In the golden dusk of the city’s ruins, a crowd of people filled the streets, their eyes trained on the lone balcony jutting out from a tower, anxious to gaze upon their god in the flesh.

But the one who rested in that tower was afraid to meet them. A sense of wrongness held him in place.

It knotted in his chest, and reminded him of an instrument wound too tight, turning notes into shrill sounds. He could feel the surface of it. Like some great, dark wave in the distance, rising to meet the sky. Rushing, to crash against the land.

Poire could hear it, too. Above the noise of all those people, anxiously talking and squawking and chirping at each other.

The sound of the wrongness. A shifting, rolling rumble, like the distant peal of thunder that never ends. And, despite the stillness of the evening air, Poire could hear the singing of the wind. It seemed to carry voices up from the crowds. Somehow, it was all familiar.

Poire’s conclave had been sparsely populated, never more than three hundred people in that huge, underground complex. But the Cauldron was home to millions, even after the destruction of the last few weeks.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of them were outside this balcony now, watching. Waiting for him to come out. But the wrongness held him back.

Poire focused on his breath as he paced back and forth in the back temple, feeling the knotted threads of the carpet under his feet. Just breathe. It’s just nerves. Just breathe. The chirping, squawking, singing conversation of avians brushed at the curtains that separated his room from the balcony. A lamp sputtered in the corner, shape shifting the shadows of the chunks of stone and sacks of mortar dust, the hammers and nails and chisels leaning against the walls.

Only a few weeks ago, this city faltered on the brink of death. A cyran Magistrate, a wicked, power-starved alien, had held the Cauldron hostage with an old terraforming barge. All the energy of the sun, focused into a lantern of pure heat. Then, drunk on a power that was not his own, the Magistrate began to burn the Cauldron, killing cyran and avian alike…

...until Poire had walked through that sweltering heat, and used the old city’s reserves to raise the dome, just for a moment. Just long enough to slice the barge in half.

To the people who lived here, it was an act of destiny. Poire, the last human, the savior of aviankind, had finally come and released the city from Imperial oppression. Salvation. Just as their prophecy said. Though it would take them many years, maybe even generations to rebuild, they celebrated his coming.

But he was not done mourning. Over the last weeks, Poire wondered if he would ever stop feeling like a fragment of himself. All his caretakers and his friends, and their caretakers, too. All those dreams of what he might become, if only he could grow faster. Become smarter, just like his friends.

Their faces were still so near. Tan or pale or dark as the evening sky. Elyse and Judorico and Gael and Tang. It seemed only a month ago, he had been living with them. Talking with them. Trying to compete with them (though he knew where he stood).

Weren’t those just faces now? Weren’t those just names?

When he closed his eyes, it was as if he could see thousands of years of growth and becoming, sliced away in a single, dark hour. The panic in Nuwa’s face, as she dragged him into the cold chamber, and saved his life.

Nuwa, who had always tried so hard with him. Even when the other caretakers had started to look at him with their hollow eyes, and speak to him with hollow words. Watching him fail. He could look at them, and see the hope fading like a flame without air.

It did not matter how low they brought the bar. It did not matter how many tests he ran through, how many hundreds of hours he spent trying.

Poire had always feared they would decide he wasn’t worth it. And what then?

But Nuwa had always been there. “Give it time, Poire,” Nuwa had said. “You can’t rush these things.” But even then, he would search her face. Try to read her thoughts.

You will never be what we need you to be.

Whatever that was.

And now, despite everything he had done, he felt more lost than ever. Each passing day seemed to hammer in the finality of his existence.

The last.

Alone.

And surrounded by hordes of alien beings. They were outside his window, right now. Gathered and waiting - just for him.

An evening song warbled over the nearby rooftops, a prayer to the dead gods. To me, he thought. It’s getting late.

When he cupped his hands over his ears to block out the song, it made that other sound grow louder. A rumbling resonance, as if a whole ocean was rising up inside of him.

What is this?

What is happening to me?

A curtain rod rattled behind him. The room in this temple still had no door. Or rather, the broken splinters of the door were still leaning against the wall. In stepped a slouched corvani whose feathers were not quite starting to gray. His talons clicked gently on the stone floor, and his wiry muscles rolled with an old litheness.

“Heads up, Fledge. There’s more of them than I thought there would be. And…” The corvani stopped mid-sentence. His blue-black feathers rustled as he crooked his head to the side, concern furrowing his brow. “What’s wrong?”

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The question was more alert, than tender, as if Eolh the Listener expected danger.

Poire brought his hands down, his ears suddenly cool from the sweat of his palms.

“Do you hear it?” Poire said.

“Hear what? I hear a lot of things. The evening song? Or all those voices outside? Listen, I tried to tell her not to let so many come, but I don’t think even she could stop them. She may be the Queen, but you’re a god. To them, anyway.”

“No,” Poire shook his head. “Do you hear the wind?”

“Wind?” Eolh’s two black eyes bored into him. Deep and dark and suspicious.

Poire shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the cold chamber. Maybe I’m still waking up.”

It was starting to recede now. Returning to that far off, distant howl.

“Could you ask the an-droid about it?” Eolh said.

He could see the worry written in Eolh’s face. In the way the corvani’s crest feathers went rigid.

