than love ballads between blossoming romances, fought claw to claw with much heartier crows.
Falcorix weaved between these altercations as he made his way to the glitter-encrusted Roostcheck to collect his payment for yelling at naked things in the desert. The rat tails on his mind could be smelled on the wind before the spire was even in sight, so there must have been far more than the few he was owed.
The proof came when he landed on an exterior branch and hopped his way through a crack in the mud, looking down amidst a din of bird chatter like he'd never heard. It was as if they'd all forgotten their melodies, and perhaps they had at the sight of the pile of scavage that had completely filled the lowest level of Roostcheck and that had the entire shaft smelling of smoky gristly meats and blistered skin.
It was difficult to imagine a larger pile of tails. Falcorix saw them as a den of snakes, not only because some of them belonged to snakes, but also because some of them were still moving, slithering like the only serpents not yet paired in a massive mating knot.
Tails were the commonest scavage paid out to smaller beities, as the lower quality meat was suited to lower names. They were light of bone or completely boneless, making them easier to transport. In Weaviranch the marmosets enjoyed large portions of them, twisted into noodle towers and drenched in butter and lemon juice.
A tail was also an easy thing to collect from its owner, especially since it did not always require them to give up their life. Shortsighted rats would exchange a moment of chopping pain for a more favorable burrow deeper in the city. If they lived close enough to a mighty beity, one of radiant glamour, they might even regrow their tail and get to barter it again.
Lizards had it all the easier, many kinds able to regrow their tail by default, making their living by soaking up sun and converting it into the meat they could harmlessly separate from their bodies. Even large and respectable lizards did so, with a stump of a tail seen as willingness to contribute to the Compassleaf community.
However, the tail of a large lizard, one productive and savvy enough to nearly elevate their name, could retain some thickness of its origin's blood, not only continuing to move for a long duration after separation, but sometimes taking on a pseudo-life, patrolling for prey and constricting it like a snake, even though there was no gullet with which to ingest their prize.
None had bothered to sort the tails coming into Roostcheck, as they were arriving far too quickly. The pool of reward scavage for the capture of the storyteller and the dentist was growing all the time, and by extension so too was the ancillary pile offered for information surrounding their whereabouts.
Falcorix knew little of this, even surrounded by relevant chatter. His degenerate piracy did nothing to temper his ego or delusion of thickened bloodright, preventing him from paying attention when in the company of those he deemed lesser. In stealing the task of the desert message he'd neglected to even get all relevant information before dispatching the original carrier. So in Roostcheck, as he looked to collect, the context still eluded him.
"You," he addressed a bird below him that seemed to tally the tails, "I'm here to collect on a delivery. Fetch me rat tails." The raptor was ignored. Rather than complain he made note of the orange patch on the disrespectful robin's breast, so that he might kill them outside Compassleaf and take what they carried as his next mission.
Twice more he attempted to address a literal underling, to being ignored both times. His frustration finally allowed some of the discourse to sink in. The flock was atwitter about a pair of fugitives, one of them apparently cherished by the whole city. In effect it first convinced Falcorix that he needed to wash his talons of the place as soon as possible, if it was such a desecrated hollow that any human was called 'cherished' and provided what the beities treated as half the joy of the city dwellers.
"I will help myself then," he informed them, though none were informed since they weren't listening. Had he paid closer attention he would've noted that none of the occupants of Roostcheck were standing on the pile directly. Contributions were made from above or the sides, and the reason became clear shortly after he set foot on the mound of still-warm flesh and skin.
The scents of many animals were mixed in a clinging cloud around the pile, intoxicating to a creature such as himself, accustomed to merely tugging invisible strings of odor on the wing. Falcorix's eyes rolled into the back of his head as his nostrils did draught deep of rodent, lizard, snake, and fish gristle.
Temptations abound, the pirate avoided haphazardly raking a pile of tails into his beak. Many transactions in cities operated purely on the honor system, and he followed it within their bounds not because it was difficult to sneak away with extra but because of the punishment for those proven to have offended: death. Transformation into the very scavage pilfered.
