“Feeling better?” Ink-Talon squawked as the grasses nearby rustled and the rattlesnake emerged. Gray immediately stopped what it was doing and darted to the opposite side of its guardian, putting the crow between it and the predator.
“Not yet, need to digest.” The snake awkwardly bobbed their head to communicate the message. They paused, tilting their head as they looked his way. “...Did that come through? I still don’t know how any of this works.”
“Yeah, it’s just acting with intent to communicate, whether you make a sound”—Ink-Talon made three distinct clicks with his beak to emphasize the idea—“or move and gesture.” He flapped his right wing silently to express the second half.
“Okay. Good to know.” The snake nodded.
“Though, if you don’t mind me asking, isn’t that something your… other half would know?”
“Why would it know that? It’s just a snake.”
“...Okay, I think we need to back up a bit.” Ink-Talon turned to face the snake with equal parts curiosity and concern. With his attunement dulling his Understanding, he couldn’t be sure of what was really going on with the snake, but something about them felt… wrong. There was an uncanny difference between how they behaved and how any other human he’d interacted with did, even Song, and he couldn’t pinpoint it. But maybe someone else could. “I should introduce you to my companion here, first. Gray? Do you want to say hello? You’re safe, I promise.”
“Okay…” Rather than peek out from the side, the kit instead decided to clamber up onto Ink-Talon’s back, in the same position it’d take as his passenger in flight. “Hello,” it chittered nervously. “Please promise you won’t eat me.”
“I promise,” the snake nodded. “I don’t eat people.”
“But if its not a person?” Gray tensed up, digging its tiny claws into the feathers on Ink-Talon’s back, and prompting the crow to scramble to salvage the situation.
“You will not be eaten, not by them, or anyone else. Not as long as I’m around.” He put as much conviction and absolute certainty into his chirps as he could, and it seemed to placate the kit enough for him to finish the introduction. “This is one of my best friend’s children. We call it Gray because it doesn’t seem that keen on picking a name for itself just yet.” The crow then turned his head, side-eyeing the snake and putting his beak entirely out of view of the squirrel before silently opening and closing it to communicate with the snake privately. “It’s been resistant to the idea of ‘being a person,’ too, so your promise wasn’t the most reassuring thing. We’re working on it.”
“I’m sorry, to both of you.” The snake coiled back and rested their head on themselves, and once more Ink-Talon was hit with that pervading sense of wrongness.
“Nobody was hurt, so don’t worry about it.” Ink-Talon squawked before tilting his head as he continued. “But I think we should hear each other’s stories from the beginning. There’s a lot you don’t know, and a lot that I’m curious to find out.”
----------------------------------------
The rattlesnake explained what had happened to her to Ink-Talon, bracing herself the entire time for the judgment for what she did shortly after arrival. She had blood on her nonexistent hands, and it disgusted her. Surely the crow would feel the same. But that wasn’t the emotion that came across in his croaks and chirps as he responded. No, the crow’s feelings on her sins were entirely absent, as if it didn’t phase him at all. Instead, he just moved on to explaining what his past few weeks had been like.
She and Ink-Talon weren’t the only humans who had found themselves in this world. He had left seven of them behind in “Darksoil,” the city he was fleeing from, and had reason to believe that there were plenty more, all of them tied to whatever lay past that forest where they first woke up. However, when he got to the reason why he and Gray were fleeing, the reason why they traveled so light and slept under camouflaged cover, she realized why his reaction to her story had been so muted.
He already knew about what she had done. It was the reason why he and the others had been persecuted. What he hadn’t known was why.
“I don’t blame you, to be clear,” Ink-Talon trilled sympathetically. “I certainly did, once upon a time, and I still would if you had done it deliberately. But you, that hare, the original owners of our bodies. All of us are just victims of circumstance.”
“What about the snake? It’s here too. It still wants to eat, and it doesn’t care if its prey is sapient.”
“That snake isn’t you.” Ink-Talon stepped forward, crouched and tentatively extended a wing, only draping it over her back when she didn’t express any objections. “I don’t think it’s even the original owner of that body. I think it’s just… a snake. The raw consciousness of the animal brain, unaltered by the Gift of Understanding. I’ve… experienced that before, but not in the way you are. The crow-mind was only ever present in the absence of the Gift altogether, when I… wasn’t.”
“But… why?” She stared desperately into the crow’s eyes, hoping against hope that he might have an answer. He didn’t.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
“I don’t know. Two of my friends back in Darksoil, a Komodo Dragon and a giant salamander, have a similar kind of dual-minded nature, but neither of them involve a feral mind or actively conflict like this.” Once more, the Ink-Talon’s expressions were worryingly devoid of emotion.
