I have a life and a death from crows. It all started with the one in the yard. My older brother was going to shoot it with his BB gun. I took pity on it and took a BB into my right hand that is still in there. It aches when there is a mist.

I awoke to the soothing clicks and hushes of sprinklers and the warmth of a summer afternoon pouring through an open window. Dreaming of the eyes of crows; I'd grown so fast I'd forgotten everything else. I'd learned to call them to my windowsill and I fed them there. Then the three crows would leave.

I could call the ones at the seafood restaurant where I work to give them food. Once, there was one in the trash, and someone had dropped the lid, trapping it. The others were all around and calling to me crazily. I opened the lid and it flew out and they all flew away.

Later, on my car, there were several gifts. Two pennies, a carwash token, some jacket stuffing, a yellow wire and a green pebble. I accepted the stuff on top of my car, noticing that the crows were watching to see what I would do.

Years later, I was in the park with my nephews. We saw a crow and two falcons. I said the crow would drive them off and it did. A few weeks later I saw a crow driving a bald eagle. In the air, the crows outmaneuver the larger birds and spook them from above. This is due to the crow's intelligence. It knows the eagle or hawk could destroy it. The crow is relentless and smart. It knows how to take the giant down. I realized I'd seen all of this before, crows driving squirrels, rabbits and even cats. It was no surprise that they went after other birds.

I'd once seen the crows, at the seafood restaurant I worked at, surround and harass a seagull to keep it from getting into the trash. They had learned the hard way that seagulls scattered trash and then the lid got left shut. So seagulls got banned by the crows. This one seagull wasn't getting the message until finally another crow showed up. As if they were waiting for this particular crow to arrive and swoop at the gull, they all did in unison, and the seagull suddenly figured out it wasn't welcome.

"And thus I tell thee of their ways, so that thou may kin mine, for these are the same. Together now, listen and I shall explain." I whispered my own words. Then I said what I wanted to explain: "Together I am yours and thou art mine. For mine eyes see as yours, and you heed my call. This I know and the secrets of your unhatched ones. The wisdom of the older and more gentle world, covered now in a layer of Man."

They didn't care about my words, it seemed. They had their own language, much older and wiser. I wanted to go with them and learn their stories. This was not the love that was meant to be. The worst of my days had yet to dawn.

In my heart I carried their shadows everywhere. It was a song I could always hear, their distant calls. Under each sound they made was a deeper meaning, esoteric and vast at once. Theirs was the whole world without time and they cast their shadows over Man since the beginning. They wished to show me some paths, I knew not why.

Here I would find a bush of strange berries. I ate them and became very sick. Then I could hear their music. It was upon the breeze, as I lay in my vomit, barely conscious. I could hear the world: I could hear the sound of violins in the grass, an orchestra of crickets, and the diva was the mother of my crow. She sang and I understood the emotion of the song: it was mourning.

I got up and continued to dig and accept money in the name of Man, as life demands. Each job was less beautiful and paid better. The crows applauded my masquerade with laughter and roasts of great merriment. I even took a woman, but it lasted only a few nights before I was tired of her words. I told her to go and she begged to stay. I could not abide her pleas nor her presence. She ended up staying and I left.

Just as well. My real friends were on the move. Something down on the port had drawn them by the thousands at eventide. I tread the path they showed me, and alighted upon my way, they danced with their wingtips. I saw then what this was to them.

Four crows stood in a cross upon the ground of the parking lot in the center of the white lightshaft. This cathedral they made; some court of maybe a thousand crows sitting and watching in silence. I alone witnessed this; that was not of the corvin bloodstock.

The female among the four hopped forward and then back and flapped her wings, scattering from the other three. Then the two crows left facing each other did fight. I had never seen two crows fight each other. It had rules; unlike the savage disciplines they admonished upon greater birds and beasts. They were fencing and sometimes they would stop and admire each other.

Finally the one was struck down. The matter was settled and all the birds took off. They did so just as the one that had stood before the two fighters gave one loud and shrill call. The air was battered by their wings and a passing bat panicked in their downdraft. Only the wounded fighter and his mother remained.