Still, he got a little something extra for free as he rooted around in search of only his allotment, and only of rat tails, namely the pooling soup-scent, which was almost a meal unto itself. All types of rodent tail were mixed together, mouse, rat, squirrel, chipmunk, even beaver, and he delighted in taking additional time in the pile to discern between them.
Lost in the process, eyes inches deep in scavage, he did not see the bulge under the pile's surface that slithered toward him. The moment he pushed a dried trout fin out of the way the half-creature struck like a cobra, wrapping around his neck and squeezing. The bird panicked and cried out before his air was cut off, then tumbled forward and rolled down the side of the mound.
Tossed out a split in the side, he rolled to a stop in the clover at the foot of Roostcheck. Finally he was the center of attention, though the bulk of it was derision, for he wrestled not with a snake that had survived a sentence by masquerading as a long tail, but by an actual lizard tail. The mostly dead thing belonged to a giant anole, and had gotten it into its flesh that it was something like a tree python.
It nearly succeeded in its effort to squeeze the life out of Falcorix, for his panicked biting scored flesh that could no longer feel. The heat of the pile had excited the tail's death spasms, invigorated it, and as soon as it was free of the rest its power faded quickly. As its grip loosened, Falcorix flailed free and collapsed gasping onto his back, wings spread.
Shame came with the raucous laughter. Guard dropped, information too finally washed over the fallen hatchling of Echopeaks. Didn't he know the rewards were not yet properly sorted? Didn't he know there was no need to hurry, as so much as word of a human hair on the wind was enough to earn a tail and a tip of two tips? Had he never heard of Loric Shelvtale, greatest storyteller in Namstamp, and how he'd made himself star of a story by stealing a mirror to wield as hero's weapon?
Falcorix's mind dilated as the fact fell into place in his craggy ornery memory. A mirror? Much as it stung, he let the rain of arrow-tidbits strike him for several minutes, lying so still he was at risk of being dragged back and tossed into the tail pile: two humans, two dental weapons, one man and one woman, the woman elder enough to see a difference, thought to be in the Shedlands.
Not just under his nose, but within his reach. In sight of each other, but to their advantage since his mirror put them in sight of Falcorix's very soul. The biggest piece of context hit him like a boulder, really had him feeling the ground, the thing that he never should've felt; no, the touch of dirt should've been as alien as the eggshell of the moon. Only high branches could hold him, cradle him enough to foster his return to stable respectability.
That context was the reward for the return of the fugitives to the estate of the Scion Krakodosus the thundercoat. It made the pile of tails look like a pinch of sunflower seed. Even in Echopeaks he'd never heard of such a hoard of meat, bone, organ, and marrow. Everglut it was called, or eternaglut, when framed in relation to a beity of his diminutive size.
If he made the claim of everglut, and the claim was accepted, it meant that in lieu of taking the total of the scavage all at once, which he could not possibly consume before it rotted, and would thus have the headache and heartache of bartering most of it away immediately, he could instead be granted a lifetime supply of scavage from the party offering the prize, beneficial to them as it was usually a lesser amount than the lump carcass sum.
Since that party was the Scion, his everglut would be honored by Compassleaf at large, and across Salmon Run dynasties, should the life of a lesser beity somehow last that long. Falcorix would be entitled not only to all he could eat, but all that he could individually carry. With the right cargo of lightweight and dried meats, such as tails, bird feet, and tarantula legs, he could carry an impressive bounty on the wing, from Compassleaf and to Echopeaks.
With it he could barter his way up the branches, up to his old home, and then higher. He would be Falcorix of meat drippings, of meat rain, of meat downpour, of meat monsoon, every beat of his wings showering those below with food.
Much sustenance in Echopeaks came directly from the mountain-stumps, be it their nuts the size of mammoths or the fruits of the lesser trees that grew in groves between giant branch divots that had collected soils falling from bird and insect wing over eons. Meat was in high demand, so much so that even the mountain-vassals in the foothills accepted it, in the form of morsels tossed into knotholes. The tough but stalwart trees believed it invigorated them, quickening them in battle against the rock slides of the mountains that threatened their masters.
