In the kingdom of Casca,
[[tradition has long held that sinners can ask God for forgiveness for one wrong if they eat a hundred birds.|Main]]
(set: $x to 1)The banquet is set. The only thing that remains is your appetite.
{(if: $x > 10 and $x < 21) [The second day begins, the sun rolling upwards like a flashing pupil in the bloodshot sclera of the sky.]
(else-if: $x > 20 and $x < 31) [The third day follows the last, like a child following her mother. The sun's commitment to the path of her forebear, yesterday, unnerves you.]
(else-if: $x > 30 and $x < 41)[When the fourth day comes, you aren't surprised, but you are disappointed. It's taking you too long. When the sun shines on the food you haven't eaten, you shut the windows.]
(else-if: $x > 40 and $x < 51)[Setting up the banquet again on the fifth day makes you feel filthy. Flies cluster on the plates you didn't clean last night. The sun is an eye, like yours, but her stare has never been approving.]
(else-if: $x > 50 and $x < 61)[By today, what's leftover is beginning to look ill. You've salted everything that wasn't salted before, but it makes the meat bring tears to your eyes. When the sun asks through the windows to come in, you embrace the sixth day with hatred.]
(else-if: $x > 60 and $x < 71) [On the seventh day the sun is gone. If you want, you could look out at the grounds below. But you don't want that.]
(else-if: $x > 70 and $x < 81)[When she comes back on the eighth day, you think that she wants to be adored for it. You look at her sullenly, and shut the drapes again. Why? To eat in darkness? You suckle on hell. This does nothing for you.]
(else-if: $x > 80 and $x < 91)[At this point the ninth day alights on you, conferring sainthood. Your hair is a halo of fire. Your mouth is the edge of hell. You want to throw up. Maybe the sun purges light to remove it from her body.]
(else-if: $x > 90)[You would like it to end.]}
(if: not (visited: "1: Turkey"))[[[A turkey.|1: Turkey]]]
(if: not (visited: "2: Chicken"))[[[A chicken.|2: Chicken]]]
(if: not (visited: "3: Duck"))[[[A duck.|3: Duck]]]
(if: not (visited: "4: Goose"))[[[A goose.|4: Goose]]]
(if: not (visited: "5: Pigeon"))[[[A pigeon.|5: Pigeon]]]
(if: not (visited: "6: Quail"))[[[A quail.|6: Quail]]]
(if: not (visited: "7: Raven"))[[[A raven.|7: Raven]]]
(if: not (visited: "8: Cardinal"))[[[A cardinal.|8: Cardinal]]]
(if: not (visited: "9: Lark"))[[[A lark.|9: Lark]]]
(if: not (visited: "10: Nightingale"))[[[A nightingale.|10: Nightingale]]]
(if: not (visited: "11: Chickadee"))[[[A chickadee.|11: Chickadee]]]
(if: not (visited: "12: Woodpecker"))[[[A woodpecker.|12: Woodpecker]]]
(if: not (visited: "13: Wren"))[[[A wren.|13: Wren]]]
(if: not (visited: "14: Jay"))[[[A jay.|14: Jay]]]
(if: not (visited: "15: Finch"))[[[A finch.|15: Finch]]]
(if: not (visited: "16: Dodo"))[[[A dodo.|16: Dodo]]]
(if: not (visited: "17: Dove"))[[[A dove.|17: Dove]]]
(if: not (visited: "18: Heron"))[[[A heron.|18: Heron]]]
(if: not (visited: "19: Swan"))[[[A swan.|19: Swan]]]
(if: not (visited: "20: Seagull"))[[[A seagull.|20: Seagull]]]
(if: not (visited: "21: Nightjar"))[[[A nightjar.|21: Nightjar]]]
(if: not (visited: "22: Stork"))[[[A stork.|22: Stork]]]
(if: not (visited: "23: Tinamous"))[[[A tinamous.|23: Tinamous]]]
(if: not (visited: "24: Albatross"))[[[An albatross.|24: Albatross]]]
(if: not (visited: "25: Tufted Titmouse"))[[[A tufted titmouse.|25: Tufted Titmouse]]]
(if: not (visited: "26: Oriole"))[[[An oriole.|26: Oriole]]]
(if: not (visited: "27: Owl"))[[[An owl.|27: Owl]]]
(if: not (visited: "28: Goshawk"))[[[A goshawk.|28: Goshawk]]]
(if: not (visited: "29: Catbird"))[[[A catbird.|29: Catbird]]]
(if: not (visited: "30: Peacock"))[[[A peacock.|30: Peacock]]]
(if: not (visited: "31: Booby"))[[[A booby.|31: Booby]]]
(if: not (visited: "32: Emu"))[[[An emu.|32: Emu]]]
(if: not (visited: "33: Puffin"))[[[A puffin.|33: Puffin]]]
(if: not (visited: "34: Goldfinch"))[[[A goldfinch.|34: Goldfinch]]]
(if: not (visited: "35: Jacana"))[[[A jacana.|35: Jacana]]]
(if: not (visited: "36: Harpy Eagle"))[[[A harpy eagle.|36: Harpy Eagle]]]
(if: not (visited: "37: Kingfisher"))[[[A kingfisher.|37: Kingfisher]]]
(if: not (visited: "38: Roadrunner"))[[[A roadrunner.|38: Roadrunner]]]
(if: not (visited: "39: Screamer"))[[[A screamer.|39: Screamer]]]
(if: not (visited: "40: Flamingo"))[[[A flamingo.|40: Flamingo]]]
(if: not (visited: "41: Hoatzin"))[[[A hoatzin.|41: Hoatzin]]]
(if: not (visited: "42: Cuckoo"))[[[A cuckoo.|42: Cuckoo]]]
(if: not (visited: "43: Penguin"))[[[A penguin.|43: Penguin]]]
(if: not (visited: "44: Cormorant"))[[[A cormorant.|44: Cormorant]]]
(if: not (visited: "45: Pelican"))[[[A pelican.|45: Pelican]]]
(if: not (visited: "46: Red-Tailed Hawk"))[[[A red-tailed hawk.|46: Red-Tailed Hawk]]]
(if: not (visited: "47: Cockatiel"))[[[A cockatiel.|47: Cockatiel]]]
(if: not (visited: "48: Antbird"))[[[An antbird.|48: Antbird]]]
(if: not (visited: "49: Osprey"))[[[An osprey.|49: Osprey]]]
(if: not (visited: "50: Hummingbird"))[[[A hummingbird.|50: Hummingbird]]]
(if: not (visited: "51: Toucan"))[[[A toucan.|51: Toucan]]]
(if: not (visited: "52: Peregrine Falcon"))[[[A peregrine falcon.|52: Peregrine Falcon]]]
(if: not (visited: "53: Shrike"))[[[A shrike.|53: Shrike]]]
(if: not (visited: "54: Pintailed Whydah"))[[[A pintailed whydah.|54: Pintailed Whydah]]]
(if: not (visited: "55: Oxpecker"))[[[A oxpecker.|55: Oxpecker]]]
(if: not (visited: "56: Tanager"))[[[A tanager.|56: Tanager]]]
(if: not (visited: "57: Wallcreeper"))[[[A wallcreeper.|57: Wallcreeper]]]
(if: not (visited: "58: Leafbird"))[[[A leafbird.|58: Leafbird]]]
(if: not (visited: "59: Bluebird"))[[[A bluebird.|59: Bluebird]]]
(if: not (visited: "60: Reedling"))[[[A reedling.|60: Reedling]]]
(if: not (visited: "61: Manucode"))[[[A manucode.|61: Manucode]]]
(if: not (visited: "62: Maleo"))[[[A maleo.|62: Maleo]]]
(if: not (visited: "63: Vangas"))[[[A vangas.|63: Vangas]]]
(if: not (visited: "64: Bee-Eater"))[[[A bee-eater.|64: Bee-Eater]]]
(if: not (visited: "65: Hoopoe"))[[[A hoopoe.|65: Hoopoe]]]
(if: not (visited: "66: Hornbill"))[[[A hornbill.|66: Hornbill]]]
(if: not (visited: "67: Honeyguide"))[[[A honeyguide.|67: Honeyguide]]]
(if: not (visited: "68: Sandpiper"))[[[A sandpiper.|68: Sandpiper]]]
(if: not (visited: "69: Great Auk"))[[[A great auk.|69: Great Auk]]]
(if: not (visited: "70: Ruff"))[[[A ruff.|70: Ruff]]]
(if: not (visited: "71: Lyrebird"))[[[A lyrebird.|71: Lyrebird]]]
(if: not (visited: "72: Kiwi"))[[[A kiwi.|72: Kiwi]]]
(if: not (visited: "73: Kea"))[[[A kea.|73: Kea]]]
(if: not (visited: "74: Treeswift"))[[[A treeswift.|74: Treeswift]]]
(if: not (visited: "75: Trogon"))[[[A trogon.|75: Trogon]]]
(if: not (visited: "76: Avocet"))[[[An avocet.|76: Avocet]]]
(if: not (visited: "77: Coot"))[[[A coot.|77: Coot]]]
(if: not (visited: "78: Plains-Walker"))[[[A plains-walker.|78: Plains-Walker]]]
(if: not (visited: "79: Shoebill"))[[[A shoebill.|79: Shoebill]]]
(if: not (visited: "80: Mesite"))[[[A mesite.|80: Mesite]]]
(if: not (visited: "81: Yellow-Knobbed Curassow"))[[[A yellow-knobbed curassow.|81: Yellow-Knobbed Curassow]]]
(if: not (visited: "82: Barn Owl"))[[[A barn owl.|82: Barn Owl]]]
(if: not (visited: "83: Kagu"))[[[A kagu.|83: Kagu]]]
(if: not (visited: "84: Loon"))[[[A loon.|84: Loon]]]
(if: not (visited: "85: Boobook"))[[[A boobook.|85: Boobook]]]
(if: not (visited: "86: Emperor's Bird of Paradise"))[[[An emperor's bird of paradise.|86: Emperor's Bird of Paradise]]]
(if: not (visited: "87: Pygmy Tyrant"))[[[A pygmy tyrant.|87: Pygmy Tyrant]]]
(if: not (visited: "88: Cowbird"))[[[A cowbird.|88: Cowbird]]]
(if: not (visited: "89: Hylia"))[[[A hylia.|89: Hylia]]]
(if: not (visited: "90: Bowerbird"))[[[A bowerbird.|90: Bowerbird]]]
(if: not (visited: "91: Fairy Wren"))[[[A fairy wren.|91: Fairy Wren]]]
(if: not (visited: "92: Whipbird"))[[[A whipbird.|92: Whipbird]]]
(if: not (visited: "93: Vireo"))[[[A vireo.|93: Vireo]]]
(if: not (visited: "94: Monarch Flycatcher"))[[[A monarch flycatcher.|94: Monarch Flycatcher]]]
(if: not (visited: "95: Bishop"))[[[A bishop.|95: Bishop]]]
(if: not (visited: "96: Occelated Turkey"))[[[A occelated turkey.|96: Occelated Turkey]]]
(if: not (visited: "97: Cock-of-the-rock"))[[[A cock-of-the-rock.|97: Cock-of-the-rock]]]
(if: not (visited: "98: Victoria Crowned"))[[[A victoria crowned pigeon.|98: Victoria Crowned]]]
(if: not (visited: "99: Blue Tit"))[[[A blue tit.|99: Blue Tit]]]
(if: not (visited: "100: King Vulture"))[[[A king vulture.|100: King Vulture]]]
(if: $x > 100) [[[The table is empty.|End]]]
(enchant:?page,(bg:(gradient: 0, 0,#d39797, $x/101, #000000, 1,#000000)))
It would be easy to pick over the meat of the turkey for the next few days, but you will likely leave much of it on the table, and throw it all away when the days are done.
(if: $x > 10) [There will be many such leftovers, you are sure, but as you taste the turkey's dark meat your heart stings, knowing few of the birds will taste so fine.]
(if: $x > 20) [It is an intended first course, though you didn't take it as such, and now the garnishings are beginning to wilt on the bird's haunches...]
(if: $x > 30) [The meat has gone drier than it would have been on that first day...]
(if: $x > 40) [There is a coagulation of orange on the rims of the limbs that bespeaks terrible things happening underneath...]
(if: $x > 50) [Today when opening it you witnessed a single fly land on the top of the bird and rub its limbs together for feast.]
(if: $x > 60) [It did not take you long to realize another fly was dead in the thick gravy provided you.]
(if: $x > 70) [By now the bird has a certain smell about it, as you've put several away in the ice-boxes, but not the turkey.]
(if: $x > 80) [You want to see it rot.]
(if: $x > 90) [You want to see everything rot.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Though the chicken was raised in the castle gardens, it doesn't taste like the country chickens, raised on corn and worms. The meat is so pale, and so dry. You wonder if it would have been more worth it to eat bone, or dust.
(if: $x > 10) [When you break the bone open and suck the marrow, it tastes more like the worms than it does blood: you allow yourself an undignified expression.]
(if: $x > 20) [She must have meant for you to eat it in a small portion, though she left the whole bird.]
(if: $x > 30) [(No, no. She meant for you to rot.)]
(if: $x > 40) [In the country, the bird would have lived a life under the sun, digging in the dust with other biddies and roosting in a sagging coop by night.]
(if: $x > 50) [Your neighbors had a coop that you and Merle would steal the eggs from, which always stressed him more than it did you, even though he brought you there, taught you how to do it, had the spare coop key his mother was allowed for when she did day labor on the farm.]
(if: $x > 60) [He wouldn't steal the kegs of sasparilla out from under the porch, either, locked with the same key, and these ones you would feel bad about stealing, and silly, even now, when you did anyways and staggered around, full of sugar and misconceptions about drunkenness.]
(if: $x > 70) [It would be Vician who would explain, over a glass of something harder, that sasparilla was a soft drink, when you were both fifteen.]
(if: $x > 80) [Vician always made you feel stupid, but you still thought you could taste those nights at the bottom of a glass of sasparilla.]
(if: $x > 90) [And then, after those nights, the chickens on Sundays-- the chickens at minor saints' days-- the chickens for gifts-- the chickens to be had the lunch after, sucked clean to the bone--]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)There are always ducks in the long pond outside the castle, domestic and soft with care.
(if: $x > 10) [All of their wings are clipped, and if they mind the easy life they've sacrificed their feathers for, you wouldn't know.]
(if: $x > 20) [It was a Lefvin tradition to keep hundreds of ducks outside homes of extreme wealth.]
(if: $x > 30) [Then, when the foxes inevitably came, five guards were appointed to the pond at all hours, a constant rotation around the hapless ducks and their mainly stone enclosure.]
(if: $x > 40) [Are they keeping the ducks in or the foxes out?]
