The crow circled the desert. Below, its shadow ran across the earth. Above, its wings were shadow made flesh. There was no longer any clear sense of which of the two crows cast the other.

His name was Zila-Hidad.

He had a mind that was fond of collecting questions. There was little else to correct. He had been… wounded, in its youth, and shiny stones for attracting mates would have left him with little to show in the end. No brood of children cawing up from their tossed-off shells, hungry for the day they could take wing. There was no hope of answers. All the knowledge of the world had been burned. Books thrown into bonfires to stave off the cold night, and stories grown rough with retelling, bits of lie accumulating over the truth like rust.

The sad slow decay of things could be measured in questions.

Why had the world needed to die? Crows told stories, of course. Few who walked on land knew how well the crows could understand their tongues, and how much history was carried in coarse, crude gawk-gawk cries that filled the air between nests.

They still told the story of the Black Wolf who came to bring a bloody rebirth to all the known worlds. But why? What called it forth, and were worlds in need of remaking? Did they crumble and die if left on the vine? This one had. Perhaps the sickness of the earth was not of Arak’s hand, but because it needed destruction, and forestalling that day could only lead to slow rot.

The Black Wolf was not evil. Good sons did not hatch from the eggs of evil fathers. The spirit of the oasis was the wolf’s own blood, but it had a soft, clear mind. It poured itself like weightless water from body to body, and learned their stories. The moments they had shared in flight the crow had known a gentle peace that listened deeply and completely. Malice was foreign to such a creature.

Instead it had a basic joy in the world the crow envied.

Before, the crow had spent days simply following the creatures of the desert. Drinking in the questions of their existence. Why did toads vanish in the winter but come up from the earth itself in summer? Where did the grazing lizards go when there was no more thistle to chew?

Often the animals it followed died, and it would watch as their bones vanished into the sand. This was how he earned his name.

Only now the bones in the desert spoke to him. He could feel flashes of remnant emotion clinging on. The last breaths, the final moments, all echoed in his mind. There was no language or story to be gained from them. It was simply the calling out of the dead.

If there was a meaning, it was a simple one. Why?

Someday he would like to be able to answer them. To say that all this, this desert built as graveyards were ground into sand, was for some reason. That each death built them higher towards some terrible purpose.

His own death confused him. His heart had stopped, and grown cold. A miracle had pried him from the grave, but the grave had followed him. Sun no longer warmed his feathers. Water no longer found thirst, food no longer found hunger. His body had become a foreign country in which he was a visitor.

The question - why? - carried him out beyond the edge of the divine energy that cast itself over the desert in a great wall. Beyond the air was suddenly wild with energies, and Zila felt eyes following him.

The sky lurched and a rubbery thing with long and shapeless tendrils for arms descended from the clouds. It moved by catching the wind beneath membranes that spanned each coil, falling gracefully, not truly flying. Zila’s wing bent, and the wind sent him curving away. The creature banked and followed. He shifted, diving low, and as the creature whipped to follow-

The crow was gone. The shadow it chased dissolved into smoke and scraps of blackness. From the side, the true Zila crashed inwards. His barbs bit against the leathery skin on the back of the beast’s skull, his talons gripping. They struggled for a moment in the air, Zila’s wings striking in heavy, powerful strokes to balance him. Only a moment. Then the beast began to melt from within. It slid limp and the crow cast it down as a dissolving pile of black slop.

More rubber-limbed beasts began to fall from the sky, giving chase. They found only illusions and the empty sky as he outraced them all, outran their grasping limbs and snapping jaws, until he reached the edges of the mountains where they could no longer follow. As they dropped back from his wake they puffed up airsacks beneath their beaks, floating back into the sky as if dragged by invisible hooks.

The cold flurries of ice in the air, the brightness of the snowbanks below glittering in the sun, and even the strange, hungry depth of dark magic pervading the world here - they felt like home.

This was where he had died.

For a long time, Zila-Hidad flew in the cold bright sky, and felt the weight of the ruins below. The sadness pervading the air from long-buried ghosts. He avoided the old keep, the nest of the carnivorous bats who’d chased him to his doom.

He wanted something else. A source for this darkness.

Always, he had enjoyed asking questions, even knowing he might never know the answer. This was different. This demanded one.

In the depths of the forest below there was a place where a great cap of foreign stone, pale blue against the mountain’s basalt grey, sat in a space cleared of snow. Runes ringed it edges, and bronze was set into numerous points, plates of the corroded stuff joined together by metal-lined channels like the points and lines of a constellation.

A man sat nearby, playing a harp.

The fact that he was an enemy struck the crow instantly- and was washed away in the next moment by the sweet, enticing strum of the strings. It felt like an answer. It felt like the world was slowly drifting away, and a dreamlike happiness taking its place.

Zila-Hidad settled onto a branch beside the man, who smiled gently. His long fingers continued to move across the strings without ever pausing. “Hello, friend crow.” To Zila’s surprise, he spoke like a robin, bright chirps and twitters rolling off his tongue.

“A human? Speaking birdtongue?” His own calls stuttered in response. This man was dangerous. For brief moments, Zila’s mind could fight free, could surface over the song. Then some cunning trick and shift of the melody would draw him back down, the moment too pleasurable to break.

“Oh yes, I speak the language, no, I wrote half of the songs you sing. I wrote so many things before my... departure.” The smile on his face faded and turned bitter, like snow melting away to reveal the pulpy, rotten autumn leaves entombed below. He was a proud man and a broken one. “Don’t you know me?”

Or no- not a man. Men could not claim to have written songs for the birds, any more than they could walk in the cursed snow.

“You are a question.” The crow answered, although he knew it was the wrong one.

“Ah, how easily they forget. I was Elythwyan, the God of Poets. I’ve come hear to meet your master, little bird, so would you mind telling me a few things about him?” The god was smiling again.

Slowly, Zila began to move a single talon on his claw. To flex and twist and try to break free of the enchantment. It was no good. His body wasn’t hindered in any way, only his mind. Every moment he managed to push against his limitations was ended by a slow slide back into relaxation.

“I- No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Perhaps- a trade? I could give an answer, for an answer? You tell me, say, why the snow is death here?” He tried for his only escape. A god was a god, a man was a man, a poet a poet. All three liked to talk.

“Oh, that’s easy enough. The snow is ‘death’ because too much is being taken, all the land’s good nature drained away.” The god brushed the tip of his boot over the runes that marked the huge stone seal. “Eaten up by what’s beneath, you know? The desperate. The hungry. I can’t blame them, you know? It’s not so much that I fear dying, as I fear not being.”

His shadow whispered to him from the snow-covered ground in the voice of a dead thing. It told him he had to fight.

It was shame that worked. Hot, stabbing shame, as the crow realized he was on the verge of being captured, again. He had flown back into the very same trap that had taken him once, confident in his new strength. Only to find himself outmatched, again.

Again again again AGAIN.

He rolled the heat of that anger in his mind like he was holding a flaming coal in his grip, refusing to let it burn away, to be cooled or assuaged by the music’s drowning bliss. He held it until he was ready to die before suffering any more humiliation.

The poet-god’s fingers faltered on the strings, struck a wrong, crude chord - his looked up in a shock as the crow screeched and hurled itself down, barbed hindtalons reaching for his eye.

There was a flicker of divine energy and the god was gone, the crow crashing to the ground, kicking up snow from the top of the stone seal. Hissing, Zila-Hadid fought his way back onto his wings. No, not again. He would not allow himself to die a second time until he had his answers.