The Dark Between Dreams | ✔️

Chapter 21 🔻 Song and Dance

Some chicks were completely featherless with naked black skin and eyes still sealed shut—fresh from the egg. They couldn't do much besides tremble and gape. The bigger ones had nascent feathers still in their protective sheaths, and they stretched out their skinny necks to peer over their nests, all crying out toward Crow. "They're so small," I whispered through my fingers. "How did they get through the sand?"

A crestfallen look fell over his face. "Most of them do not. They are too weak. Too frail. But I hear them below the sand sometimes. They struggle and cry." He tilted his head, as if listening for buried souls outside the ship. "Sometimes I dig fast enough to unbury them. And then sometimes...I do not. And they are gone."

He stroked his crying fledgling with a thumb, soothing it into silence. "Though they will never know pain or hunger, despite what this one is saying, they still need someone to protect them." The chick sprang from his hands, reaching out with its long legs and flapping its useless wings. Crow laughed as he caught it in his hands again. "This one wants to fly."

The chick preened its tubed feathers that would never grow into iridescent primaries. It was forever stunted. The fledgling would never fly, no matter how much its instincts compelled it.

"Sometimes names unearth themselves in my head and I give them to my flock. This little flier is Albrecht," Crow said. "That bird above you is Nymandus. The fat one over there is Orville. And then there is Seluku, Iltani, and—"

"Why did you save me and my friends, Crow?" I interjected. "If you hate us all so much, why didn't you leave us to die?"

"I would have. If I had it my way. But she insisted." He raised his hands to point at the crow perched next to him, the one that had freed us. "You do not remember her?"

I raised a brow at the bird. The crow cocked her head to the side. "Um. Should I?"

"Crows never forget a kindness," the other hollow said. "You saved her back in your city. So I saved you."

I inhaled the tiniest of breaths. The crow in the snare..."Oh! It's you!" I said. In response, the crow flapped over to nestle on the railing above me. She gave my head a peck, and I laughed. "Yup, it's definitely you."

"That is Nannāru. She is the pesky one."

"Nannāru." Her name definitely sounded prettier with Crow's accent. I ran my fingers through her plumage. I couldn't feel her, but admired, nonetheless, the hidden hues of pink, blue, and green of her black feathers when she moved.

I regarded Crow. "We're also enemies of After. Blackburne insists there's nothing out here in the Dark. But...Orville told me the story about you trying to kill Blackburne and summoning the behemoth. And there was a map on his wall, and we saw the ruins of a city. Was that where you—?"

"Weh!"

Right. Too loud. I sighed and tried again, calmer and more eloquent. "What happened the night you went mad?"

"You already know the story. Better than I do, I am sure. I am the usurper. I betrayed your king and tried to kill you all."

"But why? Why did you do it?"

The man turned away from me and moaned under his breath, "What have you done, Crow?" Then, through tangles of his hair, he said to me, "I do not know why. There was something about that place we found..." A muscle in his face twitched. He shook his head. "It took over my mind. I have not returned to those ruins since that night."

So, those ruins are the key.

I sighed and leaned against a railing, watching chicks flop about in their nests. I wasn't getting any answers from him. My friends and I would have to find them ourselves. "We came out here to kill you," I admitted.