(if: $x > 50) [They filled silly things like the duck guard with everyone who didn't die in the war.]
(if: $x > 60) [You see Brokhe for the first time, in the single braid of soldiers, but with a bright red ribbon in it, and she is holding a flapping duck.]
(if: $x > 70) [Later you will learn that she was dared to do it, but she's the sort with bright eyes that always finds clever ways to get others to dare her to do the things she'd like to do, and you've known many, cared for a few.]
(if: $x > 80) [She reminds you of what it could have been like to have a daughter, and you know there are bonds that are not blood, but you do not want anyone else to be complicit in what you are going to become.]
(if: $x > 90) [The first thing you burned that year was the russet ribbon that was a twin of hers, because you are afraid of parallels.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Nasty things with sharp teeth in life; in death, more edible than some of your alternatives.
(if: $x > 10) [The meat has been tenderly and lovingly prepared, possibly in this very building, hundreds of feet away from the conspicuous spire you've spent your days in.]
(if: $x > 20) [Down in the heart of this castle, a bird is a meal taken of its own volition, and people speak to each other about stories that are not yet over, of days as if their deeming it so would grant them reason.]
(if: $x > 30) [The fluid inertia of living seems to escape you.]
(if: $x > 40) [She will be there among them, haunted as you are, in the black dress with molten gold stylings and thorned crown.]
(if: $x > 50) [White wings emanating from the veil's slits, a second shield against being seen.]
(if: $x > 60) [So many people have changed the path of their lives to have her speak in that low, soft tone to her, and some have cut off fingers in hopes that she will perform miracles for them.]
(if: $x > 70) [She can always tell which injuries were a pitiful grab for her attention, yet sometimes she still sucks the poison out for her adoring masses.]
(if: $x > 80) [Startlingly pale eyes roll up in their sockets and a voice seems to whisper from the world itself, "My friend, do not do such unkindness to the body the Saints have given you: I am always here, and you need not summon me with pain."]
(if: $x > 90) [Behind the veil, the gruesome way she revels in the ichor of godhood.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)There are some birds you can teach to carry messages for hundreds of miles.
(if: $x > 10) [You've often wondered what compels an animal like the pigeon, who clearly put its faith in the wrong people, to come back to owners again and again.]
(if: $x > 20) [Not that this one carried letters (this one likely lived a short and hedonistic life in the dark, you can taste the malaise in every greasy bite).]
(if: $x > 30) [But you know for a fact that animals come back, you used dogs and birds on the campaign.]
(if: $x > 40) [What you're really trying to get at, is why, why did you come back?]
(if: $x > 50) [Freedom was right there, and there was the issue of being under a thumb forever, perhaps a thumb that stroked your head, but forever a thumb.]
(if: $x > 60) [To willingly come back and coo at the side of a worn-out myth... to venerate the altar of your past with the shit of your present.]
(if: $x > 70) [Only because it is too hard to reintroduce yourself to the woods, because you will be plucked from the sky, because there is food here, because leaving is a risk and risks have never worked (only for every reason you could possibly come up with, believed or not).]
(if: $x > 80) [You think that staying is a coward's move, now.]
(if: $x > 90) [Then you let your wife lock you in a tower while claiming hysteria as a legal defense, so you are also an unhelpful hypocrite.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The quail meat has been covered in the yellow run of its own egg, as you were taught to prepare it long ago.
(if: $x > 10) [What is it like to be complicit in the suffering of your own, and who grieves more, the mother or the child, in their incestuous pollution?]
(if: $x > 20) [It's hard for you not to start thinking of her again, hard for your eyes not to roll into your head.]
(if: $x > 30) [So instead you think about the last queen, who gave Asilyn the name.]
(if: $x > 40) [She always seemed to you like a bag of flesh with something poking out from the inside to animate it, with her intense age.]
(if: $x > 50) [She admitted she had taken great pains to live until her destined successor emerged, and there it was again, that verbiage, as if queens crawled out from under the earth.]
(if: $x > 60) [There are still rumors the first Asilyn was blessed, though in a weaker way than your Asilyn, and then there is the Asilyn to come, sometimes depicted with six wings.]
(if: $x > 70) [Religion is the game of lying a little more loudly than the person standing next to you, and with more fervor.]
(if: $x > 80) [Then again, you are cynical about everything these days.]
(if: $x > 90) [The quail egg pairs so nicely with the meat, and you can imagine no worse trick of your tongue than this.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)They did not choose one of the imperial ravens for your perusal.
(if: $x > 10) [Just as well, you'd be loathe to take them, lively and wonderful cluster of beaks and tenderness as they are.]
(if: $x > 20) [In a general sense, eating ravens is near well forbidden, but the paranoid will often shoot the 'eyes of empire' out of the sky.]
(if: $x > 30) [You remember trying to pass laws to necessitate the gilding that adorns show birds be on any government-owned bird...]
(if: $x > 40) [...but what Casca's secret police does is so often beyond you, allegedly a voice in the room at every government roundtable, that it sometimes feels that you are speaking to the air, a joke, another pet of the capital.]
(if: $x > 50) [Vician owned five ravens, and Caila trained them.]
(if: $x > 60) [Alicia owned ten, and Hach must have killed three.]
(if: $x > 70) [Alisyn had hundreds of ravens "in report" to her, but you know she never trained a single one.]
(if: $x > 80) [You didn't like the idea of growing so close to something that would be asked to defuse mines, to take long treks into enemy territory, to die, if necessary, before being caught.]
(if: $x > 90) [(Then why did you make so many friends?)]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The meat of the cardinal is bitter, but this one has been candied, which in some way makes the small, dropping-like pieces of meat even worse.
(if: $x > 10) [You wish they'd simply left it how it was-- it's stupid to pretend that this feast is something it's not.]
(if: $x > 20) [A punishment.]
(if: $x > 30) [On the plate are a few red feathers to remind you of the bird you're eating, as if you're able to forget while you tear the meat apart.]
(if: $x > 40) [Red is the color of the earth and of humans, Cascat churches are often floored with clay in places only priests are allowed to step, barefoot.]
(if: $x > 50) [When you went to check the memorial fires for Vician and Caila, you walked across the banks, as they're called, with your sandals pressing into the horrified dirt.]
(if: $x > 60) [The acolyte's bell has two prongs, one with which to move flames (which are started on the body of the deceased, preferring the hands) to the candles, and one which is a bell used to snuff fires out.]
(if: $x > 70) [No one is watching Vician's fire tonight, as it is punishable by death to be out on one of the five saints' feasting nights of the year.]
(if: $x > 80) [Long after the capital sleeps on swollen bellies, you douse the ever-starving flame that the church would have you believe holds your sister's lover's soul.]
(if: $x > 90) [The church isn't half what it used to be, as they've barely upped security... you must have doused this flame half a dozen times.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Songbirds always remind you of the easy Cascan laugh, said to be one of the burgeoning country's "greatest traditions".
(if: $x > 10) [That is, to most people, "having a lark" does not mean eating a bird prepared with conifer gum in the highest spire in the nation, alone.]
(if: $x > 20) [And what a silly thing to consider the nation's greatest traditions when it is a free nation of exactly five years.]
(if: $x > 30) [Everyone is trying to pretend it has always been this way.]
(if: $x > 40) [(You are especially cynical, and Casca was a different kind of country, you would have been slammed to the wall and given what-for as your last act as a war hero... you still beg for a swift end, in little ways, and sometimes in glass thrown during expensive parties.)]
(if: $x > 50) [You want to be the worst woman who has ever lived.]
(if: $x > 60) [Then comes in Brokhe with her Cascan laugh.]
(if: $x > 70) [She lays flowers at your sister's altar, the water lilies which you once made to float on your sister's aqueous saint's acts.]
(if: $x > 80) [What a world she lives in-- a world which begins the day the world ended.]
(if: $x > 90) [If you were dead, everyone could forget what you had to do-- everything you've had to do-- to save the world.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)There are no recipes for many of the birds in the chosen hundred, and though the nightingale is common, it is usually only prepared in a nearly burnt form, and slathered with a ruby jelly to make it pallatable.
(if: $x > 10) [You can't go downstairs, to your house, to tell everyone that you don't want to eat this, since to see another person before the ritual ends is to admit failure.]
(if: $x > 20) [So to tell them that if you eat another burnt thing you'll vomit is unthinkable.]
(if: $x > 30) [Maybe it's been decades since you got the taste of ash out of your mouth.]
(if: $x > 40) [You can't help but think of your mother toward the end, gazing over the hearth with this pale and awful look in her eyes.]
(if: $x > 50) [Everyone felt so sorry for you when she passed in the fire, told you how brave you were for going back to get your sister.]
(if: $x > 60) [But your mother was in that house too, your distant, paling mother, like a hollow tree in the forest, not a living thing but a conduit for fire.]
(if: $x > 70) [You made a choice.]
(if: $x > 80) [At the time, it was because you resented her for loving once and giving up.]
(if: $x > 90) [But the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The vulture was never made to be consumed like it was made to consume.
(if: $x > 10) [They've shorn what they can, burned it for safety, and the bacteria contianed in the vulture's body are still so poisonous that the endeavor is a joke.]
(if: $x > 20) [If you ate this bird in the supposed hundred-order, you would eat it last, and then the convulsions would start, in which you would see and give your gratitudes to God.]
(if: $x > 30) [You have already begun having the convulsions, and you see them in the meat you rip from the bone, vulture onto vulture, end onto end.]
(if: $x > 40) [No depictions of the veiled and unknowable God shine down onto You, but instead it is the six winged and furious figure of a small girl who wants to break your neck.]
(if: $x > 50) [You remember her in your stomach, and you remember the poisons you filled your body with to exhume her.]
(if: $x > 60) [In glorious defiance you stare up at the messiah you allegedly killed, and grin, wiping poisonous blood and flesh from your face.]
(if: $x > 70) [She is overflowing with tears and you are overflowing with joy, rapturous joy.]
(if: $x > 80) [Your final victory is that the first Lord of this land will never love anyone but you, that you were the prophesied mother and you broke destiny between your fingers-- the world will never know the scourge of this seraph daughter, she is fucking dead.]
(if: $x > 90) [Hallelujah.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)A few slices of flesh does not a body make.
(if: $x > 10) [The blue colors of the fairy wren peeled away.]
(if: $x > 20) [The sweet call of the fairy wren peeled away.]
(if: $x > 30) [The life of the fairy wren peeled away.]
(if: $x > 40) [The vitality of an animal succumbed to the bone.]
(if: $x > 50) [The meat is so bitter that it reminds you of taking poison to kill her.]
(if: $x > 60) [The meat is so bad it reminds you of telling Asilyn your daughter died inside you.]
(if: $x > 70) [The meat is so sour it curves on your tongue the way Asilyn's face did.]
(if: $x > 80) [The meat cries the way you heard her crying late at night and thought, god, lord, god, I did it, so feverish you could not tell what thoughts were yours and which belonged to the colony of bees in your head that never stopped singing.]
(if: $x > 90) [The fairy wrens of this kingdom are often fed on honey and served to royals; something is wrong with you.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You wonder where in the meat the call of the whipbird is located, now that it can no longer make it.
(if: $x > 10) [How many of those muscles still retain the strain of the cracking call?]
(if: $x > 20) [A body is just a body, and a mind is only a mind when it has a body to mind it.]
(if: $x > 30) [So, though everyone else seems to be enamored with the intellect, you will always vouch for the power that the flesh has.]
(if: $x > 40) [But you need both for that trace of someone you loved.]
(if: $x > 50) [As if the personality were some vapor that escaped from the mouth during death.]
(if: $x > 60) [Nothing you could conjure lay in those cold hands.]
(if: $x > 70) [In the ashes, in the crater of the explosion.]
(if: $x > 80) [Well, Caila was the only one who died and left a body.]
(if: $x > 90) [Your mother's body rests in the water, where no one can find it, and Caila's rests in the ocean, where you were supposed to let it go.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Since scientists still squabble over the classification of the vireo, there is a chance that in a few years your meal will no longer be holy.
(if: $x > 10) [The story of the tradition goes like this: "If you are my servant, then you are bound to sin."]
(if: $x > 20) ["If you are bound to sin, then you separate yourself from the creatures of the land."]
(if: $x > 30) ["When your sin makes the land unclean, look to the creatures who rest least amongst it, the ones I have bound in flesh like yours and named the birds."]
(if: $x > 40) ["Their hollow bones and airen flesh will keep them separate from the weight of your heaviness, and if you sin so badly that it will damn you to the earth, where I can not see you again, then they will come to you in droves."]
(if: $x > 50) ["All of the birds of the earth will flock, hundredfold, to the table whereupon you may make your claim."]
(if: $x > 60) ["Having filled your throat with the spirits of a hundred birds, cast your pennance up to heaven, and heaven will grant you amnesty."]
(if: $x > 70) [Priests change the list constantly as if they could update the will of God, and maybe they do know, maybe there's a direct dial line no one's told you, a saint, about.]
(if: $x > 80) [A lot of the birds you've eaten can't fly.]
(if: $x > 90) [In a hundred years, when God Himself has been changed by the stories of which He is made, you hope the whole bird thing is written off as a joke.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)A single fly rubs its ugly hands over the body and moves on.
(if: $x > 10) [You've had the worst dreams ever since you came here.]
(if: $x > 20) [An aviary, buzzing with birds who attempt to rattle the cages as you walk between them.]
(if: $x > 30) [An open and desolate lake in Osko where a black-blue fire burns ceaselessly under the ice.]
(if: $x > 40) [An endless field of sharp, knee-high grass where you chase a star that falls too far in front of you, barefoot and bleeding.]
(if: $x > 50) [A house you knew, filled with dresses which are filled with chattering, rotting ravens, their beaks clicking together in a parody of sound.]
(if: $x > 60) [An empty castle (but this is a dream you live in already).]
(if: $x > 70) [A white spire whose roof you hold onto with your bare hands, and whom beneath is nothing but an infinite drop.]
(if: $x > 80) [A bed in which you see yourself rocking against her, over and over, but your body is decomposing into scales and roots and feathers and petals every time she enters it, a decaying sludge leaking onto the floor in increasingly heavy streams.]
(if: $x > 90) [And then, always, the girl, just looking, as if you can show her enough horror to convince her that she doesn't need to end the world for it to be ruined.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You've never seen or heard of this bird before in your life.
(if: $x > 10) [The table does have a bit of a tilt to it, and when you peruse this side you find a good number of the birds from further around the world.]
(if: $x > 20) [Then on the other, the Lefvin and some Cascat specialties.]
(if: $x > 30) [There's so much of the world you'll never really know.]
(if: $x > 40) [There's so much, period, you'll never really know.]
