Names

Blood sprays out of my enemy's throat, spattering my black beak and turquoise feathers with crimson dots and streaks as another petrified soldier drops to the ground, his head clinging to his neck with only a few strands of sinew. Frantic boots pound on the wooden platform all around me as my soon-to-be victims scream "Demon! Demon!"

I laugh, gazing past the dozen or so corpses I've made so far onto the empty shelters sitting still and silent, some of them collapsed from the raid, some left standing tainted only by blood smears on their entryways from my slaughtered brethren. My eye stays locked on the shelter with its roof made of yellow leaves, pressed tight against the trunk of the tree that supports the flower nest with the top of a staff sticking out of the doorway. It was important before but I can't remember why. I shake my head. I shouldn't be using this places real name. This used to be the flower nest, back when my people were still alive to call it by its proper name, but now it's just another platform in the enemy's stronghold.

Looking at the bloodstain that rolls over the open doorway and slithers around the corner puts a flame in my cold, still, heart and I drop my eyebrows into a scowl, squeezing my morning star in the lone claw that I have left as two more soldiers charge me.

I swing the morning star at the sword being white-knuckled by the soldier on my right, knocking the steel clean out of his hand. His face goes pale and his eyes widen as the blades on my left wing slice him open from hip to shoulder. It excites me to see those who reveled in the fear of the innocent sink into their own terror.

The other soldier tries to take advantage of the distraction and my missing arm, but he must've forgotten that he's dealing with an avian. I control the wind, making me far faster than a human could ever hope to be. I deflect his strike with the blood-coated blades on my wing and drive my foot into his knee, buckling it backward and dislocating it. My eyes smile. Bent backward like that, his leg looks almost like mine.

The worm tries to crawl away from me, kicking his salvageable leg at the wooden planks below him, "Wait! Please, gods, please!" He says putting a hand out in front of himself as I stomp towards him, my talons clicking on the wood, "Please don't kill me! What's your name? I'll-I'll make sure they know it! I-I-I'll make sure they fear it."

I laugh at him, looking him dead in the eyes. As our gazes meet, his hand lowers, and he starts to raise his chin. He must've realized that the title his comrades gave me was no exaggeration. "The dead don't have names to you people." I say before caving his skull in with my morning star. The blood catches my eye as it floats through the air, the sight dragging me back to that night.

The crimson spreads through the world, enveloping the sky as the ground below me quakes, cracks, and explodes, a rock bursting through the platform in front of me, almost knocking me off balance. I flap my wings and float upright until my head is shocked by the magic net wrapping up our nests. An arrow hits my back and explodes out of my stomach, blood painting the air in front of me. My wings stop flapping and I land on the slanted wood, slowly sliding towards the glowing net that will surely burn me alive. I see a blood-soaked soldier with that damned golden dragon insignia cut down a hatchling with fresh tears in their eyes, too young to fly away. The sight makes me want to rip the soldier's heart out of his throat.

A sharp talon grabs my shoulder and drags me to safety, grabbing the head of the arrow and yanking it out of my stomach. I scream as I burst back into the present, rubbing a talon on the still sticky hole in my stomach. They deserve everything I'm going to do to them.

I finish clearing out the flower nest, cutting the impromptu rope bridge that the humans constructed to be able to move between our nests, sending more than a few soldiers falling to their deaths on the forest floor.

Footsteps behind me call my attention, they must have a ladder somewhere. I spin around clubbing the human in the stomach with my morning star, tearing open flesh and stunning him. I finish my rotation, trying to slice open his throat, but he raises an arm. It's enough to keep my blades from reaching his neck but not enough to save him. His arm falls to the ground with a splat, staining the yellow-white boards red.

The image of my own black arm and talons lying on the wood, severed from my body flashes in my eyes, but I don't let the grief of a lost limb stop my attack. I float up into the air, flapping my wings, and begin hitting him with kick after kick, tearing through his get-up and scratching up his flesh while blood spouts out of his arm. Eventually, he reaches the edge of my nest and plummets to his death.

"Where's your mage and his magic nets now?" I ask the tiny, bloody dot lying in the dirt below.

I never heard the other soldier rise off the ladder next to me and just barely duck the sword coming for my throat. While the steel glides over my face I catch a glimpse of my singular eye. The look my reflection gives me only fuels my rage. The hate of the soldiers that cut down my people for nothing more than a laugh has infected my stare but instead of fighting it, I accept its cold embrace. They will feel their own wrath.