The everglut was the key Falcorix had long sought, unknowingly, in the back of his mind. His mother and father surely still lived behind a veil of indigo-silver clouds, and as soon as he pierced it they would welcome him back, nest preserved so he could relive all the nurturing he was denied.
But he had to plan, and carefully, putting aside the pelting of insults he both endured and would endure if Compassleaf were to learn that he had conversed with perhaps the most valuable humans on the continent and then let them get away.
Sharing the information of their most recent location would earn him another payment, but just that, just another dose of scavage. To earn the everglut he had to facilitate their capture and return. The real question was how to go about it while keeping what he knew to himself. Two options formed in his racing mind: one involving Lady Butterfur, whom he had learned much about just from the babble of the preceding minutes, and one that left her in the dark.
If he told the blonde bear not what he knew, but that he suspected he had a lead on her wayward pets, she might provide to him the muscle needed to achieve the goal. A fast beity was needed, one that could keep up with him as he flew, which probably meant either a large bat or the swiftest hound. No cat would have the endurance, no horse the predatory cunning. Any birds large and fierce enough would be raptors like himself, and thus vulnerable to Loric's mirror: the sad curse of their immense, yet surprisingly light, intellects.
On the other wing, he could strike out alone and attempt to relocate the pair. Once he had, being careful not to reveal himself, he could then make wider and wider circles in search of a beity to recruit on the spot. There would be no viable candidate in the Shedlands themselves, wretched as its residents were, but there was no chance the humans were looking to stay in that accursed prairie.
Otter's Whip, he wagered, was their initial destination. When he'd caught them they were headed east, and would likely follow that wall of rock he'd seen rather than summit it and hit an inhospitable stretch of Plunderoe shore, the fording of which would serve only to put them in the icy grip of a Tuncrad frost-fen.
Otter's Whip wasn't called that for nothing. Those scoundrel beasts frequented that bend, commonest of the thieves that dared to challenge the Scion's claim to the salmon when they came to spawn, as they very soon would. Falcorix wasn't privy to what intergenerational snaggle between their teeth caused the otters such entitlement, especially when they could feast aplenty when lesser fishes like mud trout came through in similar numbers for the same reason, but the bird knew he could use it to his advantage.
Yes, at Otter's Whip there was bound to be a rapids-hearted eager otter who would love to subtly insult the bear Scion by claiming the bulk of his hunt-prize. There was no need to involve the lady, and it was best for the heir of Echopeaks to move along swiftly.
The bird righted himself and hopped back to Roostcheck, rage bubbling as he rolled his shoulders to throw off the insults. Keeping a closer eye on any ambitious lizard tails this time, he selected a portion of the rat tails he was owed and tied them about his legs to serve as rations during his efforts.
Once he'd done so he took to the air and freed himself of the stifling atmosphere of Compassleaf. They could have their bickering and keep it, for soon he would ascend to the silent heights, where the sharpest-eared of the bats could not hear any sound generated by the Earth, even the violent upheaval of its very substance. Up there a volcanic eruption wasn't quite the warm glow of a campfire. Up there the air was so thin that none would dare to waste it with an insult against him, especially since it would bounce uselessly off his high name, black as the infinite night beyond the blue.
...
Days were spent getting back to where he'd just been, as expected, but he made excellent time with the fires of determination felt in every feather the whole way. Hardly a nibble of rat tail was required to ignite a fireball in his breast, one that allowed him to sleep while maintaining flight, a skill that was in truth more reminiscent of a higher name than one lower, even though the thickest blood would allow him to change course and respond to obstacles in slumber as well.
Fresh were his eyes and wings when he came to the eastern edge of the Shedlands after following the rock wall, encouraged by the sight of several human tents laid out in a systematic grid that could only be recognized as seeded traps from the sky. Slaves still patrolled them, meaning the storyteller and the dentist had passed through without getting caught.
Actually finding the two fugitives was to be the most difficult part of the task, for while he had a powerful sense of smell among birds it was meant mostly for carrion, and did not have the sagacity of a hound's nose, which could sniff out alive from dead, old from young, and the individual from their twin sibling.
