#avallachs

"..ow much more will die because of you, Shepard?"

Opening their eyes wide in horror, Evelyn can't make a sound. Their face contorted in fear and panic. They want to shout into the void, but all that leaves their lips is a pathetic whimper. A silent scream. A plea for mercy.

"Why did you live and they died? They were good men."

All they can see is an endless sea of stars. Cold unyielding cosmos suffocates them with its intensity. The all-too-familiar feeling of helplessness clouds every other thought, drowning them, dragging them down to the bottom of the deep dark sea of never-ending thoughts.

Just like it was on Akuze… Breathing becomes harder with each passing second. No matter where Shepard tries to run, all they can see is blood, all they can smell is death and ash. Screaming of their unit would be deafening if not for the ringing in their ears.

Disoriented, Evelyn tries to get up and find their weapon. They have to help them. Why can't they do anything?

One of the officers, Adrian, - they still can't remember his face - is thrown in the air, and Evelyn knows he won’t survive; it would be better to turn away, to not see his broken body on the ground. His acusing eyes focused on them. It would be easier, but they can't move. 

The only thing they can do is watch. 

Please, save them.

Shepard!

o.

The loneliest creature that earth has born is man, for man walks earth alone.

For years and years and years, as though plagued by a divine fervor, he searches, relentlessly, for something that he cannot find — a memory, cut out and tucked away from prying, tempted mortal minds, alike his own. This is now bone of my bones.

He who knows the secrets of the world, of all things good that were created, sends out the beasts of land and sky and sea, whose language he did not have to master but has taught, to retrieve the one that had been taken. Word spreads as the creatures trade in whispers, to the deepest trench and highest mountain that all living things may reach. Time passes, lands shift. At last, the beasts return to him with tidings.

The one you seek lies deep beneath the earth, they tell him, cawing, humming, roaring, but worry not;

All things die, but none can leave.

i.

Crows were not a strange occurrence.

Flocking onto roofs and masts and fences, croaking and cawing and going after crumbs that had been lost or left behind somewhere between cobblestones and weeds — but then the flocks had begun growing larger.

She did not really notice, not at first. Their groups always varied in size. One crow or two, sometimes even six, or just a little more, but never much. The jet-black birds could be found almost anywhere, staring after passersby with titled tiny heads and glinting clever eyes, hopping from one spot to the other as though having an urgent secret needed to be shared.

One crow or two would sit in one of the many trees that she passed by every day, picking at the leaves or at the branches, in dissatisfaction or delight. Four or six of them could be found scavenging the streets, fighting over scraps. Eight had began to be less usual, gathered on the blackened steel of ancient fences. Twelve birds staring after her in silence from atop a tented roof had, for the first time, made her feel at unease.

Paranoia, she’d told herself. Birds don’t do these things.

Then twelve birds had turned into sixteen. Sixteen into twenty, and ever onward after that.

The roof of the building she is facing has now turned almost fully black.

There is a murder staring down at her, unmoving, far too quiet. People all around have started talking, voices hushed and fingers pointing, though none seem to understand that it is her the birds are glaring at, with unrelenting, penetrative eyes.

She doesn’t listen to the others, their wonder and their theories, cannot even will herself to try. Her heart has began pounding all the way up into her ears, has made her hands and arms and legs begin to shiver. She turns right on her heel, then, all plans of entering abandoned, only wanting to get home, to barricade herself behind a door, where no eerie and abnormal birds could follow.

So she turns, setting one foot in front of the other as quickly as she can.