My awkward dodge leaves me wide open to the fist that strikes my good eye, fading my vision black for a moment. Images flash in my mind again, the sight of my brother, tears in his eyes as he reaches for a stranger avain whose throat is being cut, going down on the end of a blade and dropping his staff. I charge forward, ignoring the soldiers on my left and right, and catch the tip of a sword with my eye, and another through my shoulder, then, finally, I lie on the ground as the screams of my people lullaby me into death.

I'm kicked again in the head, and I roll back towards the ledge of the nest, losing my morning star somewhere along the way. The soldier sprints at me to finish the job, but I go where he can't follow me; off the side of the nest. I beat my wings and start flying, rubbing the empty eye socket on the side of my head, as I shake away the blurriness. An arrow zips through the air at me as I hover, but I dive down, dodging the shot.

Out of the corner of my vision, I see soldiers climbing the wooden ladder they erected towards the flower nest. I can't keep letting them replenish their numbers. I notice the rays of light piercing the canopy of the forest beginning to fade to orange and know that I don't have time to fight an entire army.

I fly from the flower nest to the rock nest, to the tree nest, breaking all of the ladders I see with my shoulder, chipping off a significant number of feathers in the process, but at least no one else can come to the aid of the people already on the nests. The broken ladders mean none of these bastards can escape their fate either.

I soar back to the flower nest, swooping up from below the platform behind the lone soldier that thought he had me in the palm of his hand. "You people killed me once, I won't let it happen again."

I barrel towards his back at a breakneck speed. At the last second, I spin my body around, pushing the talons of my feet into his back and pulling them out with a powerful kick. I drag strings of blood out of his body with each of my six claws, as he stumbles forward, catching the side of one of our shelters as his feet slip over the edge of the platform. His wide eyes quake in their sockets while his life rests in the claws of my mercy. Unfortunately for him, if I had any mercy, it died with my body during the raid.

I lean down towards him, slow and calm, letting my empty eye socket stare into him. I can't see it, but I can feel his fear. "Where's your leader? Tell me and I'll pull you up." I say, opening my claw inches out of his reach.

He heaves his chest, gasping for air as I imagine his palms start to sweat, "He's...on the platform with the other birds...Please demon!"

I clench my talons into a fist, as my wings start to quake, "You monsters kept the corpses?"

"Corpses? No, they got rid of the dead ones, just find the other birds and you'll find the commander." He says, his breath starting to become wet. I must've punctured his lungs with my kick.

"Are you saying there's still some of us alive?" I say, turning to look at him, so I can tell if he's telling the truth. There can't be anyone alive after that night.

"Yes! Yes! The commander hardly leaves his trophies...Please help me!" He says lifting one hand off the boards and stretching it out towards me as he coughs up a glob of blood.

I scoff at him, kicking his hand away. Trophies? The audacity of these people. His wet coughing paints the wood in front of me red as I stare him down, enjoying the uncertainty and fear that swirl in his begging eyes. "Enough." I tell myself as I punch him in the mouth. His hand slips off the side of the house and his screams gradually fade until he smashes into the dirt below.

I look down at the stump that remains of my left arm, there's no way anyone could have survived that raid. They killed us in our own homes, stepped on our eggs, and cut our throats even though we were unarmed. They killed indiscriminately and never even asked for surrender. Did they really take some of us prisoner?

The sunlight fades, and so does the time I have left to find their leader and put him down. He needs to die before I do...again. I look at the other platforms from the edge of the flower nest, scanning for any sign of my fellow avians but can't pick up the gleam of feathers. They could be anywhere, and their beaks are probably bound, meaning I'll have to search each and every house and clear out every platform in the little time I have left if I want to find the commander.

I close my eye and sigh, "If only I had more time."

"I know, but a day is all I could give you." The mage says in her low, graveled voice. I open my eye and I'm back in her tent, lying on the ground on a bed of leaves, wrapped in bandages. "Necromancy is a difficult and draining exercise, especially when I called you back as more than a mindless zombie." She says, the gold bands on her skinny arm jingling as she sits on the ground, scratching her frizzy hair. My eye throbs as I try to focus on her dark skin and brown eyes. "Raising a body is easy, but raising a body and calling back its soul...that's something else."

"I can't believe I died…"

"Yeah...It doesn't look like it was a very quick death either." She says rubbing her left shoulder, prompting me to look down at my stump of an arm.

"It wasn't."

"I'm sorry I had to do this to you. But I've been tracking that group for months. Someone has to make them pay, and your soul was the only one I could pluck from the ether with the fury to do what needs to be done."