(if: $x > 50) [You doubt everyone is especially thrilled about this use of birds.]
(if: $x > 60) [If you told everyone, "God says you need to replace the birds," or "actually, since they're so holy, stop eating them", maybe, they would do that.]
(if: $x > 70) [You are one of the last two living saints on the planet, as far as you know.]
(if: $x > 80) [In Thora, Cicilia confided, magic is not especially uncommon.]
(if: $x > 90) [You can't look for so much, all in one place, though: magic is a thing a community does, that makes a hundred one.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Some of the most gorgeous feathers you've ever seen are delicately placed before you, around what is simply just another turkey.
(if: $x > 10) [It must be nice to see an animal like this anywhere it actually lives.]
(if: $x > 20) [It would be so lovely to belong to the land of the living again.]
(if: $x > 30) [Sometimes, when the sun hits your face, you feel this momentary bliss animate your body like a fit.]
(if: $x > 40) [And you don't think you'll ever feel so morose about the world again.]
(if: $x > 50) [The world takes your face in your hands and wipes the tears off, and is gone again.]
(if: $x > 60) [Your sister spoke to you about moments like this.]
(if: $x > 70) [In a hushed voice, as if the knowing were part of the losing it.]
(if: $x > 80) [Her eyes closed.]
(if: $x > 90) [Her hands spread in yours, to let you know that whatever joy she found from the world, she would not take it without trying to drag you along.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Hach happily scrawls the most pompous drawings of these birds he can, and adds that they aren't especially great eating.
(if: $x > 10) [Great, Hach, thank you, it's been well established.]
(if: $x > 20) [He's always pretending he doesn't like this work.]
(if: $x > 30) [But he has found joy, grumbling all the while, just being close to the land, asked to work well and carefully with his bird.]
(if: $x > 40) [For all the things you disagree with about that man, and there are many, it's an annotated list, you're going to give him that.]
(if: $x > 50) [You're reminded of a contest Vician once got into with one of her officers about shooting, because the officer proclaimed to a friend that Vician's power required effectively no skill, to which Vician responded that she could best the officer in a shooting match.]
(if: $x > 60) [So they shot an apple, both, moved back if they both hit it, shot again.]
(if: $x > 70) [Vician won in a best of three.]
(if: $x > 80) [She went to tell Hach, who was bringing a message over from your camp, and Hach leaned around her and shot the apple from twice the distance without cracking so much as a smile.]
(if: $x > 90) [Or that's how the version you've been told goes.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The Victoria Crowned is a pigeon, but no one will let you say it is a pigeon, right out.
(if: $x > 10) [Instead, they'll invent a hundred new names for it, because something so blue, so rare, can not a pigeon's face take.]
(if: $x > 20) [You felt the same way in the early days about calling Asilyn a saint, when you saw her, because even a saint is God's work given human flesh.]
(if: $x > 30) [Asilyn was barely given that at all, from the opalescent eyes to the teeth in the back to the holy brow to the keel to the wings, the obvious wings.]
(if: $x > 40) [You must have spent years tongue-tied in her presence, trying to invent language to make it clear what you were seeing.]
(if: $x > 50) [When she took you aside for the first time and raised your chin to taste the blinding light sealed in her lips, you found it.]
(if: $x > 60) [In that moment you knew: your lover was God.]
(if: $x > 70) [Your worship was a hundred heavy nights beneath her hollow body and days which shimmered in how empty they were, only waiting for her.]
(if: $x > 80) [Your lover is God.]
(if: $x > 90) [Your lover almost by tautology cares for you, but God uses you like you are using birds: in you she sees a hundred chances for absolution and nothing living.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Forget this beautiful bird.
(if: $x > 10) [Don't even think about it.]
(if: $x > 20) [Let me tell you a secret: a few months ago I was standing in the rain.]
(if: $x > 30) [It was with my wife, and she went out without an umbrella to roam the gardens, and I pretended I wouldn't come after her, but I did, and she told me she didn't blame me.]
(if: $x > 40) [A few years ago I was standing in the rain.]
(if: $x > 50) [My sister's palms were outstretched to catch it, but it kept running through and around her fingers, and she kept saying, isn't that lovely, isn't that strange?]
(if: $x > 60) [A decade ago I was standing in the rain.]
(if: $x > 70) [The water fell around my hair as I headed off to battle, my heart still pulsing, because I didn't realize yet that I was the most frightening thing in the world.]
(if: $x > 80) [And when I was young, my mother would call me in from the rain, towel me off, and set me by the fire. ]
(if: $x > 90) [When I'm gone, and all the water has forgotten me, who will know how joyful I was, how miserable I've been?]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You've heard enough teasing tell of the bowerbird, whose renown lies not in its looks but in its deeds.
(if: $x > 10) [In your mouth, everything becomes ruin, from an elaborate nest to an overeager act of love.]
(if: $x > 20) [The flesh is no better nor worse for having belonged to a lover with a full life of interests, color, and patient labor.]
(if: $x > 30) [Though you are projecting-- you are not competent enough to read from the bone whether the bowerbird was successful or not, and so many indicators have been stripped.]
(if: $x > 40) [You lower your head so that the bowerbird, entering your body, can not see the wreck of the room.]
(if: $x > 50) [There is ceremonial wine spilled across the heavy curtains like blood, and glass that you knocked over upon first entering here that you've broken again, and again, into pieces of starry sand.]
(if: $x > 60) [The bowerbird can make optical illusions, according to one of the darling scientists they keep in your employ because Asilyn knows how you love and miss the world.]
(if: $x > 70) [But the bowerbird, you tell yourself, could not understand what it is to make a heaven out of hell, or vice versa (no one knows which you are doing anymore).]
(if: $x > 80) [The bowerbird might tilt its head and flick its tail at the audacity of your rage toward the world.]
(if: $x > 90) [It might do anything, but the spectre of a bird is more comfortable than a bird, who has no reason to care how you're doing.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Dear hylia, small and exquisite bird, one might think at this point that the entire world outside your window is covered in a sheet of birds like snow, just to get in the abundance before you (a millionth of a whole).
(if: $x > 10) [Hylia are known to be so small they ensnare themselves in the webs of spiders, which you would find endearing if it weren't so tragically pathetic.]
(if: $x > 20) [Obviously there is nothing to eat here and at this point that doesn't bother you in the slightest, as a small bird is a reprieve from failing to consume all of a large bird.]
(if: $x > 30) [When you get downstairs, you will spend your days learning what you hadn't before, in the charming and demure manner that once famed you as a soulful eccentric.]
(if: $x > 40) [When you get downstairs, when everything is forgiven, you will read so many books that the true shape of the world fades into a peaceful dream that rests murkily outside ideal constructions.]
(if: $x > 50) [When you are downstairs again, some words will never pass your lips, save where they are shorn contextless from books.]
(if: $x > 60) [You know what it's like to see small bodies prostate at the mandibles of spiders.]
(if: $x > 70) [That's because you put them there.]
(if: $x > 80) [When you get downstairs, the campaign will not have killed thousands of children.]
(if: $x > 90) [When you get downstairs, you will not have displaced, dehomed, encircled, starved out, or orphanned thousands of children, because you will ask God to make you forget your own name.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You had no idea how many brood parasites there were before Hach helpfully listed them, one by one.
(if: $x > 10) [Really, in death, it's just a few more birds, a little saltier, a little stringier, a little worse, a little better.]
(if: $x > 20) [The cowbird actually observes birds that nudge parasitic eggs out of their nest and proceeds to kill all of their babies, with a vengeance.]
(if: $x > 30) [You have enough time to think in here on what it is to take, or to want, or to need.]
(if: $x > 40) [You've come up with no good answers.]
(if: $x > 50) [Did you need to go back to Lefvin to ensure they'd stop sending their ships?]
(if: $x > 60) [Will you always want Asilyn?]
(if: $x > 70) [After taking on so much, what would you take back to make you feel better?]
(if: $x > 80) [Must humans always shove each other for land and space and food and water?]
(if: $x > 90) [Must you be such an obligate fucking fool about what it is you did, and what your motives were?]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The smell of the boobook, dilute as it is by other birds, reminds you in its special way of home.
(if: $x > 10) [Supposedly, the boobook was an introduced species, first used by falconers, then slowly, as ravens and hawks were deemed the better fit for humanity's uses, let loose.]
(if: $x > 20) [Now they're common as the other owls here.]
(if: $x > 30) [The land will never forget Lefvin occupation, either.]
(if: $x > 40) [Your father talked a lot about blasting Lefvin back where they came from.]
(if: $x > 50) [He didn't know who he was raising, obviously.]
(if: $x > 60) [Caila couldn't have been clocked as a fighter pretty much throughout the war, though.]
(if: $x > 70) [She still made owl noises while making camp, like your mother sometimes did when you were on your way to sleep.]
(if: $x > 80) [People like that do their best to make the world a little softer, a little sillier.]
(if: $x > 90) [Because the world is not soft or silly enough, and it's harder work than anyone thinks.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)This is the most beautiful bird you've ever seen, or the drawing is, and fuck birds, here is a description of your room: big table.
(if: $x > 10) [Big table full of birds, that is, and then several chairs, as if you are waiting for others to join you.]
(if: $x > 20) [At some point you've thrown at least three of these chairs against the wall, and one of them you smashed the leg of and threw that out the window, but then checked if it hit anyone (it didn't, since this spire of the castle overlooks a cliff in one direction).]
(if: $x > 30) [Huge, ugly drapes, in a gray that makes you more depressed.]
(if: $x > 40) [A bed in the corner.]
(if: $x > 50) [A cot in another corner (you sleep on the cot).]
(if: $x > 60) [A wastebasin hidden behind a door so that the room will smell like it less slowly (it does anyway), a small subroom dredged full of herbs for seasoning and hiding the scent of piss (herb piss scent abundant).]
(if: $x > 70) [Wooden, all of the furniture, though the floor is stony, unlike the one-room marble churches the city is known for, and unlike the extravagant subtle white paint with slight red, green, blue accents, the city's unofficial saints-based color scheme.]
(if: $x > 80) [One, bedraggled, female disappointment, scraggled hair and eyes like a demon from hell and a plain shirt and hell heaving in the silent womb, hell of her own invention, beneath that silent body, that prophesied, beloved, bescarred, beloathed body.]
(if: $x > 90) [A candle in the corner, which has burned for nine days and four years.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Tiny bird, big attitude, only one of those things translate.
(if: $x > 10) [You stab at the tyrant.]
(if: $x > 20) [This is the second time you've done that.]
(if: $x > 30) [It is very hard to kill the rich and powerful: they are usually highly insulated.]
(if: $x > 40) [If you'd been more aggressively stealthy, you could've pushed harder for specifically an assassination mission on Lefvin's king.]
(if: $x > 50) [Because you are kind of tired of watching people suffer for systems.]
(if: $x > 60) [When you won the war, one of Asilyn's snarkier subordinates personally came up to you and said something like "aren't you glad we didn't do that?"]
(if: $x > 70) [As if you were proud of personally showing everyone in the damn country what for.]
(if: $x > 80) [No, you're not.]
(if: $x > 90) [War seems like the clumsiest implement of negotiation you could imagine, and that for some reason was the one you used.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Another goddamned Thoran bird (you wonder how much money has to be spent importing birds for your consumption, especially birds no one cares enough to kill).
(if: $x > 10) [Cilicia has told you that in the deep wilds of Thora, where no one eats meat, the animals are barely afraid.]
(if: $x > 20) [There, the mesites sometimes situate themselves in the roofs of houses, especially in the winter, where the slightest crack in a cottage wall or thatching could spell valuable warmth.]
(if: $x > 30) [So tame they can be held by children, she said, demonstrating by cupping her hands.]
(if: $x > 40) [The birds in your country are flighty and untrusting.]
(if: $x > 50) [You feel a certain kinship with anything which can be so close to the world and so far away.]
(if: $x > 60) [Constantly flitting between trees, looking over its own back, it small chest heaving... those are the birds of your country.]
(if: $x > 70) [Here you are, your chest heaving, thinking of Cilica's home city you kept promising to visit, and thinking of tiny wings in your hands.]
(if: $x > 80) [You do not know if it ruins the challenge for you to have thrown up little bits of the bird.]
(if: $x > 90) [The chunks are rugged, and commingle with chunks of many other birds: maybe it's surprising you haven't thrown up many more birds, that everything has not attempted a sudden and brutal exodous.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)This might be the longest bird name yet, and all it has to show for it now is a large, well-basted stuffed bird.
(if: $x > 10) [You're not really sure how they expect you to keep doing this day after day, but you think they've pretty heavily seasoned the curassow, so it might be alright.]
(if: $x > 20) [You close your eyes.]
(if: $x > 30) [You open your eyes.]
(if: $x > 40) [You sit dumbfounded in front of the curassow, as if eating it is an impossibility.]
(if: $x > 50) [When all of this is over, if it's ever over, even the worst of it will be a memory.]
(if: $x > 60) [You told Rosa that often, as if she really needed your reassurance.]
(if: $x > 70) [Getting her assigned to you was the best possible outcome for the worst possible set-up: you and Caila, separated.]
(if: $x > 80) [You wish you had been there to hear her last words, but according to others on the frontline, there weren't any, just the whistle of the encroaching firebomb.]
(if: $x > 90) [No body, either: at this point you were too much of a force of nature to need another bodyguard, and the best thing your squadron could do was get out of the way.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The barn owl has only ever been found in Lefvin, but the original list of a hundred birds has obviously been so lost to time that what remains is a sorry reproduction.
(if: $x > 10) [Time mutates everything, and claiming the birds of the world is a perilous act when the world will not stop changing.]
(if: $x > 20) [Regionally, the barn owl is also known as the "church owl", since they were as happy to live there.]
(if: $x > 30) [How many times did you see them peering out of abandoned cities, like souls of the dead?]
(if: $x > 40) [Hach would often return from the trail with them, or follow them to find good shelter.]
(if: $x > 50) [Caila always joked that eyes like his must have belonged to saints.]
(if: $x > 60) [Vician crossed herself whenever Caila made heretical jokes.]
(if: $x > 70) [This felt stupid on the campaign, when it seemed so obvious that nothing you could do with God's powers could be holy when they were made to obliviate everything He had allegedly made.]
(if: $x > 80) [That is all to say, you have no idea where this owl came from.]
(if: $x > 90) [Amen.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The kagu was first documented five years ago, and, upon finding a sizeable breeding population, excised some scrub jay (deemed "repetitive") from the list.
(if: $x > 10) [When you get out you want to write a history of every bird filtered in and out of the list, over time.]
(if: $x > 20) [You're not convinced you're leaving.]
(if: $x > 30) [With every well-made or horrifically poorly made meal, the sensation is the same... of falling indefinitely into a place from which you will not return.]
