Flight School: Predator

When the Night Sings

I'll wake at night

Come morning light

*

No one was awake at this hour; at least no diurnal prey was so foolish enough to be, at the expense of their safety and the mercy of a stifling curfew. The night breathed a chill outside his window, its touch icy against skin, bare. He thought he heard a whisper.

Slayne rose to draw the blinds. He wouldn't have had the will to act upon a thing so trivial, not if the wind was calm, serene. It tugged at the edge of his papers, turning the pages of his book to the next and the next and the next and then it was the end of his book and all of a sudden, there was nothing left to be read and he'd lost the page he was looking at.

The quill was replaced and he'd yet to prepare himself for the painstaking task of relocating that page but the wind was incessant and had charged into his room through the open window and caused a row of books, standing, to be knocked over—toppling his bottle of ink.

The owl cursed, rose so abruptly that his chair scraped the floor with a shriek, and piled a stack of napkins on top of the spill. A natural instinct of his followed suit and that was to close the windows.

Anyone would have closed the windows.

But then he heard a sound that didn't seem so much to him as a whisper of the wind, and he stopped all that he was doing to listen.

The window was half-shut and his arm remained on the latch that begged to be pulled for there was a battering against its entire pane and it struggled against the increasing force of nature, far too strong for an ordinary gust of wind.

Half-shut, he listened.

It was a tune.

_________________________________

He fell in love with it—the tune.

At first, he hadn't thought very much of it at all for it was an ordinary progression; a harmony that could be found elsewhere in the world and there was nothing special about its existence. Yet the creature within was lulled before it could instruct the windows to be shut and the wind, ceased.

It succumbed to a pause, waiting for the tune to sing its sorrows asleep—unable to resist the comfort of its caress, so kind.

Because it went on for the night and the next, and the one after, and the one after that, Slayne was beginning to think it a figment of his imagination; the characterizing of the wind. There was no one to ask if they heard what he did, or if they knew where it was coming from.

All he knew of the tune was its existence, perhaps unseen and forgotten by the rest of the world. He liked to think that it was something only he could hear. Something that belonged only to him.

*

The owl only learnt of its origins a week later, seven whole nights of a song he never seemed to tire of, a melody he found playing at the back of his mind whenever it was blank.