The Songbird

Chapter 3: Black Waters

There was a low buzzing, that sound always present in silence, overtaking all real noise right before the senses came back to life, right before darkness became an image.

Mina's vision began to clear after time spent drifting in nothingness, and she immediately became aware of two things: one, that her body hurt tremendously. Two, that there was something lying near her on the ground.

She groaned in pain, rolling onto her stomach and trying to make sense of the shape. It looked like a massive dark bird, one that had been shot out of the sky with its wings fanned out around it. But when rationale came back to Mina with better sight, she soon saw that those wings were nothing more than a black cloak, covering a fallen knight that struggled to rise as surely as she did.

It was the female of the group, and Mina judged she must've been knocked a great distance from her horse and the other knights. She shook her head in an effort to gain clarity before turning her eyes to Mina, noticing just then that she was there.

Those eyes that once seemed soft now looked scared and confused, and she was clutching at her arm as though it were injured. For the first time, the girl didn't look so different from the peasants who occupied this space, thrown to the ground and rendered completely out of sorts as surely as Mina was.

But as the knight continued to stare at her, something strange happened against the backdrop of smoke and noise.

The girl's eyes began to grow lighter, shifting brown into an unnatural gold. Never ceasing, never reducing in their intensity, the gold became brighter, hard to look at, terrible to look at, so much brighter that they turned a seething yellow more piercing than any shade of sunlight.

Mina felt cold fear, immediately trying to shuffle away as her body cried out in pain. The knight's hands tangled in her own crown of braids, and the girl squeezed her eyes shut as tears leaked out, murmuring something over and over again right before her shoulders began to convulse and her voice began to scream.

The sound was enough to jolt Mina to her feet despite the agony, and only one thought was strong enough to cut through her veil of panic:

Get away.

Her feet were weeping, but she forced them to move. Her legs felt like water, but she commanded them to carry her along. Her back and shoulders prickled and stung, but she pushed it down through the chaos.

Smoke hung like a cloud in The Joiner's Square, and a nearby building looked like it had been blown out. There was debris in the streets, and many people were either crying in pain or, stranger than anything, cheering at the spectacle. It was chaos redefined, sounds and sights combining into something overwhelming. Mina took it all in as she stumbled for The Red Alley, sparing one glance over her shoulder before she disappeared.

The fallen knight was still screaming and murmuring something, rocking inward on herself, never ceasing even when the biggest of the knights strode over and gently lifted her into his arms. Glancing a line from the knight he held all the way to Mina's limping form, he stared at her just long enough to make Mina scramble away faster than before.

* * * * *

When her shack came into view, Mina practically fell through the entryway before slamming the door shut in an afterthought.

Sliding to the floor, her body vibrated in disoriented panic, thoughts and images of what she'd just seen flashing through her mind like cannon fire. Only the pain was stronger, and Mina struggled to lift the hem of her scorched dress, finding a mess of scratches and bruises on her brown skin. Her hands and arms were littered with similar marks, and any patch of skin that wasn't damaged lay covered in ash. No bones seemed to be broken, but the sting of everything was overwhelming and the image of that yellow stare refused to leave her.

Mina heaved, moisture prickling behind her eyes, and she clutched her red cloth in a death grip as she began to chant the only feasible thought she could form:

"Make it stop," she begged. "Make it stop, make it stop. No more pain, no more pain, no more..."

The empty air devoured her little whispers, the words sounding terribly loud in her ears. She felt her isolation as clearly as she felt the wounds, for who was there to help? Who would make the pain stop? Mina had no supplies with which to tend to herself. All that could be done was to keep speaking, keep chanting, ground herself in her voice, the one thing that had allowed her to live when she had nothing.

"No more pain," Mina whispered again. "No more, no more, no more..."

A wave of blinding exhaustion overtook her in that moment, and Mina felt powerless to stop herself from laying fully on the floor, fighting to keep her eyes open. She thought she knew what tiredness was, but this wasn't something to stave off. This was something that dragged her eyelids down and made her oblivious to all else.

The pain was suddenly no longer there, lost somewhere she supposed in the face of crushing fatigue. Images of the explosion and the girl's yellow eyes became sluggish and warped, sounds appearing garbled and haunted, and the world turned on its head. She felt her stomach lurch as darkness soon pushed her into oblivion for the second time that day.

Black waters closed over her head, and then she was gone, sprawled out on the floor of her home. She slept and did not stir, the early afternoon sun tracking across the sky before moonlight and stars took its place in the coming hours. She never moved, never cried out for any shadow. There she laid endlessly, her body mending itself from shock, though not the kind derived from what happened in the square.

This was something different, and had she been awake to feel it, Mina would've experienced a new shade of fear, something that would've sent her into hopeless fits with no one to guide her, nothing to prevent her from seeing things she'd only imagined in nightmares. Nothing to stop the feeling that something was alive beneath her skin, crawling around in her soul, aching and screaming and scratching to get out.

Unconsciousness kept her protected.

It was better that way.