Hands wave, stones scatter across the ground, but the birds do not break. Wings lash outward, striking with sudden violence, claws catching cloth, skin, forcing the nearest men back with startled cries. A beak snaps close to a face. A man cries out, stumbling back as one tears at him, another shielding me with its body, pressing closer, tighter. The air fills with the violent rush of feathers, a living wall that does not yield.
"Back—back—"
"They are mad—"
"No—leave them—"
The attempts falter. The circle breaks. The fear shifts, turning outward now, away from me, toward the thing that has claimed me in their place.
I lie beneath them.
Their bodies cover mine, a living weight, warm and insistent, pressing against the places the fire has not yet taken, shielding what remains, shifting only to strike again when anyone dares come near. Feathers brush my face, my throat, settling there as though I am something to be hidden, to be kept.
"She is already dead," someone says, lower now, trying to steady what cannot be steadied. "Let them have it. It is only a body now."
A pause.
"They’ll tear it apart by nightfall," another adds, uncertain, glancing toward the mass of wings. "We can come back later… when it’s done."
"If she lives—" someone else begins, then falters.
A man answers, quieter, almost to himself, "She will not. Not after that."
"Better not touch it now, anyway" a third murmurs. "If there is… anything left in her—if it lingers—"
Another voice, rough, uneasy, "If there is anything left… they will finish it."
The sound of shifting feet begins.
Boots scrape against the dirt. The weight of the crowd loosens, pulls away in fragments. No one steps close again. No one tries to reach through the wings that guard me.
"We will return at dawn," someone says, low. "When the birds are gone."
"And if they’re not—"
"They will be."
The square empties.
The sound of them fades—footsteps, voices, the scrape of movement dissolving into distance—until nothing remains but the soft settling of disturbed earth and the low, steady rustle of feathers.
The ravens do not move.
They remain where they have landed, pressed close, a living cover over me, their bodies rising and falling with small, quiet shifts. One brushes its head against my shoulder. Another tucks its wings tighter, sealing the last traces of heat beneath them.
I lie there, unable to move, barely able to breathe, the world reduced to darkness and the sound of them.
But I am not alone anymore.
Chapter Five
Time stretches until it loses shape.
I do not know how long I remain there. The pain comes and goes in waves, sometimes strong enough to pull a broken sound from my throat, sometimes distant, as though the fire has not gone but moved inside me. My skin burns where it has been taken, the air itself a wound against it. Each breath catches in my chest, thick with what the fire left behind.
The ravens remain.
They shift only enough to settle, their bodies pressed close where the cold tries to reach me, their wings a constant, living cover. Through them, the world is dim. I see only fragments of sky between feathers, pale at first, then graying as the day begins to sink.
