C.E. Murphy - Thunderbird Falls

Snakes don’t have legs.

It’s a good thing I didn’t know where my real body was. I might’ve convinced the thunderbird to go bite my head off.

The serpent in my claws convulsed, then surged forward, reckless action that let it strike at my throat. Silver sparkling shields flared up again, protecting me, but it had learned. Its goal wasn’t to bite through me, but to grasp my neck in a crushing grip with its mouth. I shrieked, more from fear than pain, my claws opening to scrabble at the serpent’s body. Its weight pulled my head down and suddenly we were falling, an uncontrolled dive back toward the distant lake. I flared my wings, but it only slowed the fall. The serpent lashed around, using its own stubby wings to generate enough lift that it could slam its body weight down onto my right wing.

The expected pain didn’t come: the thunderbird’s bones were less fragile than a smaller creature’s might’ve been. But it unbalanced me badly, and the dive became a tumble, serpent and thunderbird wound about one another as we crashed through the air. I screamed outrage over and over, shattering the storm clouds above us. Rain hit in torrents, sheets of water weighing us further, driving us toward the lake’s surface.

The serpent wrapped itself around my neck, crushing my throat. We hit the water with a splash that felt like it broke every bone in my body.

I felt terribly, terribly small, beneath the surface of the lake. My wings were waterlogged, the serpent’s strength much greater here than in the sky. It slithered around my neck until it held me with the end of its tail, and then began swimming deeper, dragging me farther into the stormy lake. I spread my wings, pathetic painful gesture of protest, and the serpent’s speed slowed a little.

A little. Not enough. I closed my eyes and struggled to backwing, trying to pull myself back toward the surface. The serpent tightened its tail around my throat and swam harder. I wondered how long I could survive underwater, or if a thunderbird didn’t need to do mundane things like breathe.

From the growing tightness in my chest, I suspected I wasn’t going to be that lucky.

Why hadn’t it worked? I’d sure as hell gotten the thing’s attention by bellowing its name. Why hadn’t it bent to my will?

Maybe because I had no ritual. It’d taken ritual to open the world walls with the coven. The water grew colder and darker and I fought to remember any of what they’d done, beyond dancing around a fire and singing in a language I didn’t know. Even in the midst of drowning, I snorted at myself. Water went up my beak and I coughed out most of the air I had left.

Ritual not only wasn’t my style, but I was a little short on time anyway. The serpent had only hesitated when I called its name, not been stopped entirely. I was missing something.

Virissong’s face flashed through the darkness that was becoming all I could see, and I almost laughed. Didn’t, quite: I’d already used up too much air. But almost. And cast down deep into myself, reaching for power at the same time that I made a promise: if I got out of this alive, I was going to spend a whole lot more time studying and a whole lot less time pretending that my gifts didn’t exist.

Approval bubbled through me, not my own. The thunderbird stretched its wings farther and swept them down powerfully, dragging the serpent and its downward journey to a stop. The serpent snapped around, a silver streak in the dark lake, its fangs bared as it lunged for the thunderbird.

My power responded with a flare of brightness that turned the rain-pelted lake to white. I whispered, “My name is Siobhàn Walkingstick,” into the whiteness, and the thunderbird’s voice roared, water shaking away from me in visible shock waves. “I live within Wakinyan, your ancient Enemy.” Maybe I had a little ritual in me after all. “I know you, Amhuluk. And I know the demon whose soul you share.”

I had no way to draw breath, and the impulse to do so nearly killed me. I drew water all the way to the back of my throat before coughing it out again. Dizziness brought my eyesight down to pinpoints, even the thunderbird’s superb color vision unable to offer me more than tiny spots of focus. I took the last air in my lungs and someone else whispered, “ Idlirvirissong ,” from my mouth as I lunged forward to slam my talons through the serpent’s skull, shattering bone and closing claw through the monster’s mouth.

I had a moment to be astonished while thunder ruptured all the water away from me, sending it spouting up into the sky in a whirlpool that I was the eye of. The serpent was flung into its swirls, squealing hideously as the water swept it farther and farther into the sky. A split appeared in the sky, shredding the clouds and opening a path all the way up to the clear stars. I dragged in a deep breath, feeling warmth and life returning.

I was good with the idea of nets. Cars and nets and cages. Things that held people in, rather than releasing them. What I needed now was an opening, the same kind the coven had created, one that would let not just the serpent, but all the spirits we’d released into Seattle return to their homes.

The idea of sacrifice flirted around the edges of my mind, so obvious and simple that even now I almost fell for it. It’d been made clear to me that it was my power that’d given the coven the strength to do what they had. I was certain that a little thing like the cost of my life would be enough to pay for sending the spirits home again.

But that would be the easy way out, and frankly, I didn’t think I deserved it. I tilted my head back, feeling wet feathers ruffle and stretch against my throat. I had no spell to sing, but I had the voice of the Wakinyan, and I had my own will to change the things that had been done badly.

I had never heard a sweet sound from a raptor’s throat before. The pure noise of shattering glass played off the whirlpool’s walls, bouncing higher and higher into the atmosphere, until the sound itself crashed into the gash in the sky, and tore it open all the wider.

I threw my own will behind that sound, flinging power up toward the clouds. Just to the clouds: rain thundered down all over Seattle, and I wanted to use that. I envisioned silver drops of power mingling with the rainfall, splashing down over man and beast and calling those who belonged somewhere else home again. Roofs and tree cover meant nothing, I whispered to the power-infused rain. It was the rain that carried the message, and all the creatures that heard it were bound by my will.

Amhuluk, closest to the rip in the sky and weakened by the calling of its name, went first. It threw its own black power behind it, trying to stitch the tear closed, so that the others couldn’t follow. I reached up and slashed the hole open again with a silver lance of magic, the distance between it and myself meaningless.

Crystal filled the air, so sharp-edged and full of color I winced away from it. It took long moments to realize it was an aurora, more brilliant in the thunderbird’s acute vision than my own mind was capable of processing. Jade faded to diamond-white at the edges, then ran and blurred into violet and crimson, so hard I thought I would cut myself if I reached up to touch them.

And littered in the colors came the spirits, their own forms faded and gentle inside the aching incandescence of the aurora. Resentment tingled from some, relief from others as they pounded into the sky.

The beat of footsteps into the sky shook the earth, and a surge of panic lent strength to my power. I didn’t want another earthquake, and remembered too vividly that was how the spirits had been given body. I shouted again, thunderbird voice running deep this time, and the whirlpool I hovered in the midst of buckled and mirrored itself, opening a spigot into the depths of the lake beneath me. I was the focal point of that one, too, the center at the small end, its width growing as it spiraled down toward the bottom of the lake.