No! No! Noooooooooo!
I could not suppress the shrieks that ripped out of my throat and my soul at the same time. I found myself before the painting, lunging at it and attacking it over and over and over. I had to rend the scroll, to tear it to shreds.
But the dried leaf strips from which it had been woven were too hard and thick. My beak couldn't penetrate them, and the weaving itself was too tight. I couldn't stab my beak between the strips either.
Nooooooo! No no no!
I raked my claws across the paint, which started to flake off. This was not me. This was not how these people – any people! – would remember me. I wouldn't let it be! I had to shred this painting, this terrible painting, had to destroy it and any like it until no memory of it remained.
Someone screamed. It might have been the foxling.
"Pip! What are you doing?" cried overlapping voices.
Rosie! Stop!
"Oh no, ssshe's not ssstopping!"
"Stop her! Stop her!" clamored the villagers in their archaic dialect. "She's destroying our history!"
This is NOT history!
"Pip! Pip! Please stop!"
Human hands wrapped around my body. I thrashed free, and the fingers didn't grab, as if their owner feared squeezing too hard would snap these fragile sparrow ribs. I savaged the painting, gashing lines across the monster's face.
This is not history! This is slander! Libel! Calumny! Propaganda! Whoever did it must be executed for crimes against the state, the way they were five hundred years ago!
I thought I'd had all versions of this painting confiscated and destroyed, everywhere they had spread throughout the Empire! I thought I'd had all of them collected and burned in a bonfire before the main gates of the palace, along with the original traitor artist and everyone who had picked up a brush to copy it, or distributed it, or so much as thought about buying a copy. How had one survived to be copied and re-copied and embellished over the centuries until it transformed into an even more grotesque lie?
This village. This village had to be razed from its ground-level rooftops down to floors of its basement rooms!
Wings folded around me and caged me and dragged me away from the painting, that horrible, horrible painting.
Rosie, calm down. We're not razing anything.
It was Stripey, his voice rumbling through his chest, and he sounded like he was losing his patience very, very fast.
I flung myself against his wings, but he didn't open them. I beat against his chest with mine.
It's a lie! I – she never looked like that! It was a lie spread by her enemies at court! It was such a horrible lie that everyone involved had to be burned to death for it! Flos Piri was beautiful and graceful. She had skin like pear blossoms and lips like cherries and hair like the billows of midnight – and nine very fat, very soft, very fluffy tails!
On the other side of the wall of Stripey's wings, the commotion was still going on. The villagers were howling over the desecration of their painting, the foxling was howling over the desecration of Lady Piri's image, and Floridiana and Bobo were howling to make themselves heard so they could calm everyone down.

YOU ARE READING
The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox
FantasyAfter Piri the nine-tailed fox follows an order from Heaven to destroy a dynasty, she finds herself on trial in Heaven for that very act. Executed by the gods for the "crime," she is cast into the cycle of reincarnation, starting at the very bottom...