The Legacy of Dirty Birds

The Truth is in Their Blood and Obscurity

The boy sat curled up with his book, oblivious to the chatter around him.

"You're going to spend your last day reading?" The boy closest mocked.

"It's a very good book." The red-haired boy replied. "Besides, we're just graduating. It's not like I've been made admiral."

"Do you know what time period this is?" Idris asked. "The Black Hunt Campus hasn't changed much in its years, but you lived here. You'd know."

"I...I...I don't know." Calum could barely hear her voice.

Calum blinked, he was back in the woods, now the man was older and had a sword in his hand. His breaths came in heaving gasps, sweat poured down his brow. He was crouched on the ground with his other hand pressed against the throat of a deadwing.

Calum's heart skipped a beat.

The deadwing woman had a head full of unruly, curly brown hair. Her skin was paler than almost all of his ancestors, her body was covered in freckles. Her wings had thick black stripes on the primaries. Her eyes were a striking green color that glared holes into the red-haired man's face. Her ears were short and stubby, just like his.

She spit in his face. "Get on with it, coward."

The red-haired man stood up and backed away. "I can't...I can't do this."

She pulled herself off the ground and started running. The red-haired man watched her go without a word. She looked back once, before shooting into the air and away into the clouds.

Calum's vision blinked again; he was inside a house. A fire roared in the corner. The red-haired man and the half-welven woman were wrapped in blankets and sat nearby on the ground. Her wings stretched out lazily against the human-made floorboards. She was leaning against a chair and listening to him read from a book. After a few seconds of watching them, Calum realized it was a storybook, one he'd been read to by the maids when he was much younger.

"Thank you for this, I know it's not exactly exciting to read the same story over and over again." She whispered, reaching out to rest her hand against his cheek.

He leaned into her touch. "My momma read me this story when I was a kid. It doesn't bother me that you can't read, it would be my honor to pass that tradition on to our baby. Besides, it's a very good book."

Calum couldn't feel his legs. He could feel tears in the corners of his eyes, it was overwhelming. She was like him. He wasn't alone.

She smiled, "Okay I've almost got it, except the part Crow meets Robin, I can never remember what the bird said."

He eagerly flipped back a few pages, then hesitated.

"Speaking of birds, do welves have any baby traditions?"

A sour look crawled onto her face, she looked away from him. "Deadwings...my family...we do things differently than our people. We don't honor welven traditions."

His brow creased with worry over the state of his wife. "Why not?"

She lifted one of her wings. "I come from a long line of birds, who don't want to be known by the places we came from. Back in the colony, they are so...obsessed with fame, if you die there and haven't done anything for your family to be remembered well by, you're scrubbed from history. They think they can get rid of people like they're stains." She took a deep breath. "I told you this when you bonded with me, there is nothing our cultures wouldn't reject in my family. We keep it that way on purpose. As long as our legacy is dirty, we're...free."