It's strange to be surrounded by death. It was one you like the bodies of each departed soul, your back bowing with their heft as they try to push on. Somehow you always do, because they would want you to. As if they can want anything, eyes cold and breaths caught for eternity in their throats. Mal hated it, longed to be free of it, longed to push them from her back and leave them behind, but the thought of her flock rotting alone in the cold was too much to bear. So she staggered on, about to collapse with each step the teetering heap of the fallen stacked high. It was then, in one of these moments so close to collapse but unable to fall that she spotted the wings. Still attached to a crumbled body, black feathers strewn across the forest floor. The result of a falcon attack no doubt, a sorry scene yes, but not one worth stopping for. Still, Mal found she could not pull her eyes away from the sight, an omen, a promise, those wings calling to her. Before she quite knew what she was doing Mal crouched before the tattered body, paws amid a pool of rust-colored gore and ebony feathers. With a gentle motion as if afraid to hurt the cadaver, she removed its wings, still pristine despite the creature's condition. In the glow of dawn, they shimmered a vibrant black, shifting to violets and indigos in the ray of morning light. They were her wings, she knew it with a new certainty. Taking each wing in her jaws she fixed them upon her back, spread them wide and allowed her entourage of dead to slide from her back, their weight finally lifted. Yet, she still could not leave them. As they lay before her, feathers bent and broken, round eyes glassy staring up at her. Carefully as she had been with the crow, she plucked a feather from each of their wings in turn replacing the feathers of her own with theirs, until her left wing was alive with a rainbow of colors. The blood-red of a hawk feather, the blue-gray of a chickadee, the dusty-brow of a wren, the storm gray of a kinglet, and night-black of a shrike. Their weight lifted, but their presents constant, she continued upon her way, leaving what remained of their forms behind. Content in her wings and her collection of the dead.
