"Darius... I am Darius, the Bastard... I will not forgive nor forget the Flamingo."

I keep repeatedly chanting as my fragile consciousness drifts deep within the mind space of the Pillar Guardian.

My fragmented soul has been resting in peace here for centuries. Yet, a part of me kept chanting while replaying the events that led to the enslavement of my race and the role I played in making it happen.

Blurry memories of my past are replayed from the beginning.

I was a Black Feathered Crow born into a brood of twelve hatchlings with a single mother raising us all independently.

Several months after hatching and learning the basics of identifying bird species. I noticed my brothers and sisters were not Crows but Birds of several different flying species, while our mother was a Duck.

I naturally assumed she had adopted all of us from abandoned nests, but she was a freak under the sheets and didn't care about the taboo on inter bird species coupling.

Later in life, I was told our fathers could not identify which chick belonged to them. So I sometimes wondered if they were blind or didn't want joint custody with several other males.

Even though our mother was a slut, she was an exemplary mother to us all. I shall always be grateful for her sacrifice that allowed me and several of my siblings to reach adulthood.

Unfortunately, the others perished due to lack of food or fell victim to disease while we were young. That left an Eagle, Vulture, Stork, Owl, Magpie, Hawk, Puffin, and a Crow to assist our mother in her workplace.

We grew up in a fishing port where our mother worked as a Barkeeper for the Birds who had come out to the beach to hunt fish and tail feathers.

Our mother's reputation didn't surprise anyone with the sight of a family of bastards. Although none could hold their tongue when they saw the variety and number of her brood.

We were all proud to be her little bastards, and thus the nickname the Bastard Flock came about after we trashed anyone who insulted our mom to our face.

After teaching us everything we needed to know to run the bar, she left us to find new mates to raise a new family and never returned.

Being abandoned was not a big deal since my siblings and I swore to support each other through anything that came our way.

We renamed the bar our mother left us as 'the Bastard's nest.'

Business boomed as flocks from all over the north came to try out the bar run by the Bastard Flock.

The Sake we served was to die for... sometimes literally.

The fish and insects were always roasted to perfection.

None could get enough of our flock since it was taboo to create inter bird species progeny in the developed cities of our world.

But the good times did not last forever. War broke out between the Birds of the Land and the Birds of the Sky.

Two months after the war began, my siblings and I received the call to enlist with the faction that represented the birds of the sky.

We sold the bar and used that money to buy all the material needed to enhance our bodies through Metal element Infusion surgery.

Thank the Phoenix, we did that! I am not sure if we would have survived the first week if we had joined the war without those body modifications.

Years passed, and the war escalated until both sides were reduced to less than a quarter of their original strength.

Before both sides could call a truce to cease hostilities, the Pink Pillars fell onto our cities, and the monsters from the other worlds came out to devour our kind.

Dinosaur and Reptile monsters that came through could harness the power of lightning to electrocute our flocks, who all had Metal body parts or internal modifications powered by metal infusion.

After all these centuries, the horrors I witnessed refused to fade away even now.

However, my siblings and I discovered a device that let our bodies become more machine than birds.

This was all thanks to a flamingo who created the device called 'The Pink Soul.'

It was an odd name for the device, but Flamingos were bizarre birds.

His instrument also created a way to fight against the invaders by turning parts of our metal bodies into lightning rods that could nullify or redirect lightning attacks.

In a few weeks, the Bastard Flock had taken on the name of Paragons of Birdkind.

We were the only ones capable of dealing with the heavyweights of the invading force while the remnants of our armies battled the weaker but numerous forces.

It took over a year, but my siblings... no, the Paragons conquered the pink pillars by defeating all the forces that protected them. More birds adopted the Pink Soul, created by the Flamingo, and soon became Paragons themselves.

Eventually, the world was back in the talons of Birdkind. We were now a united race serving under the leadership of the Paragons of Birdkind, of which I was chosen to become the vice leader.

If only my slut mother could have seen what had become of her bastards. I know that it would have made her proud and regret abandoning us.

My memory from this point gets interrupted as several White ethereal tendrils made out of mana traveled deep into the psyche of the Pillar Guardian and managed to stitch my soul back together from fragments lost within it.

Those same tendrils have wrapped around me in an egg shape to heal the cracks in my fragmented soul. But, as they do that, they pull me up towards a soul emanating emotions of lust, compassion, madness, hate, and love.

It must be the one controlling the tendrils that restored me. A familiar aura radiates from its mind space which caused me to remember a figure I had long since considered dead.

"Mother? Is that you?"

The tendrils transmitted my message to the soul, who then replied back through the tendrils attached to me. The name Angel is embedded in the message, which I assumed must be the soul's name.

Angel. "Am I hearing things, or did you just speak?"

That was not mother's voice. But there was a familiarity to her essence, and that comforted me.

But why is she surprised about my identity? All of Birdkind should know of my existence in history.

"Of course, I can speak! I am Darius The Bastard, vice leader of all Birdkind's Paragons."

Angel. "Bastard... Paragons?"

This must be an ignorant fool who has only met my enslaved brethren whose actual voices have been silenced.