Icememory

Crow feathers lace his flesh, they have done ever since the Succession. Not that it had a name back then. At the time there was only chaos as the houses returned and laid claim to their heirs. He had been blind for a week after his eyes had rolled black, had cut himself to ribbons on his own talons. Instinct had made him claw together his every belonging and huddle in the ruin until the screams had faded away, until his sight had come back- teeth long fused into a pair of overlapping blades. Out in the street the forest had been growing up through the paving, like the feathers through his flesh. Every one of his changes a glass-sharp reflection of the shifting city. In its branches and among its roots the new ecology had taken hold. Sprawl had become haunted by once-human hunting songs. In barely a month the Succession had broken or brutalised every trace of man.

Those of a type banded together, past tribes nigh irrelevant. It became clear with time that neither intellect nor dexterity had been lost, amongst the crow-kin at least. Some semblance of humanity resurfaced, translated through coarsened throats and sung from spire and spruce. The new natural kingdom settled on its haunches in waiting, taught and poised in readiness for Them.

When They came they rode in fom nowhere, on horses with chests like rumbling church organs, hooves like ancient pistons. They dismounted, all angles, flowing limbs and burning brightness, to walk within the wood. Of their number she had come to him then, with her ebony eyes. Not a word had passed her thin lips, parted only once to barely reveal an onyx overlap of perfect bone. He had fallen to his knees with her gaze, with the weight of his new name, thundering into his altered flesh and obliterating the old.

His darkened eyes tear and sparkle now with the memory, and a love powerful enough to strip his past away. Beneath the concrete and glass, beneath the advertising and accountancy, a love that has brooded since the dawn of time. That deep in the creases and walls of our hearts, longs to be commanded without speech in the season of change.