(if: $x > 40) [Each bird delineating a further line between what you were and what you are becoming.]
(if: $x > 50) [Which is... what?]
(if: $x > 60) [Remourseful?]
(if: $x > 70) [Angry?]
(if: $x > 80) [Tired?]
(if: $x > 90) [Hollow.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Also known as the "Oskan duck", the loon you were given supposedly had a red throat in life.
(if: $x > 10) [You expect it to taste like duck and you are sourly disappointed.]
(if: $x > 20) [It's not the worst thing you've had, but it's edging toward the middle ]
(if: $x > 30) [Someday you will go back to the north, to the border memorials and past that, to where the world stakes out its own memorials in black ice.]
(if: $x > 40) [Caila wanted to go there, and you think she would have been broken and healed again by the ice if you had taken her.]
(if: $x > 50) [One of the few things you shared in common besides history: you feel that in you both was the ability to move away from the world and become utterly alien to it, to yourself.]
(if: $x > 60) [Nothing could be more rhapsodic than letting the magic in your body stop pretending to be saintly and spill into an older, more dangerous form.]
(if: $x > 70) [After all, if saints come around every few hundred years or so, but the world is much older...]
(if: $x > 80) [...well, it really explains why someone bothered to invent God.]
(if: $x > 90) [You are looking straight up at Him, doing his works in reproach, wondering if He's proud of how sainthood has been filed in underneath him.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The kea is one of the smartest birds in the aviary.
(if: $x > 10) [Brokhe works there sometimes, as if sliding between soldier and birdkeeper were as easy as it is for a frog to move from the land to the water.]
(if: $x > 20) [She saw you staring aimlessly and was transfixed behind the glass where she was refilling kea feed, as if you were a holy thing and not another exhibit.]
(if: $x > 30) [Maybe you're both, and she recognized that.]
(if: $x > 40) [You know that she started like everyone else, hoping the stars fell off the mourning veil you still wear to the capital church so they could pick them up.]
(if: $x > 50) [But she follows a little further, lingers a little longer, managed to find out you were a great lover of rosemary and put it on the altar before you came.]
(if: $x > 60) [Your best defense is to pretend you do not see her.]
(if: $x > 70) [If you say what you mean, which is that you are threatened by anyone who would revere you, and that she is worshipping an unhappy home, it will come out sharp, and heretical, and as another outburst.]
(if: $x > 80) [You said the quiet part so loud no one believed you.]
(if: $x > 90) [Uninhabited by truth in pursuit of utter truthfulness, in your delivery the harshest truths became a lie that pain made.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Your eyes flicker between live and dead bodies on this table.
(if: $x > 10) [It is as if the air itself has been plucked like a musical instrument, and in the shaking air is a rhasphody in color.]
(if: $x > 20) [The thin white lines that grace the face of a treeswift stab the russet of cooked meat.]
(if: $x > 30) [Empty plates offer up smeared white and fat that coalesce into the shape of the souls of birds.]
(if: $x > 40) [In the middle of the table, where the centerpiece is supposed to be, she sits, instead, with her legs crossed.]
(if: $x > 50) [Six wings extending in a scatter of white and silver, where they aren't cast-aside napkins and utensils.]
(if: $x > 60) [Two unmistakeable eyes which are a pitch black nowhere else in the room.]
(if: $x > 70) [All she wants now, after you've won the war, is to hold your even gaze.]
(if: $x > 80) [Every second she stares at you is another second the world has not forgotten her.]
(if: $x > 90) [This world that has never known her, will never know her: your ghost.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You've heard that the trogon is supposed to be one of the most beautiful birds in the rainforests on the southern border, in Theresa's Gardens, but this one is so terribly marred by fire that it seems it was cooked this way, feathers-on, to a crisp.
(if: $x > 10) [It's not easy for you to force yourself to take a bite, so you mess with it on the plate, which only serves to scatter the blackened shards of charred flesh.]
(if: $x > 20) [Maybe it would have tasted just as bad, as you are beginning to learn few birds are fit for consumption in the first place, especially the songbirds.]
(if: $x > 30) [The burning is beginning to remind you of fire, after all, and you are loathe to remember fire.]
(if: $x > 40) [Sometimes it seems like your whole life has been spent around them: huddled in childhood, fleeing in teens, watching Vician set them, watching Caila put them out.]
(if: $x > 50) [Now, trying to separate the feeling of burning from the feeling of staying warm.]
(if: $x > 60) [It's not as if you're the only one to be so lonely, when at least you came from something, where Asilyn emerged, the myths say, from an egg in the heart of the Gardens.]
(if: $x > 70) [But there were fires to the south around the time Alisyn emerged, the same row of cross-continental flames that struck your town.]
(if: $x > 80) [If you are a girl with wings who emerges from a burned town, you are a tragic saint, but if you are a girl with wings who emerges from a burned town without other survivors, then imagine the kind of stories you could tell about where you're from--]
(if: $x > 90) [What a terrible thing to think of her (in the lying, in what a few extra bodies would have been worth in the making of a god--)]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You have few thoughts on the body of the avocet, but you at least have a wry interest in the bill.
(if: $x > 10) [It looks as if someone took a proper bird's bill and wrenched it up, as if someone perhaps was making a bird from clay and dropped it.]
(if: $x > 20) [Nature is the ultimate jokester, always creating and subverting expectations.]
(if: $x > 30) [At one point, you were supposed to have interpreted the teasing laugh of saints of that elements, the joy and vivacity and sometimes shrewd tricksterliness.]
(if: $x > 40) [Instead, in keeping with you, the myths have changed to a somber, maternal nature.]
(if: $x > 50) [Few people can claim to have ruined religion.]
(if: $x > 60) [Asilyn would tell you that myths are ways a people defend the concept of a self, and you are that self, made flesh, and are amazing.]
(if: $x > 70) [Vician would tell you that the myths don't matter, as long as you are true to your own will.]
(if: $x > 80) [Caila would just say that it's a shame, since you're so morose, that the two of you weren't swapped.]
(if: $x > 90) [And she'd wink.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)They perserved the eyes in a rich chemical soup, not for you to eat, but for you to watch-- look away.
(if: $x > 10) [If you want, you can focus on the meat, even move the vial of green-gold chemicals with their gaping eyes off to the side.]
(if: $x > 20) [But there is something about the faded red gems.]
(if: $x > 30) [They could have perserved those massive, lumbering feet instead, or the oddly shaped bill.]
(if: $x > 40) [You'd seen a few coots before, and they were always silly and ungainly creatures in comparison to the demure coloring of the other waterbirds.]
(if: $x > 50) [Caila had made a joke about coots when you were running missions together, primarily ones where she'd skip across bodies of water for sabotage and espionage reasons.]
(if: $x > 60) ["Imagine if you woke up and someone told you a little bird did it," she'd tell you, "I think I'd give up."]
(if: $x > 70) [You assured her that they probably should give up, and quickly, considering who they were up against.]
(if: $x > 80) [Then when they sent the fifth fleet in, when you decided you'd be taking the war back over the water, you wondered if the government really knew what they were up against.]
(if: $x > 90) [Maybe something about "four women with witch magic decimated our army with minimal backup" just didn't sound like a good enough reason to withdraw?]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)An old bird, and there are so few like it.
(if: $x > 10) [One of the birds they've barely saved.]
(if: $x > 20) [Whoever made the oracles and changed the hundred could have picked hardier birds, or more commonplace ones, and still covered the world.]
(if: $x > 30) [But now you have plainswalker for your next of a hundred meals.]
(if: $x > 40) [You place the treasured meat in your mouth, and a rivulet of salt runs down the side of your face.]
(if: $x > 50) [Phantom fingers pull at the edge of it, urging you to clean yourself.]
(if: $x > 60) [Your mother smelled like this, near the end, like death and blood and salt.]
(if: $x > 70) [All of the mythologies of your heart end in surrender.]
(if: $x > 80) [You wanted to be good.]
(if: $x > 90) [Your hands move to the side of your face, clutching a crisp and sweat-stained napkin, and drag the meat sweat away.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)This is one of the largest birds on the table, and you were only given a sampling of it.
(if: $x > 10) [(How could something this large even have flown?)]
(if: $x > 20) [Atop the meat, laced with edible flowers, is the clean skull with the bill attached.]
(if: $x > 30) [Gauche. This is gauche, is what you mean to say, gauche and horrifying.]
(if: $x > 40) [You lean back in your chair and think of how you could possibly get out of eating this (you can't).]
(if: $x > 50) [You wish you had the powers where you could set things on fire.]
(if: $x > 60) [Not that you haven't been doing a good enough job of that lately.]
(if: $x > 70) [But flesh burns, too.]
(if: $x > 80) [Your stomach turns over itself with anger.]
(if: $x > 90) [Why do you have to do every damned thing the old fashioned way?]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Kiwi with tropical fruit is one of the stupidest things you've been given, you might as well have put it in aspic and be done with it.
(if: $x > 10) [They live on one of the islands, territory that now falls within the doctrine granting you a quarter of the world, though Asilyn and you have spoken at length about your duties as protectors against further empire rather than as vanguards of it.]
(if: $x > 20) [Didn't she say something along the lines of, "Well, no need to knock other birds out of the sky with a rock if they haven't clipped our wings?"]
(if: $x > 30) [You do not want to eat this bird right now.]
(if: $x > 40) [There was always this hazy nonchalance in her eyes when she described the way the war went.]
(if: $x > 50) [None of the ambassadors could envision that the blades of light she mentioned did not actually make her look like an archangel so much as the end of the world.]
(if: $x > 60) [Or that something being gone was sometimes more horrific than it being maimed.]
(if: $x > 70) [You keep closing your eyes and looking toward the ceiling, as if God will eat the fucking kiwi for you if you implore Him long enough.]
(if: $x > 80) [Kiwis lay eggs nearly large as they are, and it nearly kills them every time.]
(if: $x > 90) [You don't want to think about children right now.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The lyrebird is another bird not hunted for meat, but for dandy feathers.
(if: $x > 10) [You might use your wish on hoping feather fashion goes out of vogue as soon as you get out.]
(if: $x > 20) [But this isn't a wish, so you should rephrase that: you want to absolve not just yourself but everyone of the crime of sticking frilly shit in their hats and collars.]
(if: $x > 30) [The decadence of the capital's castle is really just a few rooms, but those few rooms are dripping with opulence.]
(if: $x > 40) [Someday, when the land's bones are dug up and placed here, it will be more representative of the wealth of the vast land it theoretically occupies.]
(if: $x > 50) [You hope people keep living like you did, barely aware of the government, out in the wilds, forever.]
(if: $x > 60) [In the back of your head you are aware this causes its own problems.]
(if: $x > 70) [You are thinking about what a more organized world would have been able to do for your mother.]
(if: $x > 80) [But you did all take care of her, in a place she loved, with everything you had.]
(if: $x > 90) [You believe nothing would have been enough.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Finally, a bird that looks like someone's dog.
(if: $x > 10) [You are going to set the entire tower on fire.]
(if: $x > 20) [Would it have killed them to give you alcohol?]
(if: $x > 30) [It would have made the whole thing spiritually insignificant, but any civil society would have given you alcohol.]
(if: $x > 40) [Shows you how civilized this damn country you fought and died and watched other people died for is.]
(if: $x > 50) [You think the meat might be bad.]
(if: $x > 60) [Lots of the meat is making you sick.]
(if: $x > 70) [What do you want to do, go downstairs and complain to the management?]
(if: $x > 80) [Vician wouldn't have tolerated this, she would have jumped out the window.]
(if: $x > 90) [Isn't that pretty much what she did?]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The manucode looks like a cursed, bedraggled thing, and is helpfully provided with mint.
(if: $x > 10) [As if you don't have enough damn mint.]
(if: $x > 20) [There's a little jelly to go with it, which goes lovely with the mint, and awful with the bird, in a way that once again makes you think they are barely trying.]
(if: $x > 30) [As you eat another appointed curse from the dear Father you've pissed off so thoroughly, you stare out the window.]
(if: $x > 40) [It's all sky from here, so the day's moods impact yours far more than they do below.]
(if: $x > 50) [If you moved back to the country, you could be close to the world again.]
(if: $x > 60) [That, or learn that you were never going to be able to feel what you once did.]
(if: $x > 70) [Couldn't Asilyn pretend you died?]
(if: $x > 80) [Maybe you would die.]
(if: $x > 90) [Everything you've thought about in here would still haunt you there.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The maleo puts its eggs in the sand, and asks its children to pull themselves out of the earth.
(if: $x > 10) [It's not the only animal that does this, after all, there are also sea turtles to consider.]
(if: $x > 20) [You will not even get started on Caila's obsession with sea turtles.]
(if: $x > 30) [You can already imagine her folding her arms over each other.]
(if: $x > 40) [This would be the place for an elaborate metaphor about pulling yourself out of the earth.]
(if: $x > 50) [Half the time you don't have anything interesting to think, where you don't have rage or envy.]
(if: $x > 60) [All your worst emotions, the only thing that produces a semblance of the person you were, who you wanted to be...]
(if: $x > 70) [It wouldn't be terrible to lie down on hot sand and close your eyes.]
(if: $x > 80) [Grip sand close to your body and it will pull through your own hands.]
(if: $x > 90) [But it also gets stuck to you no matter what you do, so you can't be free of it, and you can't not lose it... your deep thought for the meal is that this reminds you a lot of love.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)As a certified bird scientist, just based off of what you have to work with, you think that society is a front for an elaborate race to be the first to call a bird a "bluebird".
(if: $x > 10) [Because so many of them are vividly, brilliantly blue.]
(if: $x > 20) [It's a rare color, especially in your cohort, the cloved, the pawed, the sorry.]
(if: $x > 30) [Maybe being close to the sky gives you cause to bring about miracles.]
(if: $x > 40) [You know that better than anyone.]
(if: $x > 50) [Somewhere below you, your miracle walks the castle, probably looking up while you're looking down.]
(if: $x > 60) [Hollow bones, and completely unable to be hurt.]
(if: $x > 70) [Eyes that change and shimmer with the day, and a face that matches, the cheekbones you love seeming to recede in and out of myth.]
(if: $x > 80) [Someone whose face you'll forget, and whose sihlouette you'll remember.]
(if: $x > 90) [Even the living saints are being swallowed up by the world.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)They serve the bee-eater with honey.
(if: $x > 10) [Jokes do not taste any better than meat.]
(if: $x > 20) [What a highly conspicuous thing this must've been in life.]
(if: $x > 30) [There were bee-eaters at the aviary, and you had the pleasure of watching one bash a wasp on the side of the enclosure until the stinger came out.]
(if: $x > 40) [You forget who you went with.]
(if: $x > 50) [Or you do remember, but you went several times.]