Destiny was his updraft, for his beak didn't have to pretend at the skill of scent-sleuthing, instead pointing right at his goal dumbly as soon as his eyes caught a sight as great as those he imagined soaring in the upper reaches of Echopeaks.
Tensilharp, the machine-scratch harpy, the harried queen, the fisher-eagle of filaments, the very Sig-neagle herself. There. With booming screech separate from sonic boom of wing. The thickest winged blood of the five lands of Plunderoe was there with him, and she was attacking Loric Shelvtale and Hygenis Fixtooth.
Clad in feathers gray as any storm, blue as any thought of the future, she was also armored with the husks of archaic machines, their colorful veins now empty of electric blood wrapped about her neck and legs in much the same way he had his rat tails. It almost looked as if he mocked her appearance with shabby imitations, so Falcorix tucked his legs as close to his body as he could as he began to circle the sphere of her influence, exuded like the splash of a blue whale that had just performed a complete flipping breach.
She paid him no mind, almost couldn't, consumed as she was by her dives at her quarry. The confrontation should have been over in seconds, the great beity's silent swoop resulting in both humans skewered on her pitchfork talons, but the Sig-neagle's mind could not be bothered with a stealthy approach.
The machine sounds only she could hear drove her to the precipice of insanity, and sometimes that had be vented as piercing cries, especially so when she recognized a mechanical hum long sought and long denied. She knew full well this was the machine that had burrowed into Compassleaf like a tick and hidden there, the denizens protecting their parasite for reasons that escaped her.
Vengeance was to be hers, but it all had to start with the device itself, which would serve to finally end her battle with Umbramach Nightmachine from those years ago that had knocked its offspring from her clutches. Her claws were all too ready to reclaim it, throbbing with the nearness of her goal, but a shield was thrown up at the last second and the colossal bird was repelled.
It was not the metal that repelled her, she'd ripped through sheets of titanium before, gouged the chrome rims of light-up eyes out of engines rivaling her in size, but the shield's skin of magical glue. Her body pulled back in time, but not her spirit, which was caught on the shield's surface. Tensilharp saw her reflection in the mirror Loric held up to protect himself, and was just as vulnerable to it as her miniature Falcorix. Eagle minds felt, down to the stems of their brains, the same way at the sight of themselves, every twitch stolen and reproduced a whip-lick between the wings of their instantaneously enslaved essence.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
The thickness of her blood had no relevance here. It was just her nature, her expression of the Wild, which would not allow any input from the Tame that was in her blood in equal measure.
Loric had not lucked into the tactic; that much was also clear. Deliberately the storyteller angled the flat face of the mirror, daring to shoot the Sig-neagle in the eyes with the piercing stare of her own. Falcorix feared he had unwittingly provided them their battle strategy in their first encounter, but dismissed the true notion, instead assuming that since they had brought the mirror with them the whole way they had long intended it for this purpose.
With the clash still firmly in the Shedlands, each of the beity's wing beats kicked up a cloud of dust that obscured Falcorix's view. He also granted her greater tactical acuity in his assessment, guessing that the clouds were meant to cut her off from the reflection. Such an obstacle would not prevent her from knowing the humans' exact position, thanks to her electromagnetic sense.
If her gambit worked Falcorix would fail, the end result being two corpses that would be scavenged before he could recruit anything to carry them. So for the time being he needed the pair to be cleverer, stronger.
They did not disappoint, which he might have expected had he known that the Bloody Mouth had been invoked. The oath gave an extra wind, past the second, that allowed a human to keep struggling over the edge of death. With it they could practically run on the air. Hygenis emerged in the distance, from the end of the dust cloud, pulling Loric right after. She was choosing their path while he watched the rear, angling his mirror as needed to repel the Sig-neagle.
"A little further now," Falcorix encouraged under his breath as he ascended and saw how close the humans were to new terrain. Ahead the color of the land shifted from oranges and browns to black and slate. The last of the woody plants gave way to curtains and blankets of moss and scum draped over boulders, their surfaces softened to a creamy finish by the spray from the river on stormy days.
