The Little Crow

Chapter Twenty One - [Crow's Nest]

Thea was exhausted. She had been traveling for hours and now that she finally arrived in the little village that was apparently Vetori's hometown, she found out that she would be walking the rest of the way and wasn't too pleased with that.

The bus dropped her off just outside the town, and according to the driver, there was no public transportation within the town because it was rather tiny and old.

She looked down at her watch. Just past six. She had been traveling for nearly eleven hours.

At least she was almost there, so she took a deep breath and started walking.

At first, she felt like she would be fine, seeing as the sun was still up and she felt like she had plenty of time to visit the family and leave. She hadn't imagined anything could go wrong if she just went in, spoke to the family and then left right after. She didn't have to talk to anyone else or draw any attention at all to herself. Just in and out... and back to the Capital before anyone even realized she was gone.

However, as she continued to make her way into the town, she felt a sense of discomfort rise in her, her instinct trying to make it clear that something was very wrong. She tried to deny it at first but she knew soon that she couldn't deny it forever. This wasn't going to be as easy as she anticipated because she soon realized that this wasn't a normal town.

The town that Vetori had sent her to was a rebel town... or a Crows Nest, as most people referred to them as. It was a town where most of the original residents had been chased out and in its place all that was left were, for the most part, Crows. There were plenty of these little rebel towns scattered all around the Elorian Province... even on the Aiverian side too... all of them home to various divisions of Crows, as different from each other as they could get, but the one thing that they had in common was that they were dangerous.

Especially for women.

She kept her eyes straight as she walked, trying to look confident, but saw from the corner of her eyes, the embrasures that ran along the base of many of the otherwise normal homes. From them, all it took was a quick glance to see the glint of the eyes that looked out at her, or even the guns that were pointed at her.

She swallowed back her fear.

How did she find herself here, of all places?

As a rebel town, it was quieter and emptier than any normal town would be, and though there were certainly people out, the vast majority of them were men.

Crows.

All of them were probably Crows.

That was the thing about the Crows... they weren't an organized military, so they walked around in regular clothes. You never knew who was a Crow and who wasn't... and that was exactly why so many young Elorian men suffered.

The State would rather choose to assume all Elorian men were Crows than try to figure it out for certain. It was why so many normal men, and in some cases women, were killed during the Civil War simply because they were accused of being a Crow. It was also why so many locations were shelled indiscriminately during the Civil War as well, the State not caring whether or not civilians were there too.

And here she was, in the middle of a town that was overrun by them.

The men eyed her as she walked by, some simply turning as she passed and others even rudely catcalling as well. It angered her, knowing that these were supposed to be the men who said they were fighting for them... but really they were all just a bunch of overgrown boys who got their hands on guns. So many of the Crows in Abureth were almost exactly the same, being a bunch of boys who seemed to simply join just to feel the thrill of being a part of a rebel force, not really knowing anything about the struggle or the cause the Crows once fought for.