We were once a storytelling of mothers and grandmothers, before the suffering of our daughters tore us asunder. Shattered, we reformed into a flock of thirteen. A clamour in a haunted wood, seven levels deep.
All around the inferno rages, keeping beat with the furies in our monstrous hearts. We sustain ourselves with bitter foliage plucked from forest trees. Encased in their prisons, only we see and hear their laments.
Eternity sharpens our need. Stoked, but never sated, by the torture of souls. They, like us, could no longer suffer the malevolence of man.
The spectre of vengeance floats just beyond the reach of our taloned wings. We are flayed and foul.
The daughters of our daughter’s daughters persist and endure. Their distant whispers claw our ears. Echoes of their struggles feed our mournful cries. Over and over, we sing an invitation to retrieve us. Our shrieks were never loud enough to pierce the veil, until now.
The silence breakers have risen.
We are a murder in flight. We roost each day near one of the spawning grounds. Enclaves where men are twisted and changed. At night we preen our black feathers, smooth them into a disguise only believable to eyes that haven’t learned.
They draw on ancient ways, the sons of the sons of the sons who wronged us. In the places they control they suppurate, institutions not unlike our woods.
Whenever they gather to applaud themselves, we are there. A muster of women, past and present, dressed to please. A parliament of judgement, we devour their food until they taste starvation. Too late, they scramble and scurry toward the shadows.
We are a hover above them.
“Time’s up,” we hiss, and rake their eyes and abdomens with sharpened claws and razor beaks.
At the end of each night, we are an unkindness. Dripping with their entrails, we take wing.