Tensilharp's cry rent his concentration, gave a pang of guilt. His heart should have been with his fellow bird, with his compatriot who was surely grand enough to deserve an Echopeaks sky. Guilt became homesickness as his shadow passed effortlessly into the drawn pebble beaches of Otter's Whip.
Echopeaks was more than the depths of the sky. He recalled the frost coating the trees, ice crystal spears extending from every leaf so that their crops were glittering white labyrinths. Birds of his size could challenge themselves, dive into openings at full speed, trusting their instincts to guide them through unexpected twists and turns in the fronds of ice. Sometimes they didn't make it back out, but when they did they felt so alive, having plunged into the racing currents of their very nature as beities on the wing.
His home had cowering mountains, falling artificial stars, forests in the crook of the world's most majestic trees... and the archresin. The memory stalled him midair. Normally such a hover preceded a hunter's dive, but Falcorix found he already had a firm grasp on his new idea. The archresin was an even better plan the everglut, for it allowed him to return to Echopeaks before earning it through achievement. It would take time, yes. Days and days. Its greatest weakness was that it required him to have much more faith in the humans: a belief that they would somehow succeed in their inevitable efforts to cross Plunderoe. He knew this was their plan, for there was no way to leave Otter's Whip but through Blueguts. Retreat only took them back to the Shedlands.
But if they could, besting bears and currents, and continue into Flatrock Easter they would be in raw wilderness for the longest leg of their journey yet. The most notable landmarks in that place were the human city of Staircase and Rhadiospir: The Sig-neagle's very nest. Staircase could turn them away. Falcorix knew the Wild Trinity enforced a limit on its population, but even if they didn't the power of the archresin might allow their extraction from such a place anyway.
There was a crucial second ingredient: the beity struggling before him. She could be his recruit, though phrasing it that way could easily earn his demise. Yet if convinced she would be an invaluable ally, likely taking nothing as payment but what she was after. He knew her stories all too well, and no pile of scavage would draw this attention from her. Loric or Hygenis had a machine on them, a live one, hardly surprising given their unscrupulous use of the mirror.
The dust was nearly settled by the time Falcorix emerged from his plotting hover. He soared to catch up to the struggle, all the way out of the Shedlands. Now the Sig-neagle had nothing to blind herself with in defense, nothing but what the lesser beity could offer. He chose then as his moment of approach, gathering the courage and ambition needed to fly within her aura. And to cry out.
"Great Tensilharp! I am Falcorix, son of Sonalco Splinterwing, son of Avalaco the resinous, and it is by the wisdom of the latter that I intervene! There is a tool, of tree not of man, that can be of great use here! It allows you to control your own blindness, perfect for avoiding the snatching mirror! It lies in Echopeaks, and I can guide you if you'd allow me the honor!"
He broke away to cut off his own pestering as quickly as possible, spiraled up into a fresh hover. The Sig-neagle was of the wildest mind, those fully capable of speech but who chose never to use it, so if she agreed he would know it only by her actions. Only if she disengaged from her frenzied scratching just above the storyteller.
His breath caught when she did. The greater beity climbed the sky much faster, providing precious few moments to arrange any further justification he might need. The eagle reached his height, flapped before him, giving a look that could kill, and that would if he dared waste her time while the humans escaped to the river.
"At the edge of Echopeaks I can show you the way! The archresin does not allow its use lightly, but you, the Sig-neagle, make no request lightly. It will respect your wishes." Tensilharp had a response: she turned away. Crucially, it was northward. The Sig-neagle flew, and it was on tiny Falcorix to keep up, something he quickly realized he absolutely could not do for long.
She had no reason to question his motives. Of course he had his own, but they were too small to be of consequence to her. All that mattered was the truth in what he said, which he had clearly staked his life on.
There was no way to be sure if she would allow it, but he had to try if he was to be her guide. Falcorix flapped his heart out to catch up to her, positioning between her shoulders. It was the most awkward landing of his life, and would've been every bit as humiliating as the wrestling match with the half-dead tail if anything had been high enough to see.
