I followed Knave as he continued to walk in his usual zig-zag pattern and then he stopped. "There," he said and pointed up at some telephone lines. "Tell me what you see."
I looked. "Telephone lines," I said.
"And what's on them?" he asked.
I looked closer. "Birds," I said. "Is that all?"
"No," he said. "When I tell you to look closer, I want you to look closer." He covered my eyes again and then pulled his hands back and I saw the world again like it was before, with lines of light and waves of color.
And there, sitting on the telephone lines, were birds made up of complete and utter blackness. They sucked light in like black holes. They looked at me with beady eyes and I recoiled.
"What are they?" I asked.
"Right now, most call them the Convocation," Knave said. "Birds that aren't really birds at all, like the man who wasn't a man. Hidden in plain sight, for all the world to see."
"Why are they like...that?" I asked. Looking at them hurt my eyes, but I couldn't look away.
"Magic seeks freedom," Knave said, "but those things take freedom away from us. They hunt us down, they grab us and never let us go. They are what we fear, plain and simple, fear made flesh and set loose upon us."
"Why?" I asked.
"There are no whys," Knave said and covered my eyes again, taking away the beautiful world and the cruel darkness of the birds with it. "There are never any whys."
No comments:
Post a Comment