The Talking Bird

Brighteye visited the demons frequently in the weeks and months that followed. Blaze had requested he monitor the situation, to try and figure out their intentions, and to alert her if they appeared to be advancing. For he was a flying creature, easily able to escape if danger rose, and they did not seem to regard him with any suspicion. For her own part, she didn’t let on her concerns to the others. It was too early to panic.

The demons, Brighteye came to understand, didn’t seem to have predatory intent. Indeed they were, from his vantage, much more like prey than anything else. They hid underground, behind constructed barriers, and attacked other creatures only when under threat themselves. Yet when they did utilize force, they were highly effective. They kept tamed flames as Blaze had been told, feeding them a little at a time and confining them to small places so that they didn’t escape. Brighteye watched close to understand how it worked. Blaze described it as a force of magic, something outside nature’s laws. But to Brighteye there was no such thing. Everything, no matter how alien, must have a demonstrable cause somewhere. So he focused on learning how the demons created their fires. It wasn’t inherent to their bodies, but rather it was produced as a result of some sort of tool use. The issue was that he never saw them make it. They simply maintained a large fire at all times in the camp, from which they harvested smaller fires and carried them around.

The flames didn’t bite them, and were kept at a distance at the ends of sticks, or within vessels. Yet they could be set loose to bite their enemies, and at these times demonstrated full, untamed power. Horn-heads threatened them much the same as they did Blaze’s group. Unlike them, however, the demons drove them away with flame - a threat the horn-heads seemed to respect over all other forces.

It gave Brighteye ideas.

~~~

“What is the intel today?” she would always ask him when he returned.

“They are still digging, moving the earth to the ocean and floating it away from shore. I cannot follow beyond the land. Bigger wings out there, with sharper beaks.”

Blaze nodded, and Brighteye continued.

“What they dig from the ditches is what they feed their flames. They must need it in the ocean, as if it cannot be found there.”

“How many now?”, Blaze asked simply.

“Thousands.”

She was unusually quiet today.

“Is that all they do every day? Dig up the rocks for the fires?”, she inquired.

“No.“, Brighteye said, stopping for a minute, as if unsure to go on. “They talk to each other. They play. They work together to defend themselves from their enemies, even though none of them look exactly alike. Some look like Whitecrown… but it doesn’t seem to matter…”

Brighteye sensed she was troubled. He had a feeling he knew why, so he said what he was thinking plainly.

“They’re a family… like yours.”

Blaze avoided looking at him directly now, not out of anger or offense, but because she did not know how to deal with this information. Long-held beliefs were being challenged, and instinct told her to oppose them. Yet… she was wiser than that. Brighteye went on writing, and she glanced over and read it, following along.

“You are different from the others. You can see from both sides. You tell that the demons avoided the land for many years after your ancestors retaliated.”

Blaze looked uneasy as she followed along her friend’s writing. Like she knew where the subject was going, but didn’t like to hear it.

“What if you’re now their demon?”

There it was.

“And what if, as you told me before, no-one had to be enemies?”

From the beak of a bird, they could have been her own words in defense of the slayer. Blaze thought long and hard, not responding, but not ignoring. Brighteye was at times alarmingly wise. In times like this, he was even more extreme in his ideas than her. Was this how everyone else felt around her?

“You are grown from a different seed than any of us, including me. I understand you...”, she eventually told him, trailing off before finishing. “But I don’t think I can do what you may want me to…”

“You don’t have to. Actually, you couldn’t. The demons don’t talk like you….

…but they do talk like me.”

She looked at him, almost disbelieving. But in hindsight, it made sense. Harbingers and the demon were both beaked creatures and similar in size. Of course they spoke in the same range.

“Do you understand them when they speak?”, she finally asked him.

“I didn’t at first. It was just noise. But… us… the bluetails, we are good at learning to talk. Bluetails speak differently across the world, but they still meet and form clans. When they do, each learns from the other. I can understand some of their speech now.”

“What do demons talk about?”, she asked.

“Basically what we do.”, he answered.

“And do they talk to you? You to them?”

He looked away sheepishly, feeling as if he had done something that would get disapproval from his friend. But he did answer.

“...yes. They started giving me food two weeks ago. Scraps, but good scraps. So today I told them ‘thank you’. They reacted like it was cute, like when Whitecrown started to imitate the children’s laughter.

It was something funny animals might do, but that didn’t seem to surprise them. It’s not unknown for animals to mimic my people. I assume it is known to them too…”

Blaze was now invested in the conversation, however uncomfortable its implications might make her.

“Well I know that isn’t the whole story, so let it out.”

Brighteye hopped over, starting a new line in the snow.

“Then I picked up their stick tool and dipped the fat end in the big fire, and I asked them how to create it. I’m not sure I got every word right, but I definitely was close.”

“How do you know?”, she asked him, looking directly into his eyes.

“Because as soon as I said them, they all stopped talking, and they looked at each other and back at me with disbelief."

"Even more when I repeated it slower and said 'please'.”