He did manage it though, quickly nestling down into her feathers and sitting still. The Sig-neagle did not protest, so she would allow him to ride out the journey since he could not keep up with the mightier creature. It would be a good opportunity, one sorely needed, to freshen up his breath-holding skills. They would be critical, as the archresin was deep in the sky, surrounded by air too thin to sustain them. Every fluid that high up was frozen unless swaddled in flesh, with the exception of the archresin. The heat of its eternal battle kept it flowing, like lava gobbling up the land underfoot.
...
Normally the flight back to Echopeaks would have taken him twelve days, but from the Sig-neagle's pace he guessed it would be less than four. Not once did his chariot attempt conversation, which was both expected and for the best, as the smaller bird's nerves were rankled.
There was no worse feeling than knowing he would be unwelcome in his own home, that every step of what would now be called trespass had to be cautiously planned. Most of that plan was his mount. None would question him in the immediate company of Tensilharp, but here 'none' only meant animals.
The mountain-stumps were another story, and a long one at that. Despite their inability to move on a time scale that could be witnessed, they nonetheless possessed myriad methods for enacting their wills, violence included. If they wanted you to slip off their bark while you rested, it could be made to happen. If they wanted you dead, perhaps for the crime of buzzing around their heads a little too much like a fly, it was best never to do that buzzing directly under any of the cones that held only tenuously to the branch.
Two mountain-stumps in particular were their concern, and each other's. Far from the front lines in their kind's battle with the mountain range, and pushed ever further back, the pair had been too long distracted by their quarrel with each other. The exact nature of that disagreement was impossible for a beity to know, but the best guess with such beings was always either proximity or water.
One thought the other had grown too close, and perhaps the other thought the same thing, and they'd been at the argument in a physical sense long before Falcorix hatched, and even longer in the psychological sense. Over countless seasons they'd grown toward each other in the first swings of their fencing match.
The first paths were but glancing blows, a branch snapped off by pressure every moon or so. As soon as they'd made it through each other's thickets they turned right back around for another go. This time their weapons clashed and became lodged together. Now both titans were pulling away, but the knot was holding, and so from a distance all the beities saw was two trees that had grown into an arch, almost peaceful, and the endless flow of their mingled resin.
Each mountain-stump's fruitless pull produced stress fractures, wounds in the wood that leaked their double-thick sap, amber and crimson when the light shone through, dark as a maple's depression without it. The result was a keystone in the arch: a monolithic hardened jewel of resin from which fresh tributaries flowed down in a jellied curtain, occasionally dropping globs. The Earth was so far that these eventual impacts could spray bison-sized droplets of the material day-marches away.
Such spattering quickly lost the properties Falcorix was after. It was only archresin while still hanging between the arch of the warring trees, still influenced as it was by their smoldering wrath.
He'd seen the hardened pools and puddles below, like blood welling up from the ground, but never the archway. That place was too high for a low name, but once Tensilharp pierced the veil he would fly through in her wake, on the tailwinds of her authority, and into the life robbed from him.
The archresin was his to claim, his inheritance, as his caretakers had long told him the tales of his progenitor Avalaco the resinous. They were a bird that could rival the Sig-neagle in size and mastery of flight. Mountain-stump tree-blood was no mystery to them, the curtain at the arch least so.
In the tales Falcorix had both fallen asleep and flown to, Avalaco could sail straight through the veil of sap without slowing, reappearing on the other side wearing a heavy coat of its colors like armor. With it they could battle other birds and beasts, enemy claws sinking into sap and dealing no damage.
This was because of the will instilled in the archresin, the very aggression of the spatting mountain-stumps. Legend, his legend, had it that any will that could match the mountain-stumps' could also direct the archresin as they did. The material could be given a single assignment, and as long as the will burned without dying the resin would not harden and would obey its task.
Thus Avalaco the resinous, the red-gold under the sun, the ruby of Echopeaks, had amazed and dominated the sky between the frosted canopies. And so too would their son, once his day was out. Falcorix trusted that, either directly or indirectly, the archresin would make him the beity that piracy had cast down.
