Andir crawled out into the night air and began walking back home. He could not seem to find the last tree he had marked. He stumbled through brush and over thick roots for perhaps thirty minutes before he saw the crow.
Although in perfect darkness, the black bird somehow stood out. Its feathers were a glistening, oily black that seemed to pulse with some inner turbulence. The bird seemed to look past him rather than at him. Curious, Andir stepped toward it.
The bird hopped away. Andir followed. He tripped on a root and fell against a fallen willow branch. The noise he made must have drowned out the rustle of another bird’s wings, for when he picked himself up there were two crows before him. Both stared directly at him. Their eyes moved with the same sinuous, smoky motion as their feathers.
Andir understood that these were no ordinary birds, but had a sudden urge to go home and wait until daylight before returning to study them. He stepped backwards, eyes on the two crows. They remained motionless. He turned around, intending to go back to the clearing he’d passed about twenty feet back and choose another path. He stopped.
Andir stood within a group of crows arranged in a perfect circle.
He felt sweat run down the side of his face. The crows took baby-steps forward, closing in almost imperceptibly. Andir squatted low and ran his hand over the ground, trying to find a fallen branch with which to shoo them away. A crow pecked at his hand and he swung his arm aloft in self-defense. Andir felt an ugly numbness spill down from his upraised arm into the rest of his body, and then his muscles gave way and he fell to the floor of the forest. Andir felt as though all the skin on his body was crumbling like paper consumed by fire.
Andir saw a tall man, smiling so hard it almost seemed as though he had no lips. There was a grotesque scar running down his bare chest. Andir knew his name from the stories, and might have said it aloud had his tongue still worked.
And ... something else, behind him. Something nameless for a thousand years.
Andir’s final insight was that all stories contained little truths. Larger truths, like that of the scarred presence towering over him, could never be adequately conveyed in a tale.
He blinked and the monster was gone. And the crows were on him.
He might have eventually seen the ceiling of the night dissolve into daylight and the crows rise in a solid black mass towards the blue sky, hovering like a malevolent angel with far too many wings.
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