☛ Leo Vaughn writes unusual fantasy for unusual people, rep'd by Lucienne Diver of the Knight Agency. This is Resurrecting the Real, his blog that explores the vocation of writing fiction while also publishing his short stories. His novels are coming soon to a bookstore near you.

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Under the brown twilight, Dorent stumbled through the low prickers and scratching brush. He was so weak and woozy, both hungry and nauseous, he could barely stand. Every nick of thorn and branch was another wound. But this was no time to stop. He was almost there. Soon, the Proud Bird would fall under his hand.

Ahead, a low mound rose against the dead-blood sky. The stones of his house lay tumbled, and a pile of dry branches sat atop them. A winged form like a purple blanket unfolded against the sky. It spiraled down, golden claws showing through its feathers, and landed atop the rubble. Half as tall as a man, the Proud Bird sprouted plumes of all kinds in gold and crimson, violet and white.

Dorent crawled the last distance on stinging shins, cracking the dead branches where his children and his wife had played games in the summer dusk. Lost, lost were those days. What remained now?

Only vengeance. And if he died in the endeavor, then he died.

He crawled faster. The Bird’s head spun to a hard stop, watching him.

Dorent reached the ruins of his home and stood on shaking legs. The Bird regarded him with eyes of shifting hue—now silver, now gold, now dark. Its delicate lashes fluttered at him. Its long beak was notched and worn from killing. Beside it, the nest glittered with dull black iron. The Birds had gathered all the community’s tools and jewelry to adorn their works. Any trinket collected there might offer Dorent a small weapon, but too small; anyway, he was too slow to kill a Bird even when healthy. How he would slay this monster, he could not say.

The Bird ruffled itself. Mountains of azure and flaming white rose around its head and sank again. It clacked its beak and murmured with a voice like the music of a woodland stream. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” Dorent said. The Birds had destroyed his land, and the only things left that he could eat were the tiny lizards that scurried through the dead bushes and over the dried vines. Sick and slow, he could not catch the lizards himself. It took the speed of a Bird.

So he would bargain. He would find some way to its heart.

The Bird waggled its beak at the mountain of sticks and gleaming iron trinkets atop the rubble. “Roost on my eggs seven years. And I shall feed you.”

They were a strange kind, the Proud Birds, eating their mates and waiting decades to find a slave who would incubate their eggs out of dormancy. The Birds could not roost on their own nests, for they must eat almost without ceasing. This was their curse, their one weakness. And with the land desecrated, the lizards were their only bread.

“I will roost,” Dorent said. “Though I am sick. What little warmth…”

“You are alive,” the Bird said. “You are enough.”

Shaking, Dorent crawled up the rubble heap, over dried vines and the dusting snow of dormant wheat seed. At the top, the nest was isolated, a watchtower—or a tower to be watched. He rested a moment, then climbed the layered sticks of the nest. The Bird’s three gray eggs lay in a shallow depression at the top, each one bigger than Dorent’s fist. He huddled down over them, spreading himself across them. They were cold and smooth as stones against his stomach.

Roosting, then. This was his path. He could not turn away now.

“If you leave my eggs, I cannot trust you,” the Bird said. It shivered its rainbow feathers and clacked its bill. “If I cannot trust you, I eat your heart. As I did your mate and your hatchlings.”

“I will roost. Be it seven years…” What abomination. His chest seized with agony as he lay upon the eggs. It was his own mate whom the bird had devoured. His own children.

But might he find a way in seven years?

Oh, yes. And it might not take that long.

He drew a shaking breath. “Be it seven years, I will roost.”

❧

While the Proud Bird hunted lizards, Dorent raised his spinning head over the edge of the nest. How his fields had changed. Gone were his wife, his children, his homestead. Here, in joy, they had tossed the libations of calf’s blood on the seeds and watched them sprout. When the oceans of grain had ripened, they had threshed them for days upon days, shouting the songs of harvest.

Until the Proud Birds came.

Their numbers were greater than grains of wheat. The sky turned black with them. They pelted the air with their dung and battered everyone’s ears with their bellowing.

When they first arrived, they preached the sacredness of all feathered things, so Dorent and his kin welcomed them. Dorent explained, with great respect, that they already revered every kind of Bird, and thus worshipped these New Birds, too, as the Old Farmers had taught them. The Bird of Sunrise brought light every morning, and the Bird of Deep Night sang them lullabies. The community called their own young “hatchlings,” same as the Proud Birds did.

“Let us honor them,” Dorent had said. “Let us receive new blessings from them in return.”

A sensible proposition, indeed. For the Proud Birds spoke of three holy things, just as the Old Farmers did. All birds, all food, all hatchlings—these things were holy, they said. Including themselves.

That was the first warning. Dorent should have understood it.

The Birds could not possibly harm them, the Old Farmers claimed. The community had never even thought of it, for their children and their grain were holy, and the Birds also spoke of sacred things. One could not kill to take any holy thing, though one could bargain. A mutual transaction—that was allowable.

Then the holy ate the holy.

Dorent squeezed his eyes shut as the rage swelled in his chest. This very Bird had devoured his daughter and his sons and left his own heart hollowed out as if by fire. At the last, the Birds had turned their stabbing bills on each other. A sham mercy that had been, too late, effecting nothing.

So here he lay, shivering on cold eggs that would hatch new killers. Back from the land of his exile, he would bargain with the Bird, if he survived that long. He would care for its sacred young and eat its holy food.

And he would kill.

