Born Different

“Stop! He is no threat!”, one crow-like bird among many cried out from a gathered crowd. “Stop it! Now!”

“Not-stop”, another replied with little emotion as it bludgeoned a third, all white bird with its pointed beak. Pinned to the ground underneath its attacker, its smaller victim shrieked terrified, its pale feathers bloodied from a wound under its eye.

“Tyr-reet problem-solve. Stand-down.”

He looked up, and spoke again slower but more sternly, erecting his feathers and in doing so almost doubling his size.

“Stand-down.”

Finding a second of opportunity, the injured bird attempted to right itself, only to be quickly knocked off unsteady feet. A crack of thunder from dark clouds above heralded in the arrival of a steady, bitter-cold rain.

“Brighteye!” a weak voice cried out pleadingly before its attacker jabbed again at its face, opening another wound on the fleshy flange along its beak. Its screams quieted to soft, helpless chirps - the sobbing of a child.

“STOP.”, Brighteye screamed again, even more urgently this time with his own words turning to indecipherable chatter as he pounced upon Tyr-reet, claws-outstretched, and the two rolled on the ground in combat. Feathers flew as each tried to pin down the other upon its back and attack their eyes and face. The crowd closed in. Other birds were soon interfering, trying to pry the two apart to little use. This was a high-stakes fight for both. For one, necessary to maintain dominance over a newly overtaken clan. For another, the life of a young sibling depended on him. Everything that mattered to them both was on the line. Tyr-reet, the lead male of the outsider cohort that had taken control of his own, could not let himself lose his new position. He had the advantage of size and physical skill. But Brighteye was different in a way the new self-proclaimed leader didn’t know. He had his own tricks.

“Submission!”, he suddenly cried out, and he let go of his rival and lay prostrate upon the wet ground, wings outstretched and tail fanned out in exaggerated body language that left no uncertainty to his defeat. Both battered, neither was seriously hurt. As the flock watched silently, Tyr-reet stood tall and proud over his defeated foe, strutted around with his wings held high, and in the ultimate humiliating move of social dominance, mounted him. Brighteye remained in place as Tyr-reet finished his display and turned his attention back to the pale bird, which could still only lay on the ground peeping softly, its once pristine plumage stained in blood. He moved in to deliver a killing blow and end its life once and for all.

But he didn’t get the chance. Immediately behind him, his rival rose up and made his move. In his three-fingered talons, a narrow, intricately sharpened blade was jerked ahead and downward. A shrill, sustained shriek told him he hit his mark. Tyr-reet fluttered spastic upon the ground, thorn imbedded, and a gush of blood dripping from where his left eye had been just seconds before. But the eye was no longer important to Tyr-reet, for the knife had punctured well past it and come to rest halfway through his brain. As he flailed on the ground in death throes, his back arching in the most unnatural contortions, and spun around with legs scratching at nothing and everything all at once, Brighteye didn’t waste time watching. The shock of the event would only keep Tyr-reet’s allied brothers in horrified captivity for a brief window, and then they would kill him. He rushed to the side of the bloodied white bird and nudged it upright. When it didn’t respond, he got underneath and lifted it to its feet, and its eyes opened. Shut-down and shocked, it struggled to understand it was no longer under attack. But once it saw Brighteye, the fog began to clear.

“Whitecrown, get up. Get up! Get. Up!”

Wings whirred, and through the rain, two birds made their escape from the only life they had known. Down beneath, a leader lay slain in the mud just as it had left the prior one just a day earlier. Two clans briefly united now in chaos. Anyone could fight their way to the vacated top role now. But no matter what, with their father and mother already killed by Tyr-reet and his brothers, it was not safe to remain. They no longer held a position of high-rank and safety. His brother, the colorless juvenile just a few weeks weaned and only recently learned his first few words, had already faced harassment from others in the clan for his aberrant appearance. His survival until now had only been assured for fear of reprimand by their parents - the longtime dominant breeding pair in the clan. Brighteye, an adult with considerable life experience, had known from his first feathers that his brother would face extreme challenges in his survival in even the best circumstances. Bluetails ostracize any that stand out. Even if they don’t outright kill them, they reject them as mates and leave them near the very bottom of any hierarchy, everyone’s target. They have short lives, not least of all for being the one the predator birds single out first of all. Brighteye knew it all too well, because his youngest brother was the third colorless born from their parents’ nest in his life, the first being his nestmate who lived to just his third month and the second two years later dying before the age of one. It was a recurrent pattern in their family line specifically. Though their parents cared for the pale chicks, and so by extension the helpers did so too, even they did little to interfere with those who attacked them once they fledged the nest. It was the natural order for the strong to rule the weak, one of the laws that bluetails lived by.