I try to sit up, my stiff joints making the motion difficult, "you've been tracking them for months and you didn't do anything to stop them? You couldn't have warned us?"

She shakes her head as my eye starts to focus. I can see grey streaks of lightning in her hair. Under the sliding bands on her arms, her flesh is distorted, with scars, scabs, and wrinkles, even though her face looks no more than thirty. I'm not the first one she's raised from the dead. "I couldn't risk being discovered since I'm useless in a direct fight."

"You're a damn mage you could've-"

She raises a hand, cocking her head, "Stop right there, I'm a necromancer and only a necromancer, I was banished from my school before I could learn any directly destructive spells, and no one's going to teach me now." She says, chuckling. I can't find the humor in her statement.

"Banished?"

"They found out I started practicing necromancy as soon as these bastards invaded our home." She says holding up a letter with that golden dragon seal that was on the armor of the humans who slaughtered my people. She tosses it aside, watching it drop to the dirt before turning it to me. "What they didn't understand at that school is that sometimes you have to dip into the taboo to do what needs to be done. I don't like being a necromancer, I know it's...morally grey, at best. Not to mention it's slowly rotting my mind, body, and soul, but the dead are a replenishable resource when an army like this is rolling through your lands and someone has to do something drastic and I'll gladly sacrifice myself to make these demons pay."

I look down at my stomach, pondering her words while running a talon along the wrapping over my head, resisting the urge to poke around in the gooey insides of my empty eye socket. "What does it mean for me? Being a...zombie. Other than not being able to remember who I am."

"It means you get a chance at vengeance. Don't worry about forgetting who you were, it'll just make it easier to become what you need to be." she says standing up, her long decorated robe flaring out at her sides while she taps her chin. "They're setting up a stronghold in the ruins of your home using your houses. You have a day to get there and kill them all, sending that scum to join Cin in the gloom." She puts her hands on her hips, "That is what they deserve isn't it? Do you remember the massacre at least?"

"I remember the slaughter, yes...they deserve worse." I say squeezing my talons on my remaining hand.

"Good, Avian colonies aren't exactly accessible to humans, so it's likely they're struggling to make it traversable and haven't even set up defenses yet, so you shouldn't have a hard time wiping them out. That mage that put a net on your village is long gone so you don't have to worry about him."

"Good, that'll make things simpler...Wait...to know he was there at all...you watched them kill us!" I say standing up.

"Woah there bird...I've already told you, I'm a necromancer, not a combat mage, I wouldn't have made a difference in what they did to you and the years of necromancy have left me with a certain...affinity for death, whether I'm watching it happen or being around it. Besides I needed to find a soul and a corpse that was...strong enough." She says, sucking on the tip of her finger which disgusts even me. "After watching you die, I waited patiently for them to toss you into the bushes. Knowing the best I could do is offer you a chance to give them what they deserve... At the cost of your soul, unfortunately."

"My what?" I say under my breath.

"I didn't take it for myself or anything, I'm not that sick...yet. It's just a side effect of necromancy. The soul isn't supposed to go back into the body after leaving, that's why I can only give you a day in your body and why you can't remember shit. Your soul will be destroyed after that day is up."

"My soul will be destroyed? What does that even mean?"

"It means you'll miss out on an eternity in your god's garden... Razum was his name wasn't it?"

I look around the room as my beak falls half agape. "You're a fucking monster," I say.

She bursts out into laughter, sitting back down before she keels over."Take notes kid… the only way to defeat the monsters that we're dealing with is to become one yourself...Just be thankful you don't have a past to fight you on your...transformation."

Before I arrived back at the place I once called home, I didn't believe her words. I detest her for taking away my place in Razum's garden with my fellow avains, but after seeing the empty houses smeared with the blood of those I probably called friends, I know she was right. I just happen to be the one who had to be sacrificed to get shit done and make sure these people can't darken this world anymore.

It takes me until dusk to clear out three of the five remaining nests with no sign of the leader or these supposed prisoners. I'm running out of time and I can already feel myself slipping. Occasional dizzy spells make it difficult to stand or fly straight, and even the details of the slaughter are becoming blurry. The only thing that stays clear are the images of my brother and how he would use his magic to heal anyone who needed it that came to our village with love in his heart and a constant smile in his eyes. Knowing that these humans took that from this world keeps me and my weapons steady.