(if: $x > 60) [Half of your memories are washed out, like dreams.]
(if: $x > 70) [It doesn't help that you'll see people who look like people you know in public.]
(if: $x > 80) [You are haunted by yourself.]
(if: $x > 90) [Terrible luck.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)This side of the table is full of so many birds you haven't seen before, and others you've never seen in the wild.
(if: $x > 10) [In some ways, this makes your job easier.]
(if: $x > 20) [But it also makes you bored, if you're going to be honest.]
(if: $x > 30) [You are happy to eat the hoopoe.]
(if: $x > 40) [You close your eyes and take of the meat and nod gently.]
(if: $x > 50) [A breeze blows through the open window, and you turn toward it.]
(if: $x > 60) [There is always the ocean.]
(if: $x > 70) [But for now, it is placid, a friend, or nothing at all, just a body that has forgotten you.]
(if: $x > 80) [Sometimes you think you could've been sealed in a room underground, a tomb.]
(if: $x > 90) [It would've been miserable for anyone else, but you think it would have been safe for you-- you would have felt safer.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The hornbill lives in Theresa's Gardens, which you and Asilyn visited once.
(if: $x > 10) [The forest was useful for strategic purposes, as Lefvinians were notoriously poor at navigating it.]
(if: $x > 20) [But Asilyn was always arguing to stay out of its way, as if she was certain, before it happened, that any excuse Lefvin occupying forces could find would be enough to burn it.]
(if: $x > 30) [Asilyn would get twitchy about landscapes as she would about people.]
(if: $x > 40) [Not in the way that she didn't care about people, but if everything was equally in her domain, that it was deeply necessary to protect all of it.]
(if: $x > 50) [Caila was always drawn to this, though she bought so much of who Asilyn was to the public that she never really knew her at all, even after living with her for years.]
(if: $x > 60) [And Vician only ever cared about people.]
(if: $x > 70) [You rounded the group out nicely by not caring about anything.]
(if: $x > 80) [No one thinks that, you think, or they don't know.]
(if: $x > 90) [How do you learn how people are thinking about you if you can't ask without revealing that something was ever in question?]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)One of Savia's favorite birds, the official bird domestic of the small country.
(if: $x > 10) [The bird will happily guide humans to honeycomb, so they can feast on the grubs while the humans eat the honey.]
(if: $x > 20) [It lies buried in its treasure now, with the full comb offered to you (hopefully grubless).]
(if: $x > 30) [You eat that first, because unlike bird meat, you actually want to have some honeycomb.]
(if: $x > 40) [Cilicia once told you that she wanted to buy a honeyguide, but she'd train it to find all sorts of baubles, rather than to find her honey.]
(if: $x > 50) [You told her to get a raven instead.]
(if: $x > 60) [Cilicia would sometimes blurt out things like that after parties.]
(if: $x > 70) [Then, lately, things like "Run away with me," things you could not possibly answer.]
(if: $x > 80) [People act upon a version of you they think is there, and usually they feel strongly about that person's convictions.]
(if: $x > 90) [At one point, maybe you had them, maybe they came across to her, but then you just stared, and told her that you were both drunk, tired, being silly.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Another pathetically small body, another easy labor.
(if: $x > 10) [When you were first brought to the capital, you were seeking help.]
(if: $x > 20) [What you found instead was that you would be asked to help everyone.]
(if: $x > 30) [Asilyn's gathering forces bribed you for a while, which you didn't realize when you were so young, you just thought that everyone in the capital was so nice, and so giving, and that Casca was so good.]
(if: $x > 40) [Though it was a colony capital back then, allowed to be so nice only to host foreign officials...]
(if: $x > 50) [Same as it ever were.]
(if: $x > 60) [You heard about the potential for revolution for the first time after they took you to the beach, far out in the country, allegedly so Asilyn could test Caila's powers.]
(if: $x > 70) [But you didn't test Caila's powers.]
(if: $x > 80) [She just took you to the sea, to watch the waves.]
(if: $x > 90) [The sandpipers moved in and out with the tides, plucking mussels from the ground and jumping again when the water rushed up to meet them.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The dot-eyes of the great auk are but one part of a charming bird, lovingly recreated in another one of Hach's drawings, before he immediately contradicts that care in a dozen angry scribbles about "this bastardly bird".
(if: $x > 10) [There are a few in the aviary, so at this point, you really just think that Asilyn contracted him to go around the world and keep busy.]
(if: $x > 20) [It's strange to think all of these notes are from months ago, when...]
(if: $x > 30) [...well, at the time, he didn't know who he would be writing for.]
(if: $x > 40) [What happens to you happens frequently, but not too frequently, so usually the preparations are made for two or so people to do it, per year.]
(if: $x > 50) [Almost everyone who has ever undertaken the bird rites identified female.]
(if: $x > 60) [Hach tells you that this bird is so kind it only survives in the wild because deep north Oskans practically farm it, being careful what they kill.]
(if: $x > 70) [He tends to be reproachful about birds who are too kind.]
(if: $x > 80) [Then he tends to be reproachful about birds that are too aggressive, or flighty.]
(if: $x > 90) [Then he tends to be reproachful about--]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)A reedling is a awful, puffed up little thing, which you are sure your sister would be obsessed with.
(if: $x > 10) [Merle could sense things in distress from miles away, and would always have something like five or ten critters in his house, well-cared for and deeply unwilling to live, which Caila would come over to coo at.]
(if: $x > 20) [When you began to feel annoyed by how often they spent time together alone, you started inviting him out on adventures.]
(if: $x > 30) [Since you didn't have any idea what people did, this usually meant you'd walk in circles in the forest until you found something to talk about.]
(if: $x > 40) [Later, when you were older, it was crime.]
(if: $x > 50) [Little, mild crimes.]
(if: $x > 60) [You and Caila were going to tell him about the water.]
(if: $x > 70) [Even though it was her secret to tell, it was the only one you two had at the time.]
(if: $x > 80) [There are so many "should haves" with Merle.]
(if: $x > 90) [A shouldn't have: slept with him.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Theoretically these should live somewhere in Theresa's Gardens.
(if: $x > 10) [You've been mercifully supplied with a bill, a rainbow sheathe to a sword by your examination.]
(if: $x > 20) [Or a gorgeous implement for dispersing heat, cracking nuts, finding lovers, perhaps communication?]
(if: $x > 30) [In another life you'd spend a hundred years remaking your body into the perfect instrument, and then you'd walk into the sea and cross it, emerge elsewhere, and study every living thing until you understood what reasons it had to live, what reasons to die.]
(if: $x > 40) [If you had your saint's acts you could start tomorrow.]
(if: $x > 50) [You could start today.]
(if: $x > 60) [You keep thinking about the sun-- the beautiful sun.]
(if: $x > 70) [If you wanted to change your eyes with saint's acts, you would see through spectrums no human has ever known, through compound or twelve-lidded or dozens of eyes.]
(if: $x > 80) [No one will ever know how much you were holding back.]
(if: $x > 90) [Because it's not as hard to kill things as it is to make something that will continue to live.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)If you were any bird, you would want to be a peregrine falcon.
(if: $x > 10) [The air would cover you like a blanket and you would fall.]
(if: $x > 20) [You've seen it happen to other people.]
(if: $x > 30) [She looked so happy.]
(if: $x > 40) [It's not fair to say she looked happy when it happened.]
(if: $x > 50) [She might have saved only a couple dozen of you with the distraction she promised.]
(if: $x > 60) [The truth is you don't think there was a version of her who could have come back from the war.]
(if: $x > 70) [You want to scream and pull her hair because none of you could.]
(if: $x > 80) [You want to drag her back from the brink and make her look your sister in the eyes and apologize and cave her shoulders in the way she did when her tremendous pride shattered.]
(if: $x > 90) [But she did look at your sister when she did it, because a love strong enough will ruin its own futures.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)To butcher the butcherbird feels a fittingly goache turn of phrase, but here you are with its tiny body and no one to laugh at your jokes.
(if: $x > 10) [In your dreams you see the battlefield translated to the trees.]
(if: $x > 20) [And in the bushes amongst them the braided figure of the six-winged child, opalescent eyes glinting at you.]
(if: $x > 30) [As if she is still your monster to have if you never have her.]
(if: $x > 40) [Her open mouth ruby-red with blood and lip polish.]
(if: $x > 50) [You are certain in these dreams that you are only a prelude of the hell to come, a story that will be told one day to sigh back on by the children of her world.]
(if: $x > 60) [It sickens you to imagine being complicit in the creation of her world, though your every action does it.]
(if: $x > 70) [Some nights you believe so strongly that the only noble saint's act would be to tear everything down rather than let a world this wretched continue.]
(if: $x > 80) [She feels the same way but is too tactful to let it show, so it shines only occasionally out of her eyes.]
(if: $x > 90) [Your dear, beautiful daughter.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Your mouth is full of meat and your eyes are dry and bitter.
(if: $x > 10) [You choke back another bite and smell your own flesh dessicating in the sun.]
(if: $x > 20) [Too unloveable for God to hook you on the wonder of a pennant tail.]
(if: $x > 30) [Your mother would have loved to see these birds in another life, and their death might have mortified her.]
(if: $x > 40) [Or maybe your piety might have overwhelmed her.]
(if: $x > 50) [The truth was you were too young to know your mother, that you pieced her and your father together from the shards of a person they threw apart against the ground when you were young.]
(if: $x > 60) [Your sister did it, and her lover.]
(if: $x > 70) [You come from a family and a found family and a kingdom of people who are going to be remembered in imperfect pieces.]
(if: $x > 80) [Why won't the world let you break to pieces?]
(if: $x > 90) [How much further do you have to fall apart before it will let you go?]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You can't help but learn a little about these birds, with their huge yellow eyes and red beaks and idiot faces.
(if: $x > 10) [With a name like that, belonging to another animal you'll never see, you feel you owe them your dilligence.]
(if: $x > 20) [Like the wrasses Caila was obsessed with, they clean other animals and get a meal in return.]
(if: $x > 30) [You imagine Caila cooing over it, shouting "oxpecker!" and grabbing your long hair and planting a kiss somewhere in your locks it will wash out.]
(if: $x > 40) [Sometimes you wonder what she'd be like if you'd taken her place.]
(if: $x > 50) [What would that entail, that Asilyn died?]
(if: $x > 60) [You think you might be happier if Asilyn had died.]
(if: $x > 70) [You are ruining the oxpecker with your uxoricide.]
(if: $x > 80) [The oxpeckers are doing good for the world, really the Merle of birds, off to the side, doing their best.]
(if: $x > 90) [Thousands across the country, millions, even, and here you are, being a bitch.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The summer tanager is an obvious songbird, or rather, a bird trying so hard to pretend it is a normal bird it almost feels goache about it.
(if: $x > 10) [Bright red feathers, a looming neck, dark eyes, a scowlish beak.]
(if: $x > 20) [Birds have always felt so observant to you, only complicated further by their horrible habit of being small enough to enter spaces and then winged enough to find spaces anywhere.]
(if: $x > 30) [Asilyn was this wry and insistent when you met her, always there when you turned around, practicing acts alone, plotting alone, being alone.]
(if: $x > 40) [She fell in love with you first, you fell in whatever you fell-- obsession?-- later.]
(if: $x > 50) [Sometimes it feels like she's trying to look for something in you that isn't there.]
(if: $x > 60) [Nothing you've done has ever convinced her it isn't there.]
(if: $x > 70) [When you got violent, she got sad, not angry.]
(if: $x > 80) [You got worse.]
(if: $x > 90) [You want to apologize to your wife.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)No one told you how many birds were cribbing their playbook from butterflies.
(if: $x > 10) [You wonder how many disciplines are absent you, which might bring you so much joy if you were only allowed their company for days on end.]
(if: $x > 20) [This alleges your feelings on birds are positive, which they are not, you do not have fully positive feelings on birds right now.]
(if: $x > 30) [Hach would enjoy this, or something approaching happiness--satisfaction.]
(if: $x > 40) [Everyone must have such different things going on inside their heads, and everyone just tries to get along as if humans are uniform.]
(if: $x > 50) [Or maybe everyone you've ever loved is an ugly and unpredictable edge case.]
(if: $x > 60) [Maybe you've never understood humans.]
(if: $x > 70) [At some point you break down crying in the corner, on the bed instead of the cot, your head rubbed in it, searching it for scent.]
(if: $x > 80) [A week without showering is getting to you, and the water is stale, as none can be brought in during the mission, even with the icebox.]
(if: $x > 90) [It's a lot of water, but if you don't finish this up soon, maybe they'll just let you die.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)To the utter detriment of flavor, in pursuit of authenticity, many birds have feathers on their neat dish.
(if: $x > 10) [Surrounded by a sweet onion paste, this is one of the most artful birds, and you know why.]
(if: $x > 20) [She definitely thinks it will remind you of before.]
(if: $x > 30) [Foliage exploding from your limbs, sacred fruit unrolling out of muscle and branches rising thorned from your back.]
(if: $x > 40) [An exhaltation, a sermon in the fleshtone bark.]
(if: $x > 50) [You miss nothing.]
(if: $x > 60) [You do not want your saint's acts back.]
(if: $x > 70) [You miss nothing.]
(if: $x > 80) [You do not want your saint's acts back.]
(if: $x > 90) [You are nothing now.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)A bluebird is classically small and pathetic, a parody of a songbird with a pout.
(if: $x > 10) [You're happy to have been given the feathers, if only because they look so soft, painted on.]
(if: $x > 20) [Your sister and mother were both so into painting, and at one point, Caila had stated you should take it up "to remember mom".]
(if: $x > 30) [You had said something helpful like "I don't want to remember mom".]
(if: $x > 40) [She had put her hands on her hips at this.]
(if: $x > 50) [A lovely little devotee of people who were not good to her, really.]
(if: $x > 60) [Just like you.]
(if: $x > 70) [You want to take her now and ask her how else she remembers your mother, rock her to sleep.]
(if: $x > 80) [But softnesses in retrospect so often feel like a parody of a sentiment.]
(if: $x > 90) [When living with a real person is so imperfect, and so hard.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You wonder whose this is, if she was loved.
(if: $x > 10) [A bird like this, lean and beautiful, even dead, even defiled for eating, has to have been loved.]
(if: $x > 20) [You are thinking about Hach's darling girl again.]
(if: $x > 30) [Can't be.]
(if: $x > 40) [Still having a hard time eating her, getting your mouth around--]
(if: $x > 50) [Insistent, cutting flesh, a note of bitterness, then salt, then more bitter, as if it were waiting--]
(if: $x > 60) [Who's bird is it, because obviously, not Hach's bird, he would never let her go.]
