Саймон Морден - Down Station

And she could still see, her preternatural vision catching movement far below: animals emerging from cover, the wind-waves on the crowns of the trees, the rising spire of smoke from a fire.

Her fire. She remembered. She’d set it, and lit it, and now there was a thin column of sooty smoke marking its place. She wheeled away. She didn’t want boiled grain any more, if she ever wanted it in the first place. Meat. Raw meat, running with blood, hot and vital. Only that would satisfy her. But she was huge. The crows she had flown with were like flies to her. She could crush them by the handful and still not be satisfied, and they were her crows, not to be slashed out of the air and broken on the ground.

She needed bigger prey.

She turned and spread her feathers wide, gliding like she had been born a bird, and started searching in the growing gloom for something to catch and kill.

Even though she spotted, and swooped low over, cattle the size of cars, they didn’t excite her or give her the same thrill that the discarded thought of catching crows had given her. Not some beast tied to the ground for her. Her quarry should be airborne, like her, so that she could dive on it from above, wings swept back and feet clenched like fists to break its wing and send it tumbling to the ground.

Where was she going to find such creatures, something worthy of the effort? She could almost taste them, the breast feathers torn out with her hooked beak, the puckered flesh beneath, the first burst of flavour.

She turned east to look across the hill country, and north towards the high plateau, south over the ocean and east to view the islands set in the darkling sea, but there was nothing. The sky was void and empty, and it would be hours before the moon rose. She turned for home, to the tiny red glow of the fire on the pavement in front of the castle.

She landed in a flurry of feathers, as disappointed as an unfired gun. Folding her wings, she strutted forward to inspect the remains of the cooking pot that was now a foul-smelling cinder on top of a whited-ash heap.

Her head turned sideways to look at it, her talons gripping the cracks in the pavement, and she was distracted by a flash of colour off to one side. She couldn’t walk◦– the motion was unnatural◦– so she hopped over, and found a circular pool. She pecked at the thing floating in the rippling water, a shed orange skin with a rent and stained back, and dragged it out to get a better look at it.

She knew it should mean something more to her than it did, because it was her skin, the one she’d worn before she’d spread her wings, and what? Jumped from the top of the tower, that tower above her, its edges ragged and unfinished, full of roosting crows.

There’d been a man, too, with skin as black as a crow’s coat. He’d helped her, or had pretended to do so, and then he’d stolen from her that which he considered most precious.

The door. The fire. The stepping into the surging sea. The cold saltwater washing around hot burns.

Mary. Her name was Mary.

This was Down’s doing, then. The wish first, followed by the act. That was the art of magic, and the danger of it too, because it could so easily destroy her: the transformation of her from human to avian almost had her lost in the now of flight, of hunting, of seeking. That was what Crows had warned her of, too much, too soon.

Where would Crows be now? He’d be making his way downriver, towards the place he called a portal. With that, the unbidden urge to stretch her wings again launched her into the air, flapping quickly to gain height, climbing over the growing wall and heading south.

The land was in darkness, and still she could see. There was the lake she’d swum in, half a day’s walk she could now make in a fraction of the time, there was the river, flowing out to sea, the broad, braided delta with its shallows and bars, there was the bay, curving like horns, where the waves tore in and broke themselves on the sloping shingle beach.

And there, there was the long ridge, looking like the spine of the world, except that when it reached the coast, its back was broken and beyond the cliff was a line of broken rubble extending as far out as a stack of rock, surrounded by the ever-moving sea.

She flew towards it, and a thin sickle of a moon had started to rise when she had proper sight of it, still miles away in the distance. Below her, the forest stretched out, and the river shone silver. There was movement there, and her sharp eyes picked out dark figures moving through the scrub and reeds.

Yes, there were wolves, but they were not all wolves. Two wolves, six men, in a ragged line, from the main, broad channel of the river to the edge of the forest. If any of them had looked up, they would have seen nothing. She was far above them, and travelling silently.

She circled them as they made their sweep towards the sea. They were looking for someone, someones, but didn’t have a scent yet. Perhaps there were more survivors coming through the portal, and the wolfman had been sent to collect them in the same way he’d come for her group.

Or perhaps they were looking for Crows. She thought she’d find him first, and depending on what he had to say, she might tell him he was being hunted.

The seas around the stack boomed and shook, the swell heaving against the broken rock around its base. She flew once around the pillar of rock, twice, three times, getting lower with each pass. She instinctively avoided the spray, but in amongst the flashes off the rock faces, she could detect something moving at the wave-washed base, clambering over the boulders.

It was no more than a pool of darkness, gliding from shadow to shadow, but she knew what that meant and who hid beneath it.

She swung back up to the top of the stack, contending with cross-winds and updraughts, and landed on the weather-struck rock. The wind continued to ruffle her feathers, and when she looked out over the ocean, she could see the lowest quarter of the moon blocked off by a band of black cloud.

The stack was larger than she’d thought: any bigger and she would have called it an island. To seaward, it sloped down to a rocky beach, but it rose from that low point to form cliffs on the other sides. She couldn’t climb, and she couldn’t talk. All that came out was a screech. Having found Crows, she couldn’t get close enough to him. Not as a bird, and even as she crouched low over the ground to stop the wind buffeting her, she wondered what she could do.

She hadn’t always been that way, even though it felt as natural as breathing. She remembered walking upright, swinging arms as she did so. She’d had hands that gripped, a strange flat face with a curious button nose and lips that could pout, and hair that fell from the crown of her head in black coils. She had a tongue, sharp and quick.

She was cold. She stumbled, and she steadied herself with a five-fingered thing that it took her a moment to recognise. She was still bruised and cut, and now she was also in her vest and pants, exposed to the strengthening salt gale.

The muscle in her mouth lengthened and thickened. She could taste copper and bile.

‘F… Fu…’ she mouthed. She had teeth, and tried not to bite herself as she formed the word. ‘Fuck.’

For a moment, she wrapped herself in the strange-angled limbs she had instead of wings and lay in a rough rock-bowl, rocking against the sudden pain and shock, trying to cushion her mind from the sense of howling loss.

She could no longer fly. She’d put it down and she didn’t know whether she could ever take it up again.

Slowly, she unwound, and had to relearn how to stand on feet, and how to use knees, and how to swing hips. Awkwardly, stutteringly, she started down the slope to the shoreline.