I examine both of the remaining nests, as soldiers stand on the edges, waiting for me to fly to them since I destroyed all the bridges except for the one connecting the remaining two platforms. I don't have time to waste, so I leap off the edge of my platform and soar towards the one with the fewest soldiers, ducking and dodging the draping branches of the forest canopy, flying low so the soldiers lose track of me.

I zip upwards, right in front of the edge of the nest, grabbing a stunned soldier by the neck and tossing him off the platform. When I land, the soldiers are backpedaling and half slouched as their uniform swords quake in their hands. "Stay away from the ledge!" One shouts.

I roll my eye, "Took you long enough to figure that one out." I swing my morning star in a circle, letting the chain rattle. For every step I take forward, the soldiers take two steps back. I see a couple more soldiers gradually making their way across the flimsy rope bridge to help dispatch me. I've got to take care of the three in front of me quickly.

"All at once men! Ready?" One shouts. I plant my feet, widening my stance and flexing my wing coated in steel. "Charge!"

The look on their faces when I sprint into their rush would be enough to send a chill down my spine if I could still feel. The first soldier collapses when my morning star puts a crater in his chest. I deflect the second soldier's blow with my wing and spin away from the third soldier's strike. Missing an eye has its drawbacks, and I don't see the fourth soldier coming from my left until I'm mid-spin and I narrowly dodge a fatal blow that cuts open the dead flesh on my chest instead.

The soldiers expect me to halt my attacks, or in the least flinch, but I don't and counter-attack immediately, cracking the spiked ball of my morning star across the face of the soldier who sliced me open, and sending a blind kick behind me. I make contact with a stomach, and deflect another slash of a sword from the third soldier with my wing blades, spinning my body parallel to the ground.

The soldier with the bloodied face stumbles backward and collapses on the ground falling still. "Two left."

Commanding the wind with my wings, I leap off the ground, and zip towards the soldier still staggered from my kick. He raises his sword into the air, ready to slash at me. I fake a strike from my morning star, convincing him to move his sword. I shift my weight in the air, a few dead feathers falling out of my skin, and put my feet forward, kicking the flat of his blade hard enough to knock it out of his hand. My other foot wraps around his head, my talons pressing into his scalp as I force his skull to the ground. I step off his head, lean my left shoulder down and cut his throat with a flap of my bladed wing.

I feel the winds change in my feathers and look up to see an arrow zipping towards my head. Out of instinct, I raise my claw to protect myself, and the arrow bursts through it, the tip stopping inches from my eye. My muscles spasm and I drop my morning star, completely losing control of my appendage. I move my shoulder to pull the arrow out with my other arm, totally forgetting it's been severed

The footsteps behind me remind me there's one more soldier, and I spin once again, deflecting his sword with my bladed wing and clubbing him with my other one. Wing blades were never meant to be a primary means for dispatching the enemy, but if I want to reach my goal, I'll figure it out.

I take to the air once again, flying towards the trunk of the tree supporting the nest, away from the soldier before tearing through the sky at him. I twirl, knocking his blade away with the steel on my wing and turning into a kick that breaks at least a few of his ribs.

He stumbles towards the edge of the nest, coughing up blood and sputtering for air. "Kill the leader. Kill the leader." I remind myself as I watch the memory of the necromancer shatter. I don't have much longer. I land on the ground and dash at the sputtering soldier, baiting out a slash from his sword. In one fluid movement, I flap my wings and glide backward, dodging the strike, and then push forward, slamming my shoulder into the soldier and knocking him off the nest so he can fall to his demise.

My ears start ringing and my head starts pounding. The only thing I've felt since being dead. I push my limp claw to my skull, breaking the arrow in half on my cheek, as my vision goes in and out of blurriness. "Just a bit longer. I need to hold myself together just a bit longer." This platform should be clear there was only what... five or six more on the other platform?

I stumble backward, trying to steady myself away from the ledge as everything starts spinning. "Not yet! I need to kill him!" I shout falling back, using my dead claw for support. I pick a splotch of blood on the ground and try to focus on it gazing into my reflection, trying to recall my name, or what I was like in the past, but feeling only fury when nothing comes to mind. The rage grounds me, fueling me, and I get a grip on myself, embracing the bloodlust once again. Coming back to my body just in time to hear a scream behind me.

A wet thwack fills my ears and then a splat. I turn my neck as far around as I can, looking behind me.

There lies my unbladed, turquoise wing, surrounded by a slowly growing pool of black, half-coagulated blood. I look up and see the soldier who maimed me, in shock that I'm not lying on the ground, dying. He sees the look in my eye and knows he's dead before I disembowel him with my wing blade.