(if: $x > 70) [What kind of sacrilege would it be--]
(if: $x > 80) [Yellow paper under the plate, you pick it up and cast it away.]
(if: $x > 90) [Hach's note is on the ground: he lets you know that this was an old bird, and the meat will be bad, but you should savor the last you'll ever see of him well as you can.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)It was silly for you to offer your sister a bird, and it irks you that that bird's perfect twin lies before you.
(if: $x > 10) [When the war ended, when she took ill on the trail and you bought her many such trinkets for your domicile in the capital--]
(if: $x > 20) [When the doctors said that women sometimes died of broken hearts--]
(if: $x > 30) [When you threw glass at Asilyn's head in private and excused yourself--]
(if: $x > 40) [When the excuse became weeks at her bed--]
(if: $x > 50) [When she said she would stay and you kissed her hand--]
(if: $x > 60) [When she left anyways--]
(if: $x > 70) [When everything was gone--]
(if: $x > 80) [One morning after she was gone, when the body was still lying in your room (as it did for nearly a week), you went to the window and set the bird out.]
(if: $x > 90) [Hoping that its flashing wings could somehow reverse time, that sacrificing it to a brutal world would help your sister live in this plush one.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)This must have travelled from so, so far away.
(if: $x > 10) [It has been cooked, but there is still a pervasive scent of rot on it, and the occasional spattering of white.]
(if: $x > 20) [It smells like the other body.]
(if: $x > 30) [They used the secret police to drag you kicking and screaming out of the house.]
(if: $x > 40) [Then they'd claimed that you'd possibly spoiled your sister's only chance to live a peaceful afterlife.]
(if: $x > 50) [You don't know why anyone thought this would calm you down.]
(if: $x > 60) [It still looked like her several days out, and you were certain she was still coming back.]
(if: $x > 70) [Maybe if you'd waited long enough by her side you also would have died.]
(if: $x > 80) [How lovely it would have been for the two of you to pass on together.]
(if: $x > 90) [If you have to stay here, you have to be good, so you take as much of the rot as you can and press it into your belligerent and unholy corpse.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)There are so many birds from the sea on this table, and the osprey is one of your least favorite.
(if: $x > 10) [When you were little, something carried off your dog, and your mom said it was probably the osprey that lived nearby.]
(if: $x > 20) [(Ospreys do not kill small mammals terribly often, which you only know now.)]
(if: $x > 30) [It was Merle who got his slingshot and marched into the forest, who found the nest and took aim.]
(if: $x > 40) [You never found the osprey but you did managed to kill its kids.]
(if: $x > 50) [Merle looked unsatisfied with having done it, but he loved the dog almost as much as you did.]
(if: $x > 60) [When he was older, you remember watching him watching the osprey and admitting to you that he sometimes left fish out for them.]
(if: $x > 70) [He asked you some impossible thing, like if you could somehow do enough good to make up for taking a life.]
(if: $x > 80) [You told him you'd get back to him when you'd thought on it.]
(if: $x > 90) [Then the fire happened.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The most fitting bird on the table stinks wretchedly, so much that it has been placed aside, toward the window.
(if: $x > 10) [When the breeze blows in instead of out, even though you've placed it according to prevailing winds, well, then the entire table smells of lurid fermentation.]
(if: $x > 20) [This is the animal which also has guts full of produce.]
(if: $x > 30) [Your animal, literally the animal of your sainthood.]
(if: $x > 40) [You'd seen it once before in the aviary, and it had looked vaguely pathetic, and you hadn't told Asilyn what you promised Caila you'd tell her after the war, which was that you wanted a stoat as your animal, instead.]
(if: $x > 50) [Caila had procured a frog.]
(if: $x > 60) [Vician, the bear.]
(if: $x > 70) [Asilyn's animal was all of creation, human beings, patron saint of fuck you, best powers, fuck you, wife, fuck you, opiate feathers, fuck you, birds, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.]
(if: $x > 80) [Stop hesitating, Nat.]
(if: $x > 90) [Eat the filthy bird.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)At one point it became a patriotic act to eat the cuckoo.
(if: $x > 10) [This happened since you lot were forced to quarter soldiers, much like the cuckoo forces other birds to quarter their young.]
(if: $x > 20) [It was during a period of covert rebellion, little ways the young country learned to roll Lefvin out of the nest.]
(if: $x > 30) [Then, when they'd been routed in the countryside, the cuckoo metaphors stopped, and you kept going, ready to bust the doors open on all their colonies.]
(if: $x > 40) [You did it.]
(if: $x > 50) [Now the cuckoo is another bird that nature has told to do a horrible thing to survive.]
(if: $x > 60) [Even the adults are mimics, mimicking the sparrowhawk.]
(if: $x > 70) [It doesn't taste so bad.]
(if: $x > 80) [But not so good.]
(if: $x > 90) [Not quite as good as the one you ate as a child.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)A secret about legends: a hundred years ago, apparently God did not know about the penguin.
(if: $x > 10) [You don't begrudge him that, this is one of the birds that has been pared down as you could not possibly eat the entire thing, and even so, it looks like you've been given several pounds of inedible fat.]
(if: $x > 20) [You are eating it in the same way you would eat grass if the challenge asked you to, frequently gagging, something like treason stirring in your unhelpful heart.]
(if: $x > 30) [A hundred years ago, if you had sinned, sinned as badly as possible, obviously the best way to sin, there would have been no penguin on the menu.]
(if: $x > 40) [God said, gather up all the birds of the world and place them before Who would not be spared my mercy, and it turns out the world keeps expanding.]
(if: $x > 50) [On every new continent, in every new world, birds, birds, birds.]
(if: $x > 60) [Horrible birds that taste like a full jar of lard.]
(if: $x > 70) [If God decides to talk to you, in this life, or after it, you will ask him what the deal was with all these damned birds, if a hundred was necessary, let alone several thousand.]
(if: $x > 80) [God will probably ask you what you think about several thousand of anything, and then fold His arms.]
(if: $x > 90) [Few punishments fit crimes as well as yours.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Who prays for the diving birds?
(if: $x > 10) [Up to two hundred feet into the ocean (and what of it), who prays for their safe return?]
(if: $x > 20) [On the sea, your sister once declared herself the lord of things which had ended up in the water, but belonged elsewhere.]
(if: $x > 30) [Sometimes you spend hours analyzing her actions for calls for help you might've missed.]
(if: $x > 40) [During the campaign through your countryside, when the war felt meaningful, you remember a night when you were camping out around a lake.]
(if: $x > 50) [She pitched herself backward and came out of the water not much later with a writhing two-meter pike.]
(if: $x > 60) [You forget the day she stopped having fun.]
(if: $x > 70) [Usually they did not ask her to kill anyone, only to incapacitate huge chunks of the opposing army by flooding their armories, or destroying supply lines.]
(if: $x > 80) [This was what eventually lead to you being stationed apart from each other.]
(if: $x > 90) [Incompatible fighting styles, and all.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)This, too, another one of her favorites.
(if: $x > 10) [Not to eat, but to watch, sometimes she'd yell "Pelican!" after appearing from out of nowhere to spit up water in Vician's face.]
(if: $x > 20) [Wasn't their first kiss her going in to drench Vician and Vician taking all the water directly from her mouth?]
(if: $x > 30) [Or was it a night in winter when the four of you decided you'd be following augury and taking it to war, and Vician kissed her first on the forehead, and then again on the mouth?]
(if: $x > 40) [Maybe even earlier, one time you'd walked in on the two of them on the high, open walkway between two buildings in the capital, and Vician had turned around with the force of a viper, clutching your sister's face in her hand.]
(if: $x > 50) [Every memory of Vician you have is full of that brutal energy that makes you want to kick her off the top of a building.]
(if: $x > 60) [Did you respect her as much as you hated her?]
(if: $x > 70) [You wonder if both of them are together, like Caila had promised.]
(if: $x > 80) [You don't believe in any of this country's tangled folklore afterlives.]
(if: $x > 90) [They're together primarily in that they both left you here.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The aviary exhibit with these birds always smelled horribly of the constant sludge of shrimp that needed to be imported for their benefit.
(if: $x > 10) [You swear you could see a little smile in the eyes of those birds, nasty though they were.]
(if: $x > 20) [The meat has this heady taste of shrimp to it, as if the pinkness penetrates all the way down.]
(if: $x > 30) [Not that it tastes nearly as good as shrimp, but if "shrimp!" were echoed about three times, and you caught the last one, and encased that in a memorial of general unpleasantness.]
(if: $x > 40) [Perhaps the revenge these birds get on you is that this diet is evil and you are having the worst time of your life.]
(if: $x > 50) [The flamingo in particular seems like a clever girl, and you wouldn't begrudge her a mote of malice.]
(if: $x > 60) [You are one to speak on the malice of others.]
(if: $x > 70) [Maybe the birds have sided against you, and will not fly up to heaven to catch the ear of God.]
(if: $x > 80) [You get the feeling God already has an ear and eye trained down upon you.]
(if: $x > 90) [You wonder if God, the birds, and you, are all stewing in the same hate.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)When Casca resolved to become an independent nation, and follow the Saints, every endangered bird on the Hundred was made sacred.
(if: $x > 10) [In practice this means that there is a gilded aviary where birds are bred for sinners, as long as they are impossibly rich.]
(if: $x > 20) [Osko, Salvita, Thoran, all the nations that were practically absent during your war (not that you blame Osko), all came down to tour the young nation, and the favorite attraction of every young diplomat was the aviary.]
(if: $x > 30) [So much of the nation felt so plain and comely, where it wasn't wreaked with fire or mines, that Asilyn was always fond of smiling and giving the same aviary tour, again and again, to the aristocrats you'd try to tease further with imported wines later that night.]
(if: $x > 40) [To be fair, the aviary was truly second only to her, and to you, the last remaining saints, though she would graciously volunteer to show her powers in your stead.]
(if: $x > 50) [Your powers were merely gestured at in continued agricultural bounty.]
(if: $x > 60) [When Thoran ambassadors found rot in a heavy pumpkin-rimmed dish, you muttered to Asilyn that now they probably understood more about your powers than anyone else who'd gotten a demonstration of Sainthood.]
(if: $x > 70) [Asilyn had thrown you against the wall, and you had smirked when she bit your collarbone and you half-heartedly promised to behave.]
(if: $x > 80) [How wonderful to be kept alive as an act of absolution, only, for someone else's benefit.]
(if: $x > 90) [Emu is a dark, heavy, and delicious meat.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The puffin is known for being a bird with a sweet smile and seaborn flesh, which is an assessment you can now agree with.
(if: $x > 10) [Oskans serve it like they would fish, with the same accompaniments and emphasis on salting the poor thing past its already briny body.]
(if: $x > 20) [Vician once told you, in one of your rare conversations, that her first saint's acts were setting hearth fires.]
(if: $x > 30) [You watched the way she stared into the flames, the power held in her shoulders squaring so little with the flickery wisps of the fire she'd learn to wield.]
(if: $x > 40) [There was no element befitting of Vician on this world, save for maybe ice.]
(if: $x > 50) [Yet bits of her fire manifested in a rare but hearty laugh, in the way her temper flared when she became berserk, in the way your sister clung to her as she once clung to warm blankets.]
(if: $x > 60) [You have seen Vician's fingers extend as if rolling a ball off her arm, and fire erupt in a nearby furnace and purr.]
(if: $x > 70) [But then you have also seen Vician astride the wreckage of cities in a pitiless blaze.]
(if: $x > 80) [You never felt entirely safe when those callused hands closed around your sister's waist, as if they might draw fire and set her off with it.]
(if: $x > 90) [But then, when Vician burned, she burned a part of Caila without the flames ever touching her.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Without feathers, most birds are not much of anything.
(if: $x > 10) [Maybe you're just oblivious, and someone else could divine a life from the meat and flesh, from what connects ]
(if: $x > 20) [You're just oblivious, and full of meat.]
(if: $x > 30) [You were never much for meat, even as a child, willing to eat it as you were to subsist on foraged mushrooms and your extended family's crops.]
(if: $x > 40) [Caila was more excited by the prospect by the prospect of getting to prepare something than to eat it, no matter the flesh.]
(if: $x > 50) [She was the first in the kitchen, before and after the move, and that in-between time, when life was only ever sweet because she had made something stronger than the sorrow gripping your mother.]
(if: $x > 60) [When you tried to learn her magic, she was a fussy teacher, often grabbing your hands and doing the motions for you, through you.]
(if: $x > 70) [Her hands are always there, moving over your own with the grace and dexterity she held in life.]
(if: $x > 80) [With the insistence, the impatience, the if-it-can't-be-perfect, it-can't-be-anything, with the audacity.]
(if: $x > 90) [With eyes widened with the sight of a better world.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)A name you do not recognize, and a flesh that convinces you of nothing.
(if: $x > 10) [Hach has left elaborate diagrams on this one, it seems he wants you to know what all the trouble cost.]
(if: $x > 20) [A trip to the islands, paid off by the newly enstated government, riddled with explorers of varying character.]
(if: $x > 30) [Everyone else wanted to list the birds he wanted to test.]
(if: $x > 40) [His hawk flapping eerily all the while, especially when one of the lead scientists told him he could not bring it to the island of 'incredibly delicate and unknown fauna'.]
(if: $x > 50) [The diagrams of the jacana, which he apparently killed with his hands instead to prove a point, indicate a bird with feet so long he must be lying to you.]
(if: $x > 60) [Hach says the females fight over nests on the river, beating each other with their huge feet, and you think his mind must be a small and condense pan of alcohol.]
(if: $x > 70) [He must have been a nightmare to travel with.]
(if: $x > 80) [He always was.]
(if: $x > 90) [The world is getting too good for us, he wrote, with sarcasm, and you thought, God I wish.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Myths can be killed.
(if: $x > 10) [Fierce in the wild, you find that the harpy eagle who died for you was from the aviary.]
(if: $x > 20) [You're shocked more aren't from the aviary, shouldn't almost everything be from the aviary?]
(if: $x > 30) [The aviary did not have a complete selection when you were out... an in-progress crown jewel of the nation.]
(if: $x > 40) [Once the crown jewel of the crown jewel was a ruffled bird with sad eyes, but they must have killed her for you.]
(if: $x > 50) [Unpleasant truths and bitter meat.]
(if: $x > 60) [Asilyn took you frequently by the aviary, as if rubbing the idea in, before you were here.]
(if: $x > 70) [How long had everyone planned to get rid of you?]
(if: $x > 80) [Something spikes in you.]
(if: $x > 90) [But it will not turn to killing flesh, not anymore.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The proud bird of peace bought low before you.
(if: $x > 10) [You wish you could again see its marvelous scales, the blue that flexes in the air.]
(if: $x > 20) [The kingfisher featured heavily on crests from your father's side of the family, though he kept nothing but the name.]