Is he always like this? Numb to the pain of these questions? Or was he just hiding his true feelings? The snake tried not to overthink it, because neither possibility was particularly reassuring. She wasn’t doing a very good job. He does seem to genuinely care, but why is he so… calm?
“I don’t like the way I am, either,” Gray squeaked, finally moving out from behind Ink-Talon, but still tense and prepared to run away. “I also want to learn why. Do you?”
The rattlesnake mind immediately saw its next meal, but the already-eaten mouse and an emphatic and preemptive denial from her human mind got it to settle down without a fight this time.
“I… don’t know what I want.” She shook her head, dejected. “At least, I don’t know what I want that’s possible. Because going home doesn’t seem to be. But… I don’t think I want to go looking for answers, either. Not when I can barely handle the situation in front of me.”
The snake-mind, however, knew exactly what it wanted, and for once the two of them were in agreement. To it, entertaining these questions was a waste of time when so much needed to be done to survive. It wanted nothing more than to rest in peace, digest this meal, and then go hunt something more substantial. It would avoid hunting the two in front of it because it knew that there would just be another stalemate if it didn’t, but something needed to be eaten sooner rather than later.
“Well, finding stability and safety is incredibly important, and the two of us are in dire need of it as well. You’re welcome to accompany us.” Ink-Talon looked down at the squirrel next to him. “Is that okay with you, Gray?”
“Yes.” The kit simply nodded, not explaining anything further, but the answer seemed to make the crow relax. Was he really putting that much stock in an animal-child’s opinion? What would he have done if it said no? And if he was leaving the decision of staying with them up to him…
“...Wait.” The snake coiled back, pulling out from under Ink-Talon’s wing. “You didn’t come out here searching for me? The way you talked about the situation back in that city, I thought finding me to clear everyone’s names was the goal. How did you find me, then?”
“I… didn’t?” The crow tilted his head and croaked in confusion. “You found us, remember? But you lost control before you could introduce yourself.”
“No! I genuinely was going to let the snake eat you to save us both.” She rattled her tail as she shuddered in shame and disgust. “I had no idea you were a person at all, much less human.”
“But you said you traveled a while to get here. Why go that far for a meal when there’s plenty available?”
“I don’t know, okay?” she hissed back. “It was arbitrary! Don’t blame me for Fate deciding that I’d have to try and eat the only person around who could help me!”
“...Fate?” The crow was well and truly stumped by that one. “Are you serious, or is that just an attempt at a turn of phrase?”
“Dead serious. How else would you explain it? And before you say ‘coincidence,’ tell me why you are here, in this exact spot, having bedded down directly upwind from where I had been.”
“We’re lost.” Gray answered for the crow, blunt and confident.
“We are not lost,” Ink-Talon squawked, stomping a foot for emphasis. “I could easily get us back to Darksoil. I just… don’t know where anything else is. I never bothered to look closely at any of those terrible maps and I never planned on having to flee the city. I know the Highnests are vaguely ‘dawnward,’ from what the Explorers said, so that’s the way we’re going.”
“So, you just picked a heading arbitrarily and flew that way?”
“More or less, I guess?”
“See what I mean?” The snake reared up a bit, bringing her head to eye-level with the crow. “You just randomly picked a direction to move in, and it just happened to be directly towards me. And then I randomly selected your scent out of all of the ones I could smell and though sheer luck managed to re-find it repeatedly during the long trip. How impossible does a coincidence have to get before it stops being one?”
“Okay, it’s far-fetched, but so is the other option.” The crow huffed and fluffed up his feathers. It was definitely an unpleasant idea to contemplate, so she couldn’t blame him for being annoyed by it. “There has to be another explanation. But even if there isn't, what should we do about it?”
“Nothing. Just keep picking randomly until something obvious presents itself, like you probably were already.” The rattlesnake attempted to smile, which was perhaps the most menacing face she could have made, but Ink-Talon got the intent a few seconds after flinching. “The idea that we’re being drawn towards each other just gives me a little hope, and I’m going to hold on to that. So lead the way, and I’ll follow.”
“Sure, whatever makes things easier for you. We all need hope.” The crow looked around and then up at the sky. It was mid-afternoon, judging by the sun’s position. “We’re staying here tonight, though. You still need to rest and eat some more.”
“Rest. That does sound good…” The snake found an open sunny patch where the grass had been flattened already and coiled up in it. It is good not to be alone anymore, but interacting with other people is still just as awkward as it always was. Funny how that works.
Humor does not further our survival. If she wasn’t already cold-blooded, the awareness of coherent thoughts that were not her own would have made her blood run cold anyway. Rest. We hunt as soon as we are able.
The snake mind had just spoken to her, and she decided that working through the implications of that was a job for a future version of herself.
Correct. Future ideas must not take priority over present needs.
And it was a real nag, too. Great.