ToastySpam
Legend
Ravaged
The corpse looked miserable.
That was the first thing Eld thought when he saw the bird. The feathers on its back were ruffled and split, the soft fibres splayed apart. On one side its skull had entirely caved in and there was a circle of dried blood where it had hit the scale. He imagined it falling out of the sky; a fat, feathered raindrop.
He stood – with his teacher Ifed and the decaying bird – at the very top of Scout’s Peak. They were right on the edge of Hynafaidd; only a few bodies from the endless fall into the cloud barrier. Up here, the gale was dangerously strong. It ripped at their clothes, howled into their ears, and tugged their hair with cold fingers.
But even Eld, timid though he was, did not feel frightened. His attention was too drawn to the rarity that lay before him.
A ravager gull.
Usually they were seen in flocks – huge swarms of feather, beak and talon that had a propensity for blotting out the sun. It wasn’t often that they descended upon Tref, but when they did it was a catastrophe for the unprepared.
Even the majestic Pilots could only do so much. The role of a squadron during a ravager attack was not to defend against the predators, but to lead them away from home. The might of the Hebog paled against a few a hundred gulls, all of them slicing with serrated bills and stabbing with pointed toes.
Once a flock was spotted on the horizon, you dropped everything. It didn’t matter what it was, how important, or how inconvenient. You got the Below out of there and to any cover you could find. The safest place of all was within the ancient metal walls of the Aelwyd – one of the only substances truly impervious to the vicious little creatures. Unfortunately, most were left to cower in their homes; hoping against hope that the flock wouldn’t catch their scent and dive-bomb the roof.
A literal slap on the wrist woke Eld from his reverie. Ifed frowned up at him, lowering her hand.
“Eldwyn! Answer the damned question!”
“S-sorry. I didn’t hear.”
Her eyebrows knotted further across her head as she tutted at him.
Ifed was a woman of fierce appearance and fiercer manner. Silver eyebrows spanned her brow like buzzard wings. Her hair – greying, but still thick – was knotted back behind her head in a practical bun. She glared at him with darkly sharp eyes.
“For the sake of the Lord Below, my boy! How can one hope to succeed as a scholar if they cannot muster the will to pay attention?”
Eld wasn’t sure he’d ever heard her say a sentence not punctuated with an audial exclamation mark.
“I’m very s-sorry, High Scholar Ifed. Please could you repeat the question?”
In response, she tutted at him and gestured to the gull’s corpse.
“What is the sex of this bird?”
Eld paused. Sexing birds of any species was a difficult task. Unlike with Trefyans or lizards, there were no obvious physical differences between the genders. Even genitalia was similar between them, and existed only as internal vents.
He tapped his finger against his thigh nervously, wracking his brain to remember what they had covered in his lessons. Normally memory wasn’t an issue for him, but being put on the spot like this had completely emptied his mind. He felt as if the wind were blowing through one ear and out the other.
“I think… I think it’s a male.”
“And why is that?”
“The bill is quite s-stout. In accordance, the body appears to be larger than one would expect for a female gull.”
Ifed gave a curt nod, which was about as far as she got when it came to expressing approval.
“Correct. Or, at the very least, I would come to the same conclusion. And what do we say about that?”
“Always be firm in one’s estimations, but never take any as truth.”
“Excellent. Now – what is different about this bird in particular?”
Eld frowned, chewing his lip.
“The fact that it’s alone? Ravager gulls almost always travel in swarms.”
“Yes, yes, but that isn’t the answer I was looking for. Examine the body, closer.”
He swallowed, throat tightening with nervousness. It was one thing to study diagrams and recite facts; another entirely to look at the three-dimensional body of an animal that still had blood in its veins.
But he was a scholar, or would be – and just as the Pilots must brave danger on the high winds, so must he brave the disgustingness of a dead gull. With resolve, he knelt down beside Ifed.
