Divine Singularity || Reader x Murder Drones

IV

You carved through the sky like a fault line in motion, your wings slicing the air with the weight of a storm. The wind howled around you, torn into strands by the vast span of your plumage, your feathers trembling with quiet unrest. You didn't fly with direction so much as compulsion—a movement less guided by purpose and more by feeling.

What did it even mean to protect life? The phrase had always sounded noble in theory—etched into your very existence like a birthright. But in practice, it was vague. Undefined. How exactly were you meant to go about this duty of yours? Where did you begin?

You didn't know.

But something—some distant, sputtering flicker in the great tapestry of life—called to you. A weak light, quivering on the edge of nothingness. A dying heartbeat on the horizon. And with no clearer road ahead, you followed it like a pilgrim chasing a fading star.

The egg had been left behind, tucked away in the shadows of your little area beside the stream, shielded beneath the webbing of leaves along with your old body. You hated leaving it. Every part of you bristled at the thought of separating from it even for a moment, but pragmatism had won over sentiment. The skies were no place for fragile shells. One false movement or strong gust, and the thing the Dove had left behind could slip through your claws like water.

So you flew alone.

And the closer you drew to the dying light, the more the air began to change. It grew dry, thin, scorched. The taste of it scratched your throat like sandpaper. Beneath you, the green bled out of the land until nothing remained but brittle trunks and sun-bleached stumps—trees severed like amputated limbs. The soil cracked in spiderweb patterns, each fracture a silent scream baked into the earth. Not even moss dared cling to the rocks here.

A dead forest.

Once, perhaps, this place had throbbed with life. Canopy thick and breathing. Now it was a wasteland. Human hunger had swept through here like wildfire, and in its place, nothing but silence remained.

You slowed your descent, letting your enormous frame drift downward like a settling shadow. Your wings fanned wide, sending dust spraying across the ground as you landed. The earth cracked under you—dry, exhausted, ready to collapse beneath even the lightest touch.

The dying light was close now. It pulsed beneath the surface like a candle caught in the throat of the world, flickering weaker with each breath. Your thousand eyes blinked open one by one, scanning the stretch of land around you. Each eye flicked in a different direction. Each pulse of vision carried a different frequency. Lifeforce was a spectrum now—every being a frequency you were learning to tune into.

And what you felt here wasn't a single creature.

It was all of it.

This place wasn't home to one dying thing.

The land itself was dying.

You crouched low, talons curling into dirt that crumbled under your grasp, the soil turning to powder beneath your fingers. You pressed one palm flat to the ground, and the feedback that flooded into you was staggering—like tuning a radio to a frequency made entirely of screams you couldn't hear, only feel. The lights told a story. Life used to thrive. But now it was dying, burned away by machines, by drills and saws and poisons and fire. The memory of birdsong had been ripped out of the trees. The roots had been cauterized.

And you were too late.

No healing pulse of your power brought the sprouts back. No energy flow stitched the canopy together again. You tried. Of course you did. Light bled from your hands in gentle arcs. It kissed the soil like rain.