The other two soldiers that made it across the bridge aren't difficult to kill. Each of them holds that same, paralyzed look in their eye when they see my cadaver, covered with cuts and holes and oozing the slime that was once my blood. It doesn't take long for me to show them that their fear was well placed.

I stumble to the opposite side of the nest, trying to fly on more than one occasion, but one wing won't even lift me off the ground. I guess I'll have to use the human's bridge.

The commander wasn't here, so he has to be on the last platform. I get to the flimsy rope bridge and see two soldiers sawing at the six ropes supporting the bridge in one last desperate attempt to survive. I smirk with my eye, knowing it won't save them.

When I take the first step onto the bridge a masculine voice fills my ears, one distant, but painfully familiar. "Shava?" It squawks.

"Shava?" I repeat, raising my head to the forest canopy. "Shava." The name sounds so familiar. My head starts to buzz again as broken fragments of memory stitch themselves together in the abyss that is my mind. Falling out of the nest and breaking my leg for the first time, flying for the first time, playing tag in the sky with my… I whip around, "Brother?"

I see a tiny cage with six or seven avains cramped inside, feathers of all colors bursting from between the bars, most of them soaked with blood, their faces cut and bruised. "Shava!" They chant, their voices equal parts disgusted, relieved, and astonished. They seem to know me, but the only beak I recognize is that of my brother, even though I can't recall his name. His eyes are unfamiliar to me though, like they belong to a different person.

His pupils shrink and he pulls away from the bars a bit. Being a mage, it's no surprise he recognized my condition. I see the knuckles of his talons start to turn white against the bars of the cage as his arms shake at the elbow, his brow reaching down to touch his beak, a nasty, purple scab running between his eyes, touching the base of his black beak. "Shava...make them pay for what they did to us!" He shouts at me. I give him a blank empty stare, he looks like my brother, but he's off and it's not the wounds from the torture. An arrow thunks into my back sending me stumbling towards the cage and those less acute gasp, thinking I'm hurt. The archer that shot me tosses his bow and empty quiver to the side, drawing his sword, taking a few steps away from the bridge when I stand back up, ignoring the arrow.

I'm running out of time. If I go kill the commander, I won't have time to come back and save my kin. My head turns back to my brother who's still staring at me, "Make them pay Shava! If not for you, for mom and dad and all of us they locked in here! We're already dead! Go! NOW! You're running out of time." He shouts, pressing as tight to the bars as he can. Those behind him stay silent, cowering in fear.

I tilt my head, In his eyes I can see myself, right now. Involuntarily, I walk towards him.

"Shava leave us! They're gonna cut the bridge!" Thoughts of the commander slip out of my mind, I can't watch him become a zombie like me. The look on his face makes me want to vomit more than any of the blood I've spilled today. This isn't him.

"Shava!"

"Back!" I shout, banging on the lock of the cage with my remaining wing for a few moments until the cage door swings open. The rope bridge snaps, flying back towards us and slamming against the trunk of the tree that supports the nest we're on. That's it...it's over.

The rage fades from me, and I collapse onto the hardwood below, my brother sprinting to my side, lifting my head off the ground and placing me in his lap, my blood soaking into his feathers.

"Shava, why didn't you-"

"It wasn't worth it." I say coughing "What's the point of being a demon if there's no purity left to protect?" His eyes walk over me, his anger and bloodlust slowly fading as he looks at every wound, feeling each cut on himself...just like he used to. The change in his demeanor washes relief over me. He pounds a fist on my chest, knocking a few of my feathers loose, knowing I can't feel it. I groan and grip my head.

His eyes start to water with fresh tears, "You don't have much time." He says gently, setting me down. I force my hand out to him, I don't want him to go...not yet. He looks at me, seeing my weakness, immediately offering me comfort with, "I'll be right back."

The other villagers left standing don't come near me, and I don't blame them. Time blurs together, but I grip the fraying strings of my soul just so I can see my brother one last time before I fade to...wherever.

I blink and my brother is over me again, holding his staff, casting a soft, calming yellow light, like the sun above the clouds. It washes me with warmth, as the pieces of my memory start to come back to me. The mage, my kin, my childhood, my life in the sky and on the nest...I come back.

My eyelid starts to get heavy, I can't hold on any longer. "Shava...say hello to mom and dad for me."

"Thank you Maiiq." My eyes close and everything starts ringing and I feel a bit dizzy, but in a moment, it all stops.