Fifth Lord

Chapter 1

She woke to pain, the searing fire burning in her skin and screaming in her chest. The cacaphony of screams around her joined in the staccato of her heartbeat. Her flesh was rending from the bones and she realized the screaming was her.

She couldn't open her eyes, sockets fused closed and bubbling. Blood filled her mouth and her screams turned to gurgling sobs as she felt it run down her face, her skin hissing and smoking under the acidic red.

Then the pain stopped. Heaving breaths wracked her body and blood dripped from her lips. The scent of damp moss touched her distorted tongue as she choked on bits of herself.

In her chest she felt a pressure. It was light and soft, her mother's touch on her face. It caressed her ribs with tendrils and fingers. Its weight was a welcome thing and eyes looked in her and found warmth. It traced her spine with the care of a collector, transfixed by the rarest book they had seen. It saw and took everything in itself.

And then it took.

Writhing and squirming between her lungs, gnawing at her heart. It grasped and took in its clawed fingers. It shredded her tissue into macerated pulp that it gobbled and spit out until there was nothing left but it in the hollow cavern of herself.

...

She woke to a woman standing over her, winged and adorned in gold. Her hands long and clawed removed the bindings from her limbs. Metal and grotesque they had sunk into her new flesh and embedded themselves, heavy and foreign.

Clawed fingers reached into her new body without permission to remove what should never had been. With each piece removed she felt the debt weighing upon her shoulders deepen, the ties between them becoming heavier and bearing.

With shaking fingers she reached into her own leg and dug into her flesh. Her fingers blunt and human were never meant for this work. She tore the flesh and meat aside, grasping the metal shard in her no longer human fingers.

Midnight and sharp they gleamed in the red lacquer. Lengthy talons piercing the metal with a strength they never had possessed but wear with right.

The woman stands before her and smiles behind her cage, wreathed in a halo of feathers she extends her arms with invitation to embrace.

The woman makes no move to help her. The woman's eyes simply watch with her hollow motherly grin as she struggles to rise from the cold metal table.

She staggers into the woman's embrace. Her arms are tight and cold, sharp fingers digging into her shoulders. It is clinical, observational in method and execution. She attempts to move away but the fingers dig tighter into her flesh, new blood flowing sluggishly across new skin.

It felt like hours before the woman stepped back, hands still resting on her shoulders, her expression the same hollow motherly grin and calculating eyes. Her voice was smooth and cold, rattling like water in metal pipes.

"My dear child, how beautiful you are," the woman trailed her hands across her back, "So much power, so much potential trapped in your little form." The fingers' daggered forms dug into her flesh, grabbing at bone and pulling. She felt air hit muscles and sinew, things that should forever see dark brought to the painful breaking of dawn under unwelcome hands.

She screamed and thrashed but the woman's grip held fast, keeping the bone and flesh from her body. Then she felt something shift under her skin, spreading from her chest and reaching out of herself, from her eyes, from her mouth, from the gaping wounds in her back.

Keening whimpers echoed around the chamber, tears that long ran out dried on her cheeks. "Hush now my child," came the woman, "The pain is temporary, power is forever." The woman's eyes held disappointment, at what she did not know.

Her taloned hands gingerly reached back to touch the weight now hanging from her shoulders, her hand coming away tinged with a greasy substance and blood. She attempted to turn her head, trying to see what was attached to her when her her chin was harshly yanked back to face the woman.

The woman elegantly gestured towards the side of the wall where a section of the wall had slid away to reveal a dust coated mirror. Under the woman's heavy gaze she stumbled her way to the mirror, blood running rivets down her back.

Wiping away the dust she let out muffled sob. Her face was no longer her face, she was faced with a monster.

She wore the face of a crow, beaked and feathered, her body silhouetted by large black wings.

Her monstrous form melted into her body and familiarity replaced it, the woman's hands came to rest once more upon her shoulders. She struggled to not flinch away from the sharpened grip. The woman gazed at her through the mirror and she could not gaze back.

"And you will be called Corvus."