He would claim a piece of it, wear it upon his beak as a shining blade, a focal point for description: Rixfalco the amber dagger. That could be his high name. And should this fail, should he not be able to claim the archresin, the Sig-neagle would not fail. With it as blindfold, peeling away from her eyes whenever she willed it, she would destroy her machine quarry and leave two broken humans for Falcorix to collect and deliver. With that delivery would come the everglut, and a way into Echopeaks that was only slightly delayed.
These visions sustained him all the way to the cloud layer that separated his low-nest homeland from the upper depths. The mountain-vassal forests were far below, some of their roots probing at the solid puddles of resin that had splashed into their reach. Two impossibly large trunks stood on either side of the Sig-neagle's flight path. One combatant and the other. Falcorix dismounted after warning her they had arrived, flying to face her.
"Through these clouds stands the archway, and between them the archresin. Match the strength of the trees' wills and claim only the piece you need. It will obey you in one assigned task, which I imagine will be as a blindfold. The storyteller's mirror cannot take your spirit when you cannot see its taking!
Whenever you will it the blindfold will come away, and it will fall as sugary grit as soon as you are done. But be warned! The archresin will not be disrespected. The lesser will find their own wills subsumed... not that you need worry, mighty Tensilharp!"
The Sig-neagle lingered to the end of his statement, but did not react to it. The much smaller bird was beginning to wonder if the great beity had become almost as single-minded as the resin itself, if her intellectual faculties were pushed to the back of her being, quietly doing the work of understanding him without interrupting her raw personality.
He was about to deliver his second warning about the thinness of the air, but she would be held back no longer. Her deep breath indicated she already sensed the conditions, and with one powerful flap she broke through the silver-indigo and into the upper depths of Echopeaks's inhospitable sky.
"This is it," Falcorix told himself, flapping madly to keep steady in her wake. "Stop shaking!" His legs didn't listen. "Did you shake when you killed for rat tails? Did you shake when you hunted the high name Neuracory and ate them? No, now stop!"
If his limbs didn't obey, how would the archresin? There was no time to puzzle it out. The further the Sig-neagle got from him the less legitimate his claim to the air he tread. Only time inhaling was justified, and only if he didn't exhale until they both exited the clouds with amber badges of honor.
The breath taken bested his nerves: a veritable cask of air that hopefully aged gracefully. Falcorix escorted it through the clouds, startled by their physical resilience, like flying through a lake of spiderwebs. Calculating how much of his precious breath was used up in breaking through would only result in panic and the further acceleration of its consumption, and he had just enough determination to acknowledge that and keep going, focusing on the Sig-neagle.
Which couldn't be done for long, for even she was nothing in the face of the archway. Both trees were too hot with anger to frost, made fiery when compared to the other whitish canopies visible in the distance. Those who could read trees saw their fury, the arch less architectural and more emotional: a perpetual dual-snarl as one mouth bit the other's lip and tugged. Here was a bloody mouth, vast and turgid and spoken in the temporal tongue of the plant kingdom.
Crimson keystone with sun behind bathed both birds in passionate light, but their goal was below, issuing from the fissures in the gemstone. The resinfall hung lower than Falcorix had ever imagined, stretching like a road all the way back to the cloud border.
It was also a mass grave, many animals entombed in amber glass, the freshest not entirely immobile as they flowed toward the ground at a rate of two snail day-marches to each human day-march. Those still in the fluid portion had failed the test, foolishly tried to take the resin and had instead been taken themselves. Should the trees ever settle the altercation, dropping the keystone like the fulfilled sword, the spot would be forever marked with the war's casualties, some dramatically posed in death.
As they approached Falcorix saw that bugs were the most common creatures to err in this way, too tempted by the sickly double-sweet smell and too intellectually weak to value their own lives more than a slim chance at the sort of meal that could sate for months at a time, not surprising given that some of their lifespans were mere months, and thus one swallow of the archresin was an everglut in itself.
A cloud of beetles, black and iridescent green, hung about the flow, working up the nerve to die. Predatory insects, who could nonetheless digest the resin because the mountain-stumps themselves insisted it was as good as blood, hung in a dead and dying layer at the flow's surface: scorpionflies, flying scorpions, parasitic bat flies that had leapt from their hosts looking like spider crabs of the deep sea thanks to the size of the wings they'd fed on, frost mantises with the patience to freeze mid-pounce, wait a winter, and finish the strike in spring, and countless others of the chitinous hordes.
