Creatures with Wings

The world had truly become a dangerous place.

A wise individual would know never to travel through the increasingly scarce lands and seas alone. Even a child foolish enough to set out on their own would be left for dead by their own mother if she herself were wise. However, if someone had the chance to travel by flight, the chances of harm coming to them might as well be null. The skies above the clouds were normally quiet and serene, and a beast daemn like Phoel knew this well.

In the centuries Phoel had been exploring the skies, the great firebird of enormous wingspan had only seen enough settlements to count on ten pinions. As she flew, she would often see a diversity of wanderers on the ground far below her, but they were almost always too cautious of what was on the ground to look up. She had made it a very important point to always keep a great distance between herself and everyone else in order to remain safe from being seen and hunted, even if that meant passing them by as they were being torn apart by feral creatures or otherwise. Only then, in their last moments, would they look to the skies for a salvation that wouldn’t come. Being solitary was something she had to do for herself, and the sights and sounds of the world were more than enough company for her.

Most beasts like Phoel had the ability to transform into a being resembling something of a person, but she hadn’t needed to use that form since she was very young, before life began to rapidly disappear from the world; sometimes she thought she knew the answer as to why, but other times she felt the reason was beyond her comprehension. All she knew was that somehow, the earth itself was alive, and it voraciously craved the extinction of all life. Often, she sought the safety nestled deep within skytrees that touched the clouds and ancient buildings that stood hundreds of meters high, built by an unknown civilization who were thought to have disappeared thousands of years ago before her birth.

The bright stars of the late Spring evening above filled Phoel with their fire as she glided through the sky on a strong breeze, her feathers whipping against the wind and the scent of warm air filling her beak. Even the sunlight reflected off of the moons helped to give her strength enough to fly for long stretches of time without rest. At this height, the ground below appeared eerily divided into multicolored shapes and sections.

The Vastwoods, north, ahead, she thought. The Sandlands, south. Subulna, even further north. Colors of gold, gray and green meshed with one another against the earth. She would chase rivers without end which resembled blue veins split into the earth traveling far beyond a bird’s eye, and great shadows cast from massive trees painted portions of the ground black. She could almost feel her body rising and falling as she flew over towering hills and depressed valleys - a feeling that would never get old to her.

How’s the night tonight? she asked herself as she approached dense woodland.

Quiet night, she replied. Not a cloud.

How many quiet, cloudless nights have you counted now?

Four-hundred? Four-thousand? Has it been that long? Phoel looked up at the white constellations. Distant memories of death and grief filled her mind.

Take a breath. Her mind was silent for a time. Remember that you’re not responsible for them.

Phoel turned her head back to the forests in front of her. It wasn’t my fault. And the voice was quiet.

Her wings began to grow stiff shortly after this exchange; she’d been flying at a slow pace for eight days and nights without stopping, and this was typically her limit before she would have to stop for a short time. She lowered herself down towards the edge of the woods as she approached, landing inside of a good-sized tree to rest her wings. She settled in and closed her eyes, but she soon noticed that the sounds of the forest became increasingly overwhelming.

Nightlarks, she thought. Damned singing nightlarks. Why are they so upset?

A child’s scream split through the sound of the birds, causing her eyes to shoot open and the nightlarks to begin crying louder. Phoel looked around through the darkness and began to hear the faint, agitated cries of several people through the thick woodlands. One semblance of a word was yelled that she had to think about shortly before she realized what it was: ‘demon’.

Phoel’s talons tightened around the branch she roosted on, thinking that maybe the nightlarks, which were averse to light, were riled up due to the light of flames manned by people. Her heart started pounding as the shouting intensified, growing increasingly more aggressive as if to drown out the terrified fauna.

It could be anything. Her thoughts raced ferociously in her head, and her body was locked between fight or flight. No reason to entangle myself in such reckless violence.

But she hadn’t seen a large gathering of people in years, and certainly not one like this. Intense curiosity took over, and Phoel found the inner strength to begin hopping from tree to tree. As she approached the cries of dozens of people rallied together, a bright, flickering light shone through the thick trees ahead, which she knew was fire she had the ability to spy from; Phoel closed her eyes and her mind was projected into the flames of a torch held by a woman. The woman was surrounded by a crowd of at least forty or so people dressed similarly to her, most of them wearing long-sleeved white shirts bearing odd symbols and each of them wearing necklaces with giant heart-shaped lockets rested against their chests. She noticed that as she looked at them, their eyes glinted brightly against the light of the fire, and each of them were colored uncommonly. The entire crowd was made up of daemns, though she did not know their species.

