#ocrus

She moved with the grace of a decadescent queen to a country in mourning, delicate turns of toe forcing ebon claws to scratch the ground with the fury of her rattling bones, leaving gashes in a tremored wake. Where the shadows of her skin met the shadows of the earth, the metallic slivers of argent anklets jangled around a pair of pike-point legs. Her feathers were the remaining char of ancient fires, volcanic excretions that had once compressed into premature continents cooled and split, though miles and atmospheric pressures above, by oceans vast, yet forever linked by the unscrapeable scabs of crust and the molten mother who so birthed it. She turned her head at the sound of an intruder and a sun was held in stasis in her eyes, eclipsed in full by the darkness of an alien moon, its light devoured into the sharp shape of a corona-like crown but belonging to an orb which was not strictly impenetrable. The movement sent a star shooting through that cloistered universe, a scintillic meteor that glided through her cosmos of consciousness towards another sun, another system; she saw another shape, another trespasser.

The night was disturbed by the fractured soundscapes of unquiet caws from maneater maws, a rapturous sermon delivered to no audience but the sound of their turgid voices and the echoes of expression that rippled as each wail was met then reciprocated. Trees shivered in response as the breeze wove the noise through their long, stagnate forms; their branches provided pews for the corvid congregation whose true number was indecipherable - not from the darkness of their surroundings, nor the disorienting discord of their vocal vacillations.

Somewhere between the splendor of Monir and otherworldly ephemera of Fern, the forest of Hallowed Oak began to grow thin as one walked east toward the land of three lakes that were aptly dubbed Trinity. That oft forsaken outcropping was rumored to harbor great gatherings of transmutable beasts, legends of increasing cruelty frequently ushered forth from the lips of mortal men belonging to more civilized societies, who feared the yarn to act as a metaphor for propensity of the same in their own nature, or harbored some genuine belief in these storied beings... or both. However, if the path strode was in the obverse direction, westward, then the density of the brush was markedly more. It was easy to grow confused when the sights seen were repetitious to an exponential degree. It was easy to be drawn in by the sounds of a ritual in reverberant progress.

The moon shone down upon a small break in the trees, its auroral light aglow in a cooler rendition of the warmth she had greedily stolen. Opalescent hung her gibbous form, gleaming with an interest whose intensity was dulled by the distance of the dead void of space from terra firma to lunar terrae. In that clearing, bands of crows encircled a stationary pair: one, the queen and her bejeweled legs scarring the earth, and another, her expired king, whose heart was pierced with the elongated shaft of a hunter's arrow. Around them danced their countrymen and women, with jaunty steps that followed a jangly, out of time rhythm. These tangible ripples that expanded from the suffering center each rotated opposite of one another - if the first moved left, the second moved right, third left, fourth right, and so on, and so forth until the outer limits were reached. Most curious about that last line, circumferentially the largest of all, was the presence of a man among the avian ranks, dutifully following the animalian celebration that wasn't altogether any more barbaric or uncivilized than those displayed by humans, those that frequently took place around maypoles, fueled by the friskiness of spring. ... Even if it was in quite different company, and on the cusp of a frigid season.

Covered in the colors that reigned in the absence of light, his dress was a voluminous assemblage of silks expertly woven together to not constrict the necessary movement of his sanguine, dagger-toed steps. About his neck and shoulders were draped an overabundance of pearls whose strings were broken with the sheen of a different gem - sometimes the coquettish blush of rose-colored crystal, sometimes the verdant shine of emeralds, sometimes gilt facets of poorly chipped pieces of pyrite. His hands held what would have been a train if he was stationary or simply walking, but now was reduced into bunch of fabric clutched by skin that was stained with a commixture of soot and oil, flecked with a finely ground glitter of mica-dust.

The sight of it all gave the appearance they were courting the death of their compatriot. It was a funerary ritual that was steeped in the formality of gestures rather than thoughts and words turned by a human tongue; actions and precise gestures that spoke volumes more to the loss of a loved one than the simple offering condolences ever could. The cacophonous aggregations of those still obscured by the shadowed curtains of their perches shook the sky. Death, in the flesh, returned the delight offered by those curse-born creatures of ash.

Though the queen had seen the approach of another, the rest of her associates seemed to pay no attention except for the man. He stopped when the line circled near, and extended his hand in offering.