“You will, old friend. Soon, you will.”
There was an odd tenderness in the bird’s tone.
“We wish we had liberty to tell you more. Yet, for your sanity’s sake, for the sake of what you still must accomplish for our mother, even you must experience some things in their conventional order.”
“I just want to know what you’ve done to me!”
“You give us too much of the credit. Your own crafting of meaning shapes your path far more than we could. The truth of that acorn in your pocket holds to that same foundational principle.”
Green pulled out the acorn and looked at it.
It was unchanged. A common acorn.
“Is that some kind of riddle? Can’t you just tell it to me simply?”
The king looked up into the branches.
“The strangest human we know visits a royal pan-dimensional manifestation of collective history-spanning crow intelligence while battling an incursion from beyond reality…and he asks us for simplicity.”
The birds above all croaked with hoarse laughter.
The Crow King turned to look out at the surrounding forest, stooping his massive frame low beneath the uppermost branches. He paused to wipe his three-foot beak against the central trunk, a motion like a barber stropping a straight razor. As Green watched, the king continued to grow. The huge corvid turned his attention back to his guest.
Green deflated with a sigh. It was all too much.
“Could you at least try to explain?”
“We are trying. Know that simply being here is costly to us. The body of a life is as much made of choices as matter and energy. Are we expected to explain your own choices to you? Who can decide for a creature to be different? To be strange among his peers? To mean something more than stuff stretched across space and time? Who chooses?”
“Catskill called me ‘not-man.’ What did you do to me?”
“The guardian’s senses delve deeper than simple substance. He doesn’t just smell the seed. He smells the tree to come.”
It was like standing at a locked door, sensing something vitally important was there, just out of reach.
The crow looked down at him and chittered softly, as if in thought. The creature seemed to make a decision.
“Hmm. Perhaps…A demonstration. A brief lesson. Come. Be quick. Lend us your acorn,” the king said.
The king’s cawing voice had grown deeper and louder. Green could feel the vibrations shivering along his collarbones. The words brought with them a smell of decay mixed with the cloying sweetness of overripe fruit.
With nervous care, he held the acorn up on his open palm.
A storm-colored blur darted at Green’s hand and the tiny nut was pinched in the crow’s kayak-size beak. The king twitched his great head and sent the acorn flying over the edge of the roof, falling to the ground below.
“Wait! No!”
The Crow King didn’t answer Green’s protests. The giant bird tilted forward, spread wings the size of billboards, and soundlessly followed the acorn down, untouched by the frozen landscape.
Green let go his hold on the branch, stepped to the edge to look over, slipped, and fell off the roof.
He sucked in a breath of surprise as his hip impacted one of the motionless oak leaves, frozen in the act of falling. It crinkled like dry paper, but held his weight. Clutching at empty air, he teetered on the leaf, rolled, and fell to the side before colliding with another leaf like a punch to the stomach. Then to the ribs. Then to his left armpit before he fell the last six feet to the ground.
“Ow.”
He stood, brushed the dirt from his jeans, and looked up at the Crow King.
The bird’s growth rate had increased. Now, the king’s eye was level with the library roofline.