She hopped past him, tilting her head, and then she left him there. I can tell by their manners what their relationships are, sometimes. This was an obviously matriarchal approach. If I misunderstood it, then their was an added complexity to her abandonment of the fallen bird.

I lifted him from the ground. I took him with me.

Each day I tended to his needs. I practiced my crow noises on him and he made no response. One day he flew around my room so I opened my window and he flew out. He came back.

From then on he was imprinted on me and we went everywhere. He couldn't fly well anymore, they had clipped his wings during the trial-by-combat ritual I had witnessed. No crows spoke to him or to me when I carried him upon my shoulder.

I went on walks and he would open his wings to the breeze, as if pretending to soar. I had to get a staff to protect him from other animals, as our walks became our way. I quit my job and just lived off the money I had hoarded.

As we went I tried to speak to him with the words I knew in corvin, but he refused to know his own language for me. So I resorted to speaking to him in my own words: sounding as much like his own language as I could. This he liked and finally he made noises back.

As we walked I narrated the world around us and he would repeat, sometimes adding details. Some of his details were abstract; at first I did not know what he meant. Then I realized he was telling me about stories he knew about our world.

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So I shared my own stories. I talked about my life and the things I had done. When he grasped the game, he told me his own life, using the language we had made to explain. His imagination was limited, he only ever spoke of places where we were. So to hear new stories I had to take him to new places.

That was easy, he guided me onto trails and paths where men had seldom, if ever, gone before. I saw springs and rocks that were from the dawn of the world and still held some magic where they stood in holy shade.

"Do not look, my Lord." Cory suddenly warned me. I did not heed him, and woe that I did not. For it was his words that might have spared me to know of one place and its denizen that has brought my heart to such pain.

She made me look by calling to me with melodious laughter from the branches and twigs that were too thick for me to penetrate. I saw her large brown eyes and her dark lips and the speckled light on her freckled cheeks. And then the dancing one was gone, silently across the leaves like a deer. I should have known fear, for such a thing to be, and to be near it.

"Must go now." Cory urged me. This time I listened, sensing that somehow I was in-danger.

Sometime later I saw a man walking with her. She had disguised herself to look like a woman, wearing clothing and speaking to him. Only her laughter was the same. Although I knew she was sincerely delighted by him, her sinister intentions were a secret I had to know.

At the edge of her ancient glade, surrounded on all sides by apartments, she stopped him. He stood in a trance and she shifted her form to her true shape as she fed. I watched as she extended her taproot to his heart, through his mouth. Her nourishment was the love he had to offer and it was her justice to have it. Mankind had destroyed her world and then forgotten her. She had done nothing to deserve this, she had given Man wisdom over the forest long ago. Forgetful Man had cut down her forests. She had a right to survive and she took no more than she needed.

When he had no more love to give her she found another. She discovered I was watching her and she changed her path. Then one day Cory warned me:

"This is too far, we have seen." Cory warned me carefully, in our hybrid language.

I was confronted by the creature. She stood in the early morning, barring my path with a sage smile, her eyes tilted down on me. I knew that to see her true countenance was both an honor and a threat. She was capable of defending herself and I knew her way. She would cloud my mind and take my love from within my heart. Yet she was not doing that. This was a parley.

"Stay away. I know your kind too, and it is not fair that you seek me." She spoke slowly and with a gentleness I was not expecting.

I felt sorry for her and agreed to stay away from her. She darted into some trees; the mists she disturbed, with her sweatpants worn over faun legs, made my hand ache.

"What is it?" Cory knew I was in pain.

"My hand hurts from the mist." I complained.

"The Martyr." Cory said strangely.

"What have you said? I don't know that word." I carefully asked.

"One who dies for another." Cory spoke in reverence. "He was around in the early dawn. The mist came and took his breath. He held her hand and froze that way, but her life was spared. She will always remember The Martyr she said again and again. That is her. Now we are in real danger." Cory told one of his stories. It was among the more comprehensible ones.

"I remind her of someone?" I asked, trying to be certain I was getting the point.