Her attention was soon drawn to a young man’s high, cracking voice towards the center of the crowd: “The birds hate fire. What about you, creature? Do you feel fear?” He brandished his torch close to the face of the creature he spoke of.

She felt her stomach lurch; he was just a child - three or four, maybe - with chains wrapped tightly around his thin torso, hands, and legs, his weeping eyes sunken and his scowling face covered with his own matted hair. He stared at the torch, confused and hurt, but he didn’t back away. His back looked somehow deformed to her, as if he had some sort of protrusion jutting out from his shoulders.

She had seen barbaric acts of violence in her travels, and she’d come across carnage even more often, but Phoel had never seen such cruelty enacted against a child like this. Before she could decide how she was going to handle this, if at all, a larger and much older man made his way through the crowd, raising his hands and yelling for the crowd to become silent. The teenager taunting the boy backed away while the older man held up a large ring of keys in one hand. He grabbed the child’s chains - causing him to flinch back in fear - and unlocked the clasp around his torso. Two massive, aubergine wings of skin and bone unfurled from the boy’s back and the pained look on his face withered away slightly. The loud din of the crowd began up again, and through it, words of hatred called out at him.

“Rapist!”

“Murderer!”

“DEMON!” A stone cast at the boy hit him in the forehead, and he stumbled back with a yelp.

Phoel felt a great anger surge through her body and a pull towards the crowd to do something. She hadn’t seen the likes of the boy’s race in what felt to her like millennia; the bat daemns were powerful, domineering and vicious beasts who spent their long lifespans shedding blood and forcing themselves on anything that moved, but this boy looked as if he had hardly just learned to walk. Phoel’s vision returned to her eyes and she skillfully began to weave through the trees low to the forest floor, landing on the ground near the clearing unsighted.

The cloaked man pinned the boy to the ground in one swift, merciless motion, using a long blade to cut away at the already torn rags around his body. “Now I will cut away the wings and cleanse the child!” he cried, and the crowd chanted out their agreement, but the boy’s screams of denial rung louder through the forest.

Before she could question her actions, Phoel let out her own war cry, like the sound of a thousand hawks screeching. Save for the crackling of the flames and the child’s sobbing, silence befell the entire clearing. She stood tall, slowly spreading her seven-meter-long wingspan over the crowd and breathing out a stream of flames that careened outwards into the sky. The heat that the people felt was enough to make them flinch and start dispersing.

A woman screamed, “Beast!”

“The demon has summoned a monster!”

However, the cloaked man was undeterred. He roughly flipped the boy over and lifted the knife, not to cut the boy’s wings but in an attempt to drive it through his heart. Phoel didn’t hesitate to blow a controlled flame at his hair, sending him into a frenzied panic as he searched relentlessly for a way to put it out. She then felt something crash into her side; a daemn man, armed with fangs and claws, began ripping at her feathers relentlessly. She didn’t hesitate to clamp her beak down on his head and powerfully toss him aside, but soon she was being flanked by several daemns that looked much like her attacker threatening to take her down. Some of them even held bows.

Phoel pounced into flight immediately towards the boy, locking her talons onto the chains wrapped around his wrists and lifting herself towards the sky in one smooth motion. She flew quick and far, heart pounding and blood running cold.

“Hurt!” The fact that the boy could speak startled her out of her trepidation; she looked down at him, seeing an arrow stuck in his shoulder, very close to his throat. Phoel very nearly began crying from the stress she had induced on herself.

After lowering herself again to an unfamiliar ground she was sure wasn’t safe, she gently set the boy down and landed, and in a burst of flames, she assumed the form of a woman.

“I’m sorry, I need h-hands-” She was further appalled when she realized that her skin was not smooth, but covered head to toe in a thick plumage of bright, fine feathers. Hardly swayed by her miraculous transformative ability, the boy stared on at the arrow in tearful shock.

“It’s just like a big thorn, little daemn,” she said, her own voice which she hadn’t heard in years sounding shaky and unreal to her. Phoel collapsed to her knees in front of him and he collapsed too, looking downwards. She reached over and plucked the arrow from his shoulder in one swift gesture. He shot a look at her, wincing and clasping the now open wound. He then began sobbing hysterically.

“I-I had to take it out,” she said.

“No,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Help me, you… you help me.”

Phoel finally let tears of her own come to her eyes. She reached out and parted his dark hair, and saw that his eyes were a beautiful, deep midnight blue.