The stench of death bludgeoned him. It had been carried away by the wind at his previous distance, but now filled his nostrils, even as he raised a hand to clamp them. He was aware of his teacher’s eyes burning into him, daring him to give into fear and back away.
He grit his teeth and examined the corpse. In his imagination, gulls had had a kind of dark beauty to them, but this fallen creature looked… sickly. Its feathers seemed unusually matted, and when he looked at its eye, he could make out a faint cloudiness to it.
“Perhaps the bird was… unwell before it d-died?”
“Firmness, Eldwyn! Come to a conclusion! Otherwise your words are just conjecture!”
“I believe the bird already had some kind of illness – that could be what caused it to d-d… fall from the sky.”
Eld found himself gathering confidence; found himself talking now with momentum.
“What we don’t know is if that illness killed it in the air, or if it simply weakened it to the point where it could no longer fly. The most likely conclusion is the latter, as the damage to its skeleton is, relatively, quite little compared to what most animals suffer when they fall from a height.”
“I have reached the same deduction, which means we should exercise great care when continuing with this dissection. Sickness is the hand of death; is that not what the Gwyddoned are so fond of saying?”
Eld was not listening. His eyes were glued to the chest of the downed bird. Because, against all reason, it was rising and falling.
“High Scholar, I think – I think it may still be alive!”
Ifed turned her always-furrowed gaze back to the body; now frowning with curiosity.
The little creature’s chest pumped in and out with greater and greater ferocity. Perhaps oddly, Eld felt flames of hope kindle in his chest. It seemed a shame for such an animal to die so far from its own kind.
Curiously, the rest of its body remained completely limp. Its yellow eyes were still very much glassed over in death.
Then a tiny, pale pink tendril burst through the bird’s breastbone, sending a small spray of old blood over the ground. He recoiled instantly, scrabbling backwards and scraping his palms on the rough surface of scale.
The tendril twitched violently, flipping around itself and edging further outside the soft shell of the bird’s body. Then a second burst out just like the first, and a third… Within seconds, there were seven of them; thin, wriggling tentacles that reached out like the fingers of some horrible monster.
Eld was frozen in shock. He had never seen anything like this. No sickness had been described this way in the Teachings.
The first of the worms – for that was what they seemed to be – tore itself free and fell onto the ground. Instantly, it began snaking itself towards him, leaving a trail of gore behind itself. It shouldn’t have been possible, but the way it moved was as if it had some kind of malicious intent. As it got closer, he could make out a small, silvery point at its head, around which the pink skin of the thing pulsated and throbbed.
Ifed crushed it under her boot.
“Get up, boy! Help me kill them, Lord help you!”
But Eld was still frozen. He could only watch as Ifed stomped on the remaining worms inside the corpse. It only took a few seconds, but clearly tired her, and she leaned forward on her knees, breathing hard.
“High S-scholar?”
Her whispered response didn’t seem to be directed at him, rather at the destroyed bodies beneath her.
“Marwolaeth.”
Only after a few moments had passed, did she turn and look at him through loosened strands of peppered hair.
“Go! Return to Tref and alert the Pilots. We must dispose of this.”
“But… I don’t understand, what –”
“Eldwyn!” she hissed at him. “You will do as you are told.”
Eld scrambled to his feet, stumbling backwards, then turned on his heels and broke into a run – or at least as best as he could manage. By the time he made it back to Tref, he was gasping for air and it would take an hour before he returned with help.
Ifed removed her boots, careful not to touch the sludge that had splashed up the sides, and stepped back onto the scales. Her ever-present frown deepened further than it had in years, and she turned to face out over the clouds, tapping her chin in thought.
Behind her, the bird’s corpse shifted.
A worm, torn in half but still clinging to life, slithered out from beneath the body of the gull. It slipped down across the surface of the scale the bird had fallen on and nestled into one of the cracks, before lowering its pointed head and beginning to burrow.
The end had begun.
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