"I will always remember you." Cory agreed.

"What will happen?" I asked.

"Death will always happen." Cory told his favorite joke. Then he added thoughtfully: "Except when my Lord reaches down from the light and fixes the broken one's wing. That was a funny day."

"Indeed it was." I smiled.

"She will not forget." Cory decided to answer my question, in his own way. "She will remember."

"Some paths are best left unexplored." I realized. Had I not met her, I would not know the dull horror I felt. I knew that her world was not meant to be mortal, and yet now it was. In her shade she was waiting to die with her sisters, every forest that was gone. A timeless creature that had learned about time. She had taught Man how to love the living world, sharing her gentle wisdom long ago with an innocent species. Man, in return, had taught her about death.

She had told me it was unfair. I understood this, in my own way. I did not want the knowledge I had. It raged a kind of self-loathing in me, a kind of fear of The Other, and of discovering there wasn't one. Just me, I was the face of this animal she had fled from and fed on.

"What is her name?" I asked Cory, dreading that I should know the name of something as old as time.

"Khurl." Cory knew the names of all things. It was a specialty of his.

"Is she the only one?" I wondered.

"I don't know that." Cory knew something though and said: "There must be a death."

"How do you know that?" I wondered.

"Always when this is known, there must be a death. You know, now a death must be." Cory had a tone that was like 'of-course it's like this'.

We sat by the trail leading to her woods, when one of the men we had seen her with, was walking by us. He had a camera and a knife.

"My Lord, he was kissed by Khurl." Cory told me.

"I know." I got up and we followed him, Cory upon my shoulder.

We stalked him as he stalked Khurl. I had the advantage in the forest. My bird would go to the branches with his limited flight. I could track him with ease without giving myself away, by watching him with my spy.

As he got closer to her home I realized I was going to have to end this. His death would be the one owed. It was my fault, for learning of her, yet it was his choice to be here. Was I being superstitious? I chuckled in the cool shade and the mists there pained me.

He had the knife out in one hand, having found something that his fears obsessed to him. I came up behind the young man with more silence than I thought I could. I used my staff on the back of his head and knocked him out cold.

I had to drag him back out of the forest across a carpet of painful mist. I had his knife, knowing that there must be death.

When I had found a place far from her home, along the trail, I was so exhausted from dragging him that I couldn't do it. Cory fluttered down and asked:

"Will he die, my Lord?" Cory asked.

"You know that." I nodded. I took up the knife and turned his head sideways. Then I quickly plunged it into the base of his skull and into his brain, severing his spinal cord. This would be where he died, not in her forest.

"You are dead now." Cory told the corpse.

"Why did you do that?" I asked him.

"So that he will know he is dead. It happened while he was asleep. He was confused. It is okay now. He says it is okay." Cory jumped up onto the dead man's chest. "Open his mouth."

I did heed my crow and forced the man's mouth open. Cory inhaled the man's last breath. I asked: "Was that his soul you were taking?"

"His soul? His soul already left." Cory sounded amused. "I was just sniffing the feast to come. Even though my way is with you, others will come and enjoy this."

"A murder of crows." I nodded. I watched as Cory went up to the face and ate the man's right eye. Then I wiped my fingerprints off of the knife handle. "That's enough."

"Yes, my Lord." Cory obeyed and returned to my shoulder.

We left him there without an apology and his spirit drifted away, presumably. The sun was appearing in the sky and the mists burned away.

"I will not forget." I heard a whisper of Khurl's voice on the breeze.

This made me smile.

I'm not proud of what I did to him, but it was necessary. The appalling facts of what I did and how I accomplished it are no longer important. His death was my fault and something that haunted me and plagued me from that day forward.

Indeed, if I had not become a murderer, the darkness would be our world, rather than my soul. The story of how the world changed anyway, and how my involvement was destiny, is what is important. I am sorry if I have omitted the details of that day, but I assure you that it is the consequences that matter, and not the events of that day.

And so, with a strange elation and the first pains of a heavy heart, Cory and I set upon the path of mysteries and horrors, darkness and redemption.