Deep night lay upon the land. Dorent’s belly had knotted up in agony. He could almost chew the lizards that the Bird brought him, but they were not enough, and they were not right for him. Now he was sicker than ever, small and shaking and useless, huddled on top of the eggs while the Bird roosted nearby on another mound of stone. Its eggs bruised Dorent’s side and hip without mercy. And to think he had called such eggs holy when the Birds had first come.

He shifted and rolled onto his other side, and then his foot hit something cold and sharp.

His heart skittered. A weapon?

He turned on hands and knees and felt in the dark. The object cut his fingers among the sticks. Of course. It was an iron spike, the fire striker that he had hammered into shape himself.

Fire.

He had not thought of it.

An unholy negotiation, a bargain by power.

He dug out the tool and slid it under his shredded tunic, against his chest. He held it there, listening. There was no rustle of the Bird’s feathers. Somewhere out there, the monster still slept.

❧

The next night, strange wonder and propitious sign, he found his old flintstone. It was buried far deeper in the nest, and he cut his hand and his arm for it, but he tugged it out at last. Surely this was the way.

Shaking and sick, he crawled across the nest and lowered his legs over the edge. The horizon glowed a dull gray. The Proud Bird sat piled like a blanket against the light, roosting on a rock a few yards away.

This was the time.

Inch by inch, he picked his way down the side of the nest. He checked every time a twig broke, but the Bird only shuddered in its sleep, its impaling beak slung across its back. All he needed was a collection of natural fuel.

And here it was.

Between the Bird and the nest, on a little outcropping of shattered bricks, a withered vine clung. It snaked down from here among the stones, out into the field. He had seen it by day while the Bird gorged on lizards.

Crouching over the vine, he beat the fire striker with the flint, again and again. Smoldering bits of metal fell among the dry leaves. The fire caught and slithered down the vine, a blaze of hungry flame and crackling thorns. The Bird woke and bellowed like a new-gelded calf. It clattered its wings into clumsy flight, seeking the blind sky without even a glance at him.

From the ridge, the fire spread in a slow spill. Down the slope of broken stones, out into the gorse and dead thorns where the lizards ran, it grew fast, a pool of white-hot blood melting the field. The light was so bright now, he could see the wine-brown form of the Bird hanging from the sky like a dead curtain.

❧

But Dorent was a fool.

In his delirium, his fever and his rage, he had not thought of this: He, too, ate lizards from the Bird’s beak, and the fire had killed them all. This morning was the third since he had destroyed their world. Far as a good eye could see, the tiny stumps of the scrub still smoked. But the Proud Bird lay folded at the foot of the rubble, one wing open, one white-g old eye staring up at the wan sun. Its feathers still flashed purple and crimson, azure and amber, but their luster was fading.

“You.” The beak rattled in the gravel. “You shall die.”

“Perhaps. But not before you.” He sat at the edge of the nest, shivering, his stomach wrenched on emptiness. Still, the Bird must be sicker. Dorent had traveled many long weeks to get here from the land of his exile, with little food, and he knew how to survive on hunger. But the Bird must eat lizards without ceasing, or it would die.

“I taste your heart,” the Bird whispered. Its worm-like tongue snaked from its bill and fluttered, while its eyelashes flitted in a dream.

Dorent smiled. “And I taste yours.”

❧

That evening, as the brown sun died, Dorent climbed down from the nest and collapsed among the broken bricks of his home. His knees were cut, his fingers bleeding, but he held his flint and striker in one hand and as many wheat seeds as he could clutch in the other. He crawled down the hill toward the Bird. Its eyes were gray and opaque now, its lashes still. When he reached it, he nudged the Bird’s head. It rolled back, the neck heavy and pliable.

Then its eyelid twitched.

The snake of its tongue lashed his hand, ripping like thorns.

The Bird shuddered, withdrawing its tongue and swallowing whatever it got. When it spoke, its voice was no brook-song, but a rattle of dried vines. “Feed yourself to me.”

“No. You shall feed me.”

His blood had already sprinkled the ground. The community had always slaughtered a calf, but it did not matter, he hoped, what creature gave its life in the libation for grain. And sacred for sacred, Bird for food, he must make his bargain.

With the fire striker, he chiseled out a low furrow all the way around the Bird, only a few fingers deep. It was all he needed. He crouched and raised his fist over the hill of disordered feathers. He opened his fingers, swinging and spreading with the motion he know so well. The seeds floated in a ring of silver cloud and landed in the shallow trench all around the Bird.

“Feed… yourself to me…”

“Never.” He dug under the feathers of its throat. The tongue flicked toward him, searching, but he found the cooling vein and rested the point of the striker on it. With the other hand, he raised the flint and beat the striker deep into the pale flesh. Again he smashed it, and again. With showering sparks, he nailed the Bird to the ground.

“For my children,” he whispered, the words choking his throat. “For my wife.”

The Bird gurgled as if any death was pleasurable, even its own.

The blood came in a swelling pool. It spilled into the trench and swept up the seeds in a wave. Almost at once it soaked into the parched earth and drained the seeds into the cracks.

This was the moment of discovery, of answering. He had never seen a drought like this before the Birds devoured all things green and living. When the community had killed the calves, the ground of the trench had always been moist and black, ready to sustain life. The Old Farmers had told no stories of dead, brown days.

But something rose from a crack in the ground.

A tiny white nub climbed, hesitated, tried again, then stopped. It had a little green about its edges, the first dream of a leaf, of sacred food.

“Holy for holy,” Dorent whispered. “This is my bargain.”

❧ ❧ ❧