To Brighteye it had seemed wrong, and yet he knew nothing else, so what did wrong even mean, really? This was how life had to be for their kind. For his own part he fit into the structure well. He looked like everybody else, so nobody could single him out. He was highly skilled, a jack of all trades, and had a very high social rank. He had stayed on much longer as a helper than was typical for bluetails, which was weird but not worthy of scorn. Under his care nearly every chick grew and fledged. He was excellent at providing for the young. Because he could do things the rest couldn’t, or wouldn’t think to do to solve problems. The ideas and the tools he devised benefited his clan so much, and to him were obvious solutions. Covers of soft animals’ skin over the nests of young to keep the warm in and the wet out. Sharpen a rock on another rock to make a food-cutter much stronger than the beak or the talons. Yet in all of these fields he was much faster to learn new skills than others, but they were not incapable. Many things he conceptualized he could demonstrate, and so spread knowledge. Soon everyone in the clan tucked their babies in with a blanket, and everyone knew how to make a knife.

But there were limits to their abilities, and they began with comprehension of his speech. By one year old, the way he put his words together to communicate his thoughts had begun to become too complicated for the others to understand, especially if it didn’t refer to important literal constructs like finding food or avoiding a predator. Words did not exist at all for some of the things he made up in his head. For example, he had once told his sister Skychaser of night-sights, like stories he saw in his sleep. He had just begun to recall them, and wondered intensely what they meant.

“Night-sight? What-is-there?? What-see-dark???”, she replied, very confused, with concern only about nocturnal predators. And when she was certain no threat existed, she changed the subject to one about something that mattered to her - finding something for breakfast.

As far as he could tell, nobody else awoke in another world in their sleep and lived through imaginary events, only to wake up and return to the real-life. If they did, they couldn’t put it into words to communicate the concept nor to understand its difference from their waking reality. Through his early life he had naturally assumed everyone could do what he could. When he was continuously and confusingly proven wrong, he eventually realized that there is something bluetails simply cannot do. They can communicate and think, they can learn and they can speak, but they cannot imagine.

They could not imagine what a dream was, and they could not imagine a world where they were not slaves to their instincts and to nature’s cruel laws.

But Brighteye could. So maybe his place wasn’t with the bluetails at all. For like it or not, he and Whitecrown were now on their own. For seven years he had stayed in his family clan because there seemed nowhere else to go. Most others left by age three, almost all by five. They leave the group, join up with other adolescents in temporary bands where they meet mates and eventually go on their own, to try to start a new clan. They soon no longer visit, and before long if they did they would be treated as rivals. They are all but forgotten, even by his parents, and they no longer welcome him to visit likewise. And there wasn’t a potential mate out there that didn’t appear to Brighteye like another big, naive child. To pair with anyone felt wrong when the balance was so off. His instincts were to guide them like a parent figure, not a mate. So he remained where he had always been, surrounded by family, watching young ones come and go, and he wasn’t by himself on the outside. Inside though, he was all alone.

The choice to leave had been made for him now though, and unfortunately for his kid-brother too. The only path now was the untrodden one, and he did not know what lay ahead for either. He at least knew why he was different, and what it meant. Whitecrown could not understand it - he wasn’t like his brother. Though different on the outside, he was like them within, if they could only see beyond the feathers. The two brothers were the inverses of one another. Each different for a different reason, they were united as misfits that didn’t fit into their world.

“I’ll keep you safe,” he chortled softly in the bluetail-speak to his brother as they settled down in the branches of a thick cactaiga bush beyond the borders of their family’s old land. And as he reassuringly preened the feathers on his young sibling’s neck, he uttered a very different vocalization that all bluetails use to lend comfort to their children when still in the nest. To the bluetails, the call itself had no meaning in their language, but like the soft humming of a mother to a newborn, its intent was well-understood.

“I love you, Bird.”

Whitecrown soon fell asleep, fluffed up and tucking his head into his wing, as the rain washed away the stains on his plumage and his brother stood guard through the cold night. As all around them the rain turned to snow, the world was transformed to a newly white, blank canvas.

Brighteye watched over his brother for a while, his mind wide awake, thinking of a past best forgotten and a future uncertain. Wondering why he was what he was, and why the rest what they were. Wondering what he was supposed to do next. But eventually his clouded mind cleared, and he too drifted to sleep. And he dreamed a dream clearer than most. He was overlooking a tall cliff, beyond an endless white void. Slowly forms began to appear, vague at first but becoming clear. Other birds, big and small, all different kinds of them. They were not bluetails, and yet something he had never seen before sparkled in all of their eyes that felt familiar. In seconds the visions were fading, but just as he felt the tug of the waking world pull him away, he heard a voice unfamiliar, but clear and soft-spoken.

“You’re not alone.”

He woke up with a start, looking around for the source. Whitecrown was still deep asleep, and the thicket silent under the steady snowfall. No footprints, no wingbeats, nothing to betray anyone but them even existed in a wintry world without sound, bathed under the pale blue light of the night sun.

Yet the voice this time was different from a normal dream, and it stuck with him. Somewhere out there, in a world as big as this, there had to be others.

Maybe he was born different for a reason.