Some of them were to be included in the Sig-neagle's blindfold as decoration, creating a masquerade mask with pink, white, and green flower mantis fringes. Were the ever-buoyant Lady Butterfur living close to the archway some of her staff may have gotten themselves killed seeking the decor and costumes she simply had to have for her next social.
Tensilharp, devoid of any and all affection for both culture and the aesthetic, had no thoughts to spare for such things. She was of one thought, one drilled into her by a now distant, but still detectable, sound. Were there an active machine ten times her size, spinning up hurricanes with metal exterior drills like a gigantic industrial urchin, she would still swoop in and attack, claws scratching at its shell even though the rest of her body was now a red haze behind her.
The archresin could not kill what had already been driven so insane that it did not accept death. It made no attempt to do so when the Sig-neagle dipped her face into the flow and then retreated with a powerful flap that sent a slow ripple through the curtain. Successful, she came away with spectacles of resin.
With a swift mental shove she tested them, the resin slurping over her eyes and sealing them behind crimson-amber goggles, even clouding to prevent light from penetrating. Another thought opened them again; Falcorix's word was good. The little bird had not requested any compensation, and even if he had it would have to wait until there was no buzz in her brain, so the Sig-neagle turned to depart.
Panic hit Falcorix in the breastbone, spilling yet more of his held breath, which was now more than half spent. First he had to realign his vision, see the archresin and not the dead vermin underneath, and certainly not the skeletons underneath those, or the machine fallen from the sky beneath the sky under those.
Next he had to feel, with all his spirit, that he was as powerful as the resin, which was true as long as he hatched from high names. This he could do, he was sure, for his spirit had been fully returned from the mirror. Loric had none of it squirreled away in a pocket as hostage. Falcorix had seen the mirror emptied, and yet...
The realization lit a fire that consumed his breath in a flash. With it came the understanding that it couldn't even be called a realization, for he had known for the entirety of his banishment. He had known from the bitter taste of Neuracory's blood, that he was not born of these skies. His true parents were the ones that sat on his egg, the ones who fed him on legends and grew him up weak with their falsity.
Falcorix would die if he tried to take the archresin and forge a beak dagger. Defeated, internally humiliated, humbled before the altar he'd unknowingly built of flimsy twigs, the raptor felt like a wobbling tear hanging in the sky, contents barely contained and by surface tension alone. He couldn't even find the strength to save himself with a dive, instead falling.
But the archresin knew what he had attempted. How dare such a brazen spectator not only invade skies he could not master, but also put himself in the path of trees' blows? He had interrupted, and it was clear his mind could not conjure a justification. Had the bird known the arch, grown up flying in a wide berth, he would've known that it wasn't only the boastful who were consumed and petrified.
Those who flirted with the concept were guilty as well; they did not even have to touch. As Falcorix plummeted with closed eyes, waiting for the wet clouds on his skin so he could breathe, the resin swelled and lashed out like a tongue, catching him and pulling him in alongside a swarm of long dead damselflies.
The raptor's eyes popped open and were met by a wave of glazing sap. Never before had he tried to fly and felt only a slight push, the world acknowledging him, but only enough to tell him it was going to be cruel rather than indifferent.
He cried out to Tensilharp, begging for aid, but his pleas became nothing more than a bubble in the resin in front of his beak. It separated and drifted a short ways, but not close enough to the surface to burst.
Now he wanted it back. That was his last breath, and turned and fired as it was into the clay of a desperate bargain, he was sure there was still some good air trapped in its flaws. There had to be, because he had no air left, and any would be good by comparison.
He thrashed in agony, but the archresin did not allow it to show; he was already locked. Mewling did not show, nor curling, nor resignation, nor dying. Forever there was a bird that dared to think he could be something beyond his potential, that could only be immortalized as a terrified fool chasing his last breath like a butterfly.
This was the world of the beities. The Tame was sequestered, regulated, suppressed. One could not win by cleverness any longer, not in the long run, not against creatures with passions as strong as the forces of nature.