(if: $x > 30) [He was as good a fisherman as his lot was worth, for as long as it was worth.]
(if: $x > 40) [Perhaps Caila's first saint's acts were pushing fish into his net while he sought to teach the two of you.]
(if: $x > 50) [When a day went poorly, though it rarely did, you'd see him curse the river with words you didn't know, as if it could be angry at him, and worthy of his indignation in return.]
(if: $x > 60) [Sometimes, you'd laugh, not catching the mood, though your sister did the right thing and cowered.]
(if: $x > 70) [He loved you more, he loved you less, he talked to you more, he struck you more, God knows what the point was, if he regreted it in his meanderings after disappearing, and who the fuck cares.]
(if: $x > 80) [He never had the spirit you associated with the kingfisher.]
(if: $x > 90) [Given the one you ever saw on the river, like an omen in flesh, you imagined a patient and noble creature who would expect and value the variances of the world.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)A bird from the borderlands, in the scrub between you and Thoran that is too unwieldy to claim.
(if: $x > 10) [To claim yet, someone will definitely claim it, but for right now, the two nations are separated by fields of orange sand and bristling weeds and these birds dashing amongst them.]
(if: $x > 20) [This one tastes fine.]
(if: $x > 30) [It's nice to see a bird you have no particular claim or connection to on the plate, a clean plate, so to speak.]
(if: $x > 40) [No one has ever offered to take you to the scrubland, but you'd like to see it.]
(if: $x > 50) [The violent cliffs etched through with color, the pitiless sand that leaves no room for fire...]
(if: $x > 60) [No fire, few flora or fauna, no water, only the light.]
(if: $x > 70) [Asilyn's element foremost as always amongst the Saints.]
(if: $x > 80) [Perhaps there is a cave in the heart of the world dead to all four of you.]
(if: $x > 90) [Maybe you will go there instead, far from the eye of God, and rest.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The screamer's porous meat is notoriously poor, and has been washed by so much gravy as to be something of a joke.
(if: $x > 10) [You once knew a Thoran noble who had a screamer on a leash.]
(if: $x > 20) [The bird actually had quite a stunning temperament, though when it did begin to call all of your goodwill dissipated toward it.]
(if: $x > 30) [Yet the noble would not be separated, convinced that a pat here or there would entice the bird to calm down.]
(if: $x > 40) [Hach explained to you that Thorans had domesticated a good number of birds, the screamers being one, and that the relationship was usually such that one would think the domestication had been somewhat reversed.]
(if: $x > 50) [With his hawk returning to his shoulder, he told you in no uncertain terms that it was important to keep the lines straight on who gave orders to who.]
(if: $x > 60) [Hach was notorious in his distaste for children, coincidentally.]
(if: $x > 70) [You asked Hach if he still considered himself a servant to the crown, eight years out from service.]
(if: $x > 80) [Hach responded that there was still space far north of Osko where nothing lived.]
(if: $x > 90) [That he would go there and die in peace, at the top of the food chain, if there was only no one left below him on the chain who would have no orders or purpose without his presence.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The first time you saw a peacock was on the campaign trail in Lefvin, where an abandoned mansion, clearly raided at some point for supplies, had a backyard bursting with them.
(if: $x > 10) [They are supposedly extinct in the wild due to overhunting, but there are pockets of them here and there, feral, strutting about.]
(if: $x > 20) [You kept wondering if the former inhabitants of this place had fared as well, strutting about in some other clime.]
(if: $x > 30) [Vician was the one to reassure you that the rich were more like rodents, and that there was no ship they could not cling onto to escape a bad situation.]
(if: $x > 40) [Caila was the one to find the peaches in the basement, covered in mold, but then the drink cellar past that, unmolded and distinctly full.]
(if: $x > 50) [It was one of the better days, you think, or as you remember across Caila's drunken face, which manifests in your head as a smear of joy.]
(if: $x > 60) [Though you knew already that Asilyn did not drink, and at this point in the campaign you were at a juncture where you were angry at and wholly addicted to her.]
(if: $x > 70) [So what you really remember is the bile and her hands combing through your hair, your eyes closed to keep out the light.]
(if: $x > 80) [Maybe in the darkness you asked once why there were no more fights, why everyone was fleeing more now than retreating.]
(if: $x > 90) [You remember her voice telling you that no one could stand before the Lord and live, save for you.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Hach has kept the feet, as if it will entertain you to see the blue feet of your victim.
(if: $x > 10) [No, you remind yourself, the trophies are here for proof you are not wasting your time eating bird after bird, that you are following the scripture as writ.]
(if: $x > 20) [It's hard to stop looking at the little feet.]
(if: $x > 30) [When you read to Caila, you would often find things like the booby and describe them to her, if only to have her whisper once, "how queer," as if the way she said words before could breathe the life back in her.]
(if: $x > 40) [You want to kiss her head now, yes, how strange, how wonderful.]
(if: $x > 50) [The blue-footed booby is one of many birds that has two children, one stronger than the other.]
(if: $x > 60) [If conditions worsen, one chick will eat the other, strengthening the first's chance at survival at the cost of the second.]
(if: $x > 70) [You kept this part from your sister.]
(if: $x > 80) [It is hard not to be resentful toward nature, too, because she and all her tricks are what live or lived in your body for a time.]
(if: $x > 90) [When you heard your sister screaming at night for you to smother her, a part of you, heavy with sweat and weak with the smell both of your half-dead bodies emitted, was so tempted to--]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)In life, the albatross is famed for gentle eyes and wings that could take half the world; in death, it is mainly their feathers and fat that have been of use.
(if: $x > 10) [At one point, Asilyn wore the stupidest hat you'd ever seen to court, and that had albatross feathers, where it didn't have lace flowers or a point like a ship's bow.]
(if: $x > 20) [You try to ignore visions when you take of the meat and tear it with your teeth, as it is unbecoming of you to be daydreaming as much as you are.]
(if: $x > 30) [The flesh is heavy with work.]
(if: $x > 40) [You try to ignore the feeling of a body wreathed around yours, albatross-heavy, that is to say, conspicuously light in away that sets your self alight with learned comfort and then a pulsing, throbbing fear.]
(if: $x > 50) [You try to imagine the song of the albatross at sea, where it is occasionally seen on the long journeys it makes with only the compass of its head and the smell of the water, but what you do instead is imagine your sister on the decks.]
(if: $x > 60) [Flesh heavy with work and brow spiced with sweat, and no way to help her, not in hell.]
(if: $x > 70) [Though you make her flowers and mess with her hair and invent fruit nature has never conceived just so she can have a lick of sweetness, so the work's difficulty is offset by perfect moments of peace.]
(if: $x > 80) [You pull through the meat of the albatross and are certain it has seen far more than its purported days, that it is not as fresh as commanded.]
(if: $x > 90) [Even the most holy labor, in its inability to close the wounds morality makes, is full of a thousand sins.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Another silly name for a pound of flesh.
(if: $x > 10) [The tuft is not perserved in the meat, and so its own name sags about its form, haunted.]
(if: $x > 20) [Most things carry over so badly, when you reach the end of the line.]
(if: $x > 30) [You had thought that all of Vician's fire was stored in her shoulders, in her eyes, but it turns out it was stored in her life.]
(if: $x > 40) [You thought Rosa's joy and tenacity was stored in her tongue, in her legs, but it turns out it was stored in her life.]
(if: $x > 50) [You thought your sister's tact, her grace, was stored in her hands, but every gentle gesture was stored in your life.]
(if: $x > 60) [The nation was given closed caskets, but ornate coffins, and each, in accordance with their saint deigned by the birth chart: burned, given to the sea, buried, left in the archives.]
(if: $x > 70) [Asilyn's face reflected long over the laquered bark.]
(if: $x > 80) [Of course you spoke at every event, and so did she, but sometimes you forget huge chunks of what you said.]
(if: $x > 90) [The person that looms out of history to bear your face is a mystery to you, and you do not like her: the only thing you share is the name, which she will finally claim when you are dead.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The orange stomachs of orioles were said to have been blessed by the fires that once reigned on the harbors, when the trade ships of Levfin were burned.
(if: $x > 10) [The burnings spread rapidly across the coast, up to Oskan colonies and down to the lands in the south, which had never formed a proper colony.]
(if: $x > 20) [Old Cascan tradition relates the orange of the bird's bodies back to a time when they carried the sun across the sky.]
(if: $x > 30) [All the myths burned once under Levfin, and a second time under the war.]
(if: $x > 40) [Your mother used to tell stories about a time long ago when the moon changed shape because it bled, like you and your sister would when you were older.]
(if: $x > 50) [It was said then that the moon's blood would pool in the lakes in the high mountains, staining the water there yellow.]
(if: $x > 60) [When you were old enough to go, Asilyn explained sulfur to you.]
(if: $x > 70) [You asked her where the moon would fall, then, if not here in these waters.]
(if: $x > 80) [She smiled at that, but in the way she always did when she thought you were being quaint.]
(if: $x > 90) [When you eat this bird, you find yourself thinking about the moon, and what it might be like to start your body anew every month.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The spotted owl meat you receive is mainly breast, hollowed in places and with a choice gizzard kept in.
(if: $x > 10) [There is so little on its bones that you can read the awful hunting seasons on its ribs.]
(if: $x > 20) [Hach agreed to catch everything that wouldn't hit the market on scavenger's pay.]
(if: $x > 30) [Out of all of the friends you've kept after the war, which is very few, he is the wildest, and that's saying something, because the first thing you did was shut anyone who could pretend to be normal about what had happened to you all out of your life.]
(if: $x > 40) [In addition to the documentation verifying and, in grainy color, capturing, every bird you are now to eat, Hach alone leaves what the hunt was like.]
(if: $x > 50) [He brought Rima, the falcon, with him to each locale, and Rima apparently hates owls as much as Hach does.]
(if: $x > 60) [If you read 'solid-shitting coward' again you are going to crumple all the documentation into a wad and stuff it.]
(if: $x > 70) [Then you read 'avian fool', 'nocturnal creep', 'rat plaguer', and 'unfunniest of jokes', and you are a little bit less interested in crumpling the documentation, to see where he goes with this.]
(if: $x > 80) [You wish everyone had the energy to have the kind of constant fervor Hach invests into his work.]
(if: $x > 90) [When you were angry in a domestic setting, after all, it was funny, well back then, even when her anger was always holy-- you wish //some// people were more like Hach, for the rest of you who can't be.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The goshawk used to perch in the forests of your youth and kill songbirds.
(if: $x > 10) [Seeing it dead before you is like seeing your childhood bullies as skinny cadets, ready to take the war across the pond.]
(if: $x > 20) [One more thing lost to fire, fire, fire... you wonder if their spirits resent you for having the belligerence to take them into hell and none of the omnipotence required to bring home your own people safe.]
(if: $x > 30) [If you keep your eyes closed and focus, you do not hear the crackling, save for your own teeth pulling lean meat apart.]
(if: $x > 40) [You do not smell the fire.]
(if: $x > 50) [You do not feel the licking blades of white pain curling around your fingers and dragging at you, demanding attention.]
(if: $x > 60) [You do not see Vician standing across the room from you, her copper hair lit to sparks by the light radiating from inside her own body.]
(if: $x > 70) [You can not flinch from her hand grabbing your face, fire whirling in the visible skull.]
(if: $x > 80) [She told you at least ten times, jokingly, that hers was the most fickle power, that she was the most fickle of your reborn lords.]
(if: $x > 90) [She was right, she was right, she was right.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You've seen catbirds before, and you've heard them many a morning in the capital's more agricultural suburbs, meowing.
(if: $x > 10) [Asilyn thinks the call sounds more like a meow than you do, but she often exaggerates what she actually thinks when she's alone with you, to cheer you up.]
(if: $x > 20) [This catbird is in a dish of its own blood, which has been thickened and enfused with a chocolatey flavor.]
(if: $x > 30) [You do not like this flavor combination, which Vician was always so fond of.]
(if: $x > 40) [While chewing it, you remember Caila meowing, but at what, you can't remember.]
(if: $x > 50) [Some hazy memory of being down amongst the rocks by the river and laughing, along the seaport.]
(if: $x > 60) [So you must have already come to the coast.]
(if: $x > 70) [What was she wearing?]
(if: $x > 80) [A little white dress, you want to say, or maybe this is how you remember her when she wasn't in saint's attire.]
(if: $x > 90) [What was the expression, and how can you keep it safe in your head?]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The strange, bristly nightjar reminds you in some ways of a butterfly in life, though you only saw them when trekking the countryside at night, often as a flash of movement while setting up camp.
(if: $x > 10) [When you were split and taking the country by parts, Rosa would always be at your back for such encounters.]
(if: $x > 20) [You were right (this is a common occurence) about her the first time.]
(if: $x > 30) [She was following you as much for your protection as to find somewhere to stand slackjawed and watch you bend the world around you.]
(if: $x > 40) [The camps you set up would be protected by thorns at night, or be in a part of the forest so dark and winding that only a fool would draw close to it.]
(if: $x > 50) [There was genuine shock when she realized how ugly the larger generations were, how it clearly spilled directly out of you, not something you were drawing like a blade but releasing like a poisoned lunch.]
(if: $x > 60) [Then still she stayed, eyes dark as a nightjar's and gleaming.]
(if: $x > 70) [Obviously, once again, the nightjar is not a tasty bird, as it is a bugeater if you don't believe superstitions about suckling on goats.]
(if: $x > 80) [At least this time, it is prepared well.]
(if: $x > 90) [You say a little prayer for this bird.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)When you were little the greatest treat you could receive would be to go down to your aunts' house by the river, the family house.
(if: $x > 10) [All your unmarried relatives of the last generation still lived there, and in times of poor harvest, with few proposals, a good chunk of them stayed in the old and communal home.]
(if: $x > 20) [When you were very little there was so much envy in your aunts' eyes, later, so much pity.]
(if: $x > 30) [You would grab Caila's hand, though she was entranced by the loom and the altar and the slowly rising bread, and you would drag her out to the river to make a small world.]
(if: $x > 40) [In the way you arranged the stones a story would emerge.]
(if: $x > 50) [Caila would listen and hum in her low voice, her head always tilting back towards the house and its gold windows.]
(if: $x > 60) [You would explain the shape of the world to come, where people lived and how they worked, what mattered to them, all formed from the way the water weaved through your dams.]
(if: $x > 70) [Caila would scream about crayfish, or frogs, or bugs, that you would catch and make beasts of the kingdom.]
(if: $x > 80) [But you would both stop in hushed silence to watch the stork do its work in the twilight water.]
(if: $x > 90) [The storks were never to be killed, or else their kin would come in the night and pierce the wombs of every maiden in the house.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The tinamou do not live here, most of what you have been given are gifts from Thoran.
