The Shadow Beneath the Crown

            There was once a kingdom in the clouds populated by the purest of white doves.  They were ruled by a benevolent queen and a powerful king.  The citizens all worshipped the Sun God, whose light influenced their own blinding feathers.  They thanked him for making them so beautiful and so close to him.  The residents were convinced that they were so high above all other creations that they never left the purity of their kingdom to mingle with the lower organisms.

            The Sun God prided himself on them, one of his crowning achievements, and gloated to his younger sister, the Moon Goddess, who was irritated constantly at how the reflective whiteness burned her eyes.

            “Look how they resemble me!” he would boast.

            “Look how they shine like I do!” he would taunt.

            “Look how they rise above all others like I do!” he would brag.

            The Moon Goddess noticed the Queen Dove one day in her chambers, resting atop her nest of five white eggs that were near hatching, and got a mischievous idea.  The Kingdom was expecting five new heirs to the throne.  She thought her brother needed to be knocked down a peg, and of how amusing it would be to see a black bird as King of his pure white kingdom.  While her brother was not looking, she reached down and turned the eggs all as black as her night with a touch of her finger.  She snickered as the Queen looked down to see this surprising sight and shrieked.  The King came to investigate the noise, and was appalled at this hideous abnormality.  From the eggs poked out the tops of five infant birds with beaks much too large to be those of doves and the beginnings of small, black feathers.

            Outraged, he berated his Queen for letting these “little black sins” enter his kingdom.  He would not give the throne to the weird outsiders, and he ordered them to be cast out to die in the forest below, against the wishes of the Queen.  The five little birds tumbled through the air, and all but one died upon landing.

            The Moon Goddess was angered at this attempted murder of her creations.  She blessed the survivor with dark magic, and whispered in its ear to take what is rightfully his.  She also gave him a name for the King of the Doves and her brother to remember when that day came: Crow.

            He spent years in the forest under the mentorship of his true mother, The Moon, in preparation for what was to come.  She told him that her brother was wise to her plan, and made the King nearly invincible, but that the only thing that could kill him was the bone of a mortal man.

            One day, the Moon put a plague on the Kingdom above, making half of the proud citizens sick with dark spots and beak growth, giving her child an opportunity.  Desperate, the King called for a human hero to find the cure.  An old witch doctor undertook this task, and went on a journey to find a special herb, which remedied all known illnesses known as the Osane root.  On this journey, he came upon a path through the woods where a large black bird rested on a branch.

            “You look for the Osane root, I hear,” Crow said smoothly.

            “This is correct, friend,” the old witch doctor replied with a gravelly voice.

            “I can help you find it; I pass that root often.  May I show you the way?”

            “How can I trust you will not betray me?”

            “I do not fly very fast, and if I should hide, you can find me easily; my black color sticks out among the bright green trees, you see.”

            Crow flew slowly in front of the old man, leading him to a bare patch of dirt surrounded by trees, but no special plant was present.

            “What is the meaning of this?” the witch doctor asked.  Crow was nowhere to be seen.  The old man looked up into the sky and saw him, but Crow quickly attacked his eyes, blinding the man, and used his talons to slice his throat, killing him.  Crow picked at the body until he could pull loose a rib and held it in his beak.  He crawled inside the body, and lifted it like a puppet.

            “It is about to happen, Mother,” he said to the Moon, which was bold, given that the Sun was out.

            He picked up a random tree root and called for a dove escort to the kingdom.  Several flew down to carry him up unwittingly to the kingdom gates.  He asked to be lead to the King’s chambers, but two guards refused to let him pass.       “Sorry, but only high-ranking officers are allowed to see the King without an invitation,” one of the Dove guards said.

            “Don’t you think that the King would want to see the antidote himself, and be the one to present it to his people?  Wouldn’t he want the glory all to himself?  Who would you be to deny him that?”

            Afraid of the consequences for denying the King his praise, the guards let the “doctor” pass into the throne room, where the frustrated King and disease-stricken Queen sat.

            “Thank you, human.  Give me the cure,” the King demanded hurriedly.

            Crow held out the random stick of wood and dropped it to the floor mockingly, and burst forth from the body of the old man and lunged at the King with the rib in his beak.  It pierced his heart, and the Moon Goddess could overtake her brother’s power.  The doves she had stricken with the plague were transformed into black birds with long feathers and beaks just like Crow, and were immediately under his control.

            “The King is dead; long live the King,” he whispered into his pseudo-father’s ear before he died.  The newly born crow-copies lashed out at the other doves, which quickly fled the kingdom if they were not assimilated or killed first.

            The Moon laughed at the Sun’s shame and crushed ego.

            “Your King is dead, and so is your pride!” she snickered.

            Crow sat on the throne next to his no-longer-dove Queen and mother.  He ordered his new army and minions to find the remaining doves and destroy them with the bones of the dead in honor of the Moon and as an act of disdain for the Sun.  He sent them squawking and screeching and screaming and cawing into the world as a mass of black feathers that was obedient without question to their new, black king dubbed: “The Shadow Beneath the Crown.”

            They were forever remembered by their legacy of picking at carrion and their ominous abhorrence for light.