Poire closed his eyes. He took a long, slow breath. Focusing on the air, filling his lungs. Just the way Nuwa had taught him. All the way in, letting the oxygen in the air nourish his body. And out.

I have to do this. I owe them.

The last of the reverberations of that distant thunder seemed to drain away, and even the red pain in his head eased, until all that was left was that sole, solemn song, melodic and monotonous at the same time, rising and falling from some high temple beyond the rooftops.

“I’ll be alright,” Poire said.

“We can call this off,” Eolh said. “We don’t have to do this now.”

“How long have they been waiting?”

He laughed, a dry, croaking sound, “They’ve been waiting their whole lives, Fledge. Their whole lives, and more.”

“Then, I won’t keep them.”

The corvani went first through the empty frame of the door that led to the balcony, pushing away the tattered fabric that blocked out the light and the rising humidity of the Cauldron. Evening heat breathed against Poire and suddenly, the liquid armor - that almost-alive old tech that crawled over his body - felt too close and too tight, making his skin prickle with sweat.

As if the armor could sense his discomfort, it thinned out over his body, rolling down his arms and his legs. Cooling his skin as it carried away the heat.

Poire straightened his shoulders. Breathed deep of that humid air. And stepped out onto the balcony.

A hundred bruised colors painted the sky, from the golden orange of the setting sun, to the blood-red that fringed the lowest clouds. High above, the deep purple of the waning dusk turned to night.

Below, there were the clay rooftops, and the walls of brickwork pockmarked with new scars - burn marks and gunshots. Poire could not see the streets through all the bodies, all the faces waiting below. Stained crimson in the exploding light of dusk.

Avians of every feather. From the strongest falcyr to the humblest passerine. Black-feathered corvani, pockets of ornately feathered priests holding candles in long rows down the street, and every kind of avian in between. There were clusters of redenites, with those austere masks still pulled over their faces to shade their sensitive eyes. And there was a reptile, with huge bulging eyes that never seemed to blink at the same time.

All of them, silent.

All of them, in awe of him.

The last living human.

And some distant sound… like the crashing of an ocean. Rolling. Rising.

Breathe.

It was the Queen who caught his eye first. She was standing in the middle of the cobble street, ringed by her falcyr guards. She leaned heavily on a cane made of dark kapok wood, and her skin was a shock of pale white under the vibrant reds and golds of her cloak. She wore it slung over her shoulder, to show her unfeathered skin, as if she was proud of what she had been suffered, all in the name of her people.

Her eyes shone with the same adoration they always did, that glorious, loving relief of a disciple gazing upon her lord.

It was she who bowed first.

And then, every gathered alien did the same, until a wave of motion took them all, some of them bowing at the waist, others falling to their knees. Crying out, a thousand voices becoming one.

Hail! They chanted, in all their strange tongues. Hail, the Savior!

Their voices shook the balcony itself, a roar that crashed up from the streets.

But Poire could not hear them.

Instead, as his eyes wandered over the gathered masses, he heard a sound like nothing else in the universe. As if all the oceans in all the worlds were suddenly flooding into the valley of his mind. Deafening. Swallowing him whole in that thunderous howl. Clapping against him, threatening to bring him low.

He closed his eyes. He tried to focus on his breath. Taking long, slow inhalations.

And when he opened his sight again, he gazed upon not this world, but another.

The sky was wrong. A silvery, gray brilliance as bright as the surface of a sun. Shrouding the city in a primal light, the kind of light that existed long before the smallest organism crawled up from the depths of the void.

The air itself was churning, like magma spewing from the mouth of an endless volcano. It made the roofs warp out of place, made the walls run against each other, until everything was melting and pushing against each other and changing.

Below him, all these avians, all these alien peoples, were being becoming something else. Something that Poire’s eyes could not understand. Their skin shifted in and out of place. Feathers became fur, became scales. Became something else. Their faces twisted, eyes rolling up or down, beaks and mouths tilting, turning inside out. They were still singing. Still chanting. But now their voices became a single, writhing scream.

All of them, everything, changing.

One figure stood out. One who did not change.

The figure was covered head-to-toe in a kind of fabric that stayed unnaturally still, even as the figure picked their way through the crowd.

Each step they took was heavy, made a glassy, metallic, almost electric clang. Each step, cracked the stone beneath the figures feet, so that the ground itself opened up in its wake, spreading this change with it, carving a ravine that devoured stone and dirt and roots of ancient trees, even as those, too, morphed into unreal shapes.

And as the figure passed by kneeling avians, as the ravine opened in their wake, the people there made no effort to save themselves. Allowing themselves to be swallowed.

The figure put two hands to its hood. And began to peel away the cloth.

Poire could see the figure’s face, but his mind could not understand it. The face and all its features were not of this reality.

The future? The past?

Is any of this real?

But Poire understood one thing with absolute certainty. As he looked down from the balcony, and saw the figure staring up at him, he was certain that whoever it was - whatever it was - could see him.

Was watching him, right now.

Then, the world went dark.

***

Eolh caught him before he fell. Bloody foam dripped from the fledgling’s mouth.

Eolh shielded him from the crowd below, wrapping his arms, folding his wings over the slender youth.

Before Eolh carried him back inside, he caught a glance out over the balcony.

All the people gathered below were staring. Their awe had turned to horror.