(if: $x > 10) [This is much like those treasured meals, from those treasured days, roast and round and comforting to eat as the world, though with a bit of an acidic bite.]
(if: $x > 20) [The meat is only a little better than some of the distinctly unpallatable birds, but this has been seasoned much better, prepared by someone who has worked with tinamou before and stuffed well with the rosemary you mentioned enjoying, and a bit of vegetable that even you don't know.]
(if: $x > 30) [You wonder if dear Cilicia did this, and shame fills your body as you shiver with the resplendence of the meal.]
(if: $x > 40) [It is not hard to think of the eyes of everyone who has given even a passing damn about you when you are up here-- they are always at the back of your neck, where you've cut your omnipresent hair short as you can.]
(if: $x > 50) [The dark locks will take so long to grow back, but respect will take longer.]
(if: $x > 60) [No one will ever know why you did what you did.]
(if: $x > 70) [Not the first time, the second time, the third time.]
(if: $x > 80) [When the secret lies with you, it will be found by historians, deliberated on, perhaps forgotten again.]
(if: $x > 90) [A thousand generations to gossip about your shame, discard it like the bones beneath a meal, and dig up again, just to ask God why the curve of it is so.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You have no illusions that seagull meat will be pallatable.
(if: $x > 10) [What good has ever come of notorious sky-rats, living long and fitful lives by the sea, often burgling seaside cities until they pass away as food to whatever happens to be around and one rung up the food chain?]
(if: $x > 20) [Lefvin's docks were full of them on the way home, months after the last people had left.]
(if: $x > 30) [There was a silence underneath their shrill calls that made your stomach burn.]
(if: $x > 40) [By the ocean, you could at least see your sister do her work, turning water from the slack teeth of the land into the tool of your family-- of your war-- of the saints.]
(if: $x > 50) [The way it rose against her always felt almost begrudging, not as if she had no control, but as if the water was bashful, and for some reason hesitating.]
(if: $x > 60) [Or as if she was.]
(if: $x > 70) [Droplets sprayed out around her as parts cleared the whole, seagulls screaming as fish wriggled free of the water she commanded as it pulled into a column...]
(if: $x > 80) [The truth was, the brunt of her work was shifting currents favorably, work that took more effort than anything else she did and was only a tenth as pretty.]
(if: $x > 90) [Demonstrations on the harbors were more to remind everyone else that the saints were beautiful, and on your side.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)Empire has chased swans to the edges of this kingdom, so, for verification, the head of this swan has been left to garnish the garish dish.
(if: $x > 10) [You'd seen a swan twice on campaign, when you began taking cities.]
(if: $x > 20) [Both times, they were conspicuously bathing themselves in the fountain, and both time they were listed for augury, as is common with swans.]
(if: $x > 30) [You told yourself next time you saw a swan in the fountain, you'd chase them off before the troops came, but this would have been impossible under the heavy escort you'd had all campaign.]
(if: $x > 40) [Rosa had no sympathy for anything you might be able to eat, and she'd made it her duty to ensure you //were// eating when Asilyn was on the front line.]
(if: $x > 50) [When Asilyn wasn't on the front line, or when you were with her, then your rations were enhanced with fresh fruit and occasionally the down off her wings.]
(if: $x > 60) [Her wings had always been swanlike, you don't think she could've flown with them, and had never seen her so much as try.]
(if: $x > 70) [At least the swans could swim, where Asilyn was saintlike in how secret she demanded her bathing be.]
(if: $x > 80) [Until you were lovers, and then you often saw her, feathers raised and ruffled, hovering in the steam of the baths she'd create with her command of light magics and the setting sun.]
(if: $x > 90) [In the red haze she passed over the young god other people saw in her miracles and into something animal that only you ever really saw; sullen, violent, only dubiously graceful, shivering rivulets of water off her massive, heavy wings.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The dove they got you is one of the coppery ones, according to the veritable manuscript that accompanied all of the birds you get to eat now.
(if: $x > 10) [(This is funny because they're also a standing symbol for lesbians in Casca.)]
(if: $x > 20) [Asilyn has mentioned this just below in the cursive, swoopy handwriting which is it's own saint's act, a good portion of the text is annotated in these nothing little attempts to calm the love of her life.]
(if: $x > 30) [She speaks to you as if the world hasn't been saved yet, as if you are still going to free your country and use your saint's acts to bring Lefvin to its knees, as if there is still an enemy to bind your hands together.]
(if: $x > 40) [Or, to be less cynical, as if she had any reason to love you that wasn't political.]
(if: $x > 50) [Lefvin bred doves sometimes went for as much as a small house on market.]
(if: $x > 60) [This dove's meat is soft, and far better than much of the rest of what you've had to eat, even as it ages.]
(if: $x > 70) [You close your eyes for a minute while eating it and imagine a finger tapped against your cheek, the insistent way she finishes everything first and then waits on you, watches as if everything you've ever done is being done for the first time, or better than ever before.]
(if: $x > 80) [A nation has more than fallen in love with such small gestures, and they don't know half of what you know.]
(if: $x > 90) [You are so angry that you think you could burn a life's worth of tendernesses without even once stopping to put your foot on the embers of the things it will break your heart to lose.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)You've never seen one before, alive or dead, and the sketches Hach drew for you of what it looked like in life make you think that this must be the stork's feral cousin.
(if: $x > 10) [It reminds you of the war-outfits of Lefvin soldiers.]
(if: $x > 20) [Rosa often commented on them, when she was plodding behind you on the campaign trail, between counties.]
(if: $x > 30) [At the beginning, you were honorably engaging, army-to-army, and she would mimic the sound of their war drums everywhere you went.]
(if: $x > 40) [Then it wasn't as funny to comment on how pompous they looked before the magic you pretended was equal to a gun began annihilating them in the hundreds.]
(if: $x > 50) [The heron picks a fish out of the river.]
(if: $x > 60) [Your sister blows a ship clear into the sky.]
(if: $x > 70) [If you had been just a little more powerful you would have been able to force a cleaner surrender.]
(if: $x > 80) [You were just powerful enough to make a ruin of everything.]
(if: $x > 90) [The heron with the fish in its mouth... its thin legs... the pitiless golden eye... the boring, oily flavor you already expected in the meat that bares none of its characteristics... none of these things surprise you enough to keep you from reminiscing.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The meat of the jay is bitter, and no adornment save for a few berries have been provided to counter that.
(if: $x > 10) [You are grateful that no one pretends what this is not, which allows you to remain true to your purpose here.]
(if: $x > 20) [Absolution.]
(if: $x > 30) [Blue feathers are drowned in the blood, but the empurpledness does not extend to the vivid edges, where the thin blade of sky still shines.]
(if: $x > 40) [Blue is the color of heavens and of magics, Cascat churches were open before they took on their current domed shape.]
(if: $x > 50) [When you went to pray for Caila and Vician, you felt saintlike in the gray, neutral robes with the veil drawn for mourning.]
(if: $x > 60) [Everyone recognizes your cry of anguish too well for you to truly grieve in anonymity again.]
(if: $x > 70) [When you are gone, you will be a kind of legend, a new saint in the space where your grief was, but as you are alive, you are that absence embodied, a haunting in flesh.]
(if: $x > 80) [You feel that if you can run your tear ducts dry and your body empty of noise you will somehow reach your sister.]
(if: $x > 90) [Sometimes you are cowed enough by the saints and by your own fury to pretend that your sister is still in this place.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)When you were young your mother convinced you that the finches told her about your misbehaviors.
(if: $x > 10) [These are the same finches that swept the house with their wings, that left candied berries under your pillow in the night when you were so, so young.]
(if: $x > 20) [The finches left with your father.]
(if: $x > 30) [Your aunts loved to tease you about the finches, to claim the same finches were the ones who now pulled your hair or made the loud cawking noises (so obviously crow, or coughing, cawing aunt at the top of the stairs) that made Caila grab your sides and scream in mock terror.]
(if: $x > 40) [Caila left one myth for another, until she, too, was a mischevious finch, teasingly grabbing your hair and claiming the finches must braid it, or they'd have to make it into a bird's nest.]
(if: $x > 50) [Sometimes you think your sister didn't know how to be cruel the right way, and if she had, maybe she would have been hard enough to survive the world she'd left that cottage by the river for.]
(if: $x > 60) [As if she wouldn't be dead either way.]
(if: $x > 70) [You do not miss your mother, but now you are thinking of the crunch of a sugared blackberry, which you miss, and your sister's fingers in your hair, which you miss more than anything.]
(if: $x > 80) [You do not want to eat the pathetic scrap of bird before you, done up like a turkey when its chest barely fits the garnish of bundled rosemary stuffed into its chest.]
(if: $x > 90) [You press the rosemary close to your chest and cry.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The gizzard of the dodo, surrounded by pomegranate seeds, is an egg in a little nest of large, rough slabs of dark meat.
(if: $x > 10) [You've just been given a hock of this, and for good reason: when you first saw a dodo's body curled up on itself, you cried.]
(if: $x > 20) [You're not a bleeding heart, but the eyes were closed as if it were asleep, and its chest wound was so pitiful that any child on the scene would have wailed.]
(if: $x > 30) [Weren't you little more than a child when you came to the capital?]
(if: $x > 40) [Back then, the streets seemed so wide that you thought full ships could have ploughed through each one, and worlds could have nested in the domes of the churches.]
(if: $x > 50) [You were given the Lefvin bells you'd melt to sigils in another life as a gift, and rung them all afternoon, even after you told Caila proudly that cityfolk were too proud for their own good.]
(if: $x > 60) [Dodos, easygoing and kind, were often killed by street merchants on the spot as a bit of a novelty before the city had become cloyingly clean and virtuous as well as proud.]
(if: $x > 70) [Asilyn held your hand the first time you saw a dodo, muttering her reassurances the whole time.]
(if: $x > 80) [But you should have been brave; it wasn't like you'd never killed a bird before, let alone seen one dead.]
(if: $x > 90) [Maybe you were tired of being brave: you forget sometimes how early the weariness started.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)So this is the speckled bird you've seen shitting in your sister's memorial fountains.
(if: $x > 10) [The constant song littered the last summer, your last summer, but now it's just as likely the dears are all gone to sleep.]
(if: $x > 20) [When the first wrens were born, Asilyn was holding you the way she used to in the bed that feels like part of the sky.]
(if: $x > 30) [By the time they were ready to mate, you had already decided that the world was ending.]
(if: $x > 40) [You wonder, in the whole world, how many things die between your mercurial moods, and if the thinking so hastens the process.]
(if: $x > 50) [For most people this would be mere delusion, but you are the Saint of their small lives.]
(if: $x > 60) [It was for everyone else's benefit that you pretended what you could do only extended to plants.]
(if: $x > 70) [And their generation, too.]
(if: $x > 80) [What you really had was like a cancer: any flesh, any vine, any fungus, any time, all seething underneath your skin.]
(if: $x > 90) [Now it's dead, now it's dead.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)A chickadee is worth nothing save for what seeds you might find by following it, but for you to reach salvation everything must die.
(if: $x > 10) [This is a bird which has barely been prepared, as if the chefs are worried you might think some duplicate adorned the plate, some lesser tit or other passerine or whatnot.]
(if: $x > 20) [The result is an unsatisfying meal, but it's not as if you lack for food.]
(if: $x > 30) [You admit to never having heard the distinctive dee-dee-dee the bird is known for, partially because you lived well to the south of the one species in Casca's borders.]
(if: $x > 40) [Some say Osko has a dozen kinds of chickadee, others say Osko has too much ice and oil to be worried about the chickadees, and whether they make their home there or not.]
(if: $x > 50) [Hach would often mimic bird calls for Caila, because even his orneriness was no match for her patient insistence on conversation with him, on his own terms, eventually.]
(if: $x > 60) [He must have shown her the call on a night you were slumped off to the side, in Asilyn's arms or dreaming of her, hating yourself or everyone else for making your sadness an outlier.]
(if: $x > 70) [A common misconception: you were good before the war.]
(if: $x > 80) [You have never been good.]
(if: $x > 90) [It has always been a mistake to love you.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The last time you had a woodpecker, it was because your father filched one out of the trees.
(if: $x > 10) [Its broken wings reminded you of an insect's at the time, which was why you were able to steady yourself while you plucked.]
(if: $x > 20) [Your father approvingly nodded all the while, offering advice on which feathers to pluck first and how best to twist them out of the tiny, limp body.]
(if: $x > 30) [When you were done, you were allowed to eat it all yourself, though the meat was so little that sticking your tongue felt like another test instead of a real reward.]
(if: $x > 40) [His callused hands were on your back the whole time, rubbing your shoulder with pride while letting you know that Calia would have been ornery and catty, and that he was proud to have one daughter who could pass for a son in a pinch.]
(if: $x > 50) [Your father was always proud of you for the wrong things.]
(if: $x > 60) [The year before he left, you cut all your hair off to please him.]
(if: $x > 70) [You can't help but remember your mother wailing over the ginger-blonde locks, which fell through her hands like snakes going groundward, and the satisfaction and fear mingling together in your stomach.]
(if: $x > 80) [And then the way your father's firm hand felt against your face.]
(if: $x > 90) [It was such a strange event, and so isolated, and his other faults so numerous, that you've never really blamed him for this.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)The feast is done.
[[You say a prayer.|End2]]No flesh at all, really, just a lot of honey and a drop of something they call the body.
(if: $x > 10) [Hummingbirds were foreign to you as a child, and were one of the first things you noticed in the capital.]
(if: $x > 20) [Feeders were commonplace around churches, the only place you can legally build one in Casca.]
(if: $x > 30) [Cascat folk tradition says that hummingbirds lead the dead to the other side, but the same tradition is tight-lipped on what's over there.]
(if: $x > 40) [Traditions have become a web of tangled thread that will someday be thick enough to hold the heads of millions.]
(if: $x > 50) [As if it were only ever one story.]
(if: $x > 60) [It was these myths that once encoded rebellion, whispered between safehouses and put up in strands of thread that also told omens and detected future weather.]
(if: $x > 70) [Or the piles of stones that showed the way to safehouses, shrines, and armories...]
(if: $x > 80) [What would the fight have looked like without you?]
(if: $x > 90) [The hummingbirds are in infestation around the capital this year.]
[[You take of the flesh and move on.|Main]]
(set: $x to $x + 1)(text-color:#d39797)[(link-reveal: "And all")[
(link-reveal: "of the words")[
(link-reveal: "leave your body")[
(link-reveal: "and some part of you")[
(link-reveal: "finally")[
]]]]]]
(set: $a to 1)
(enchant:?page,(bg:(gradient: 0, 0, #d39797, .5, #d39797, $a,#000000)))