Over Windle Rock, the waters roiled with lush froth, sea foam of green and white and murky brown lapping up against the stone face of Captain Claiken’s lighthouse island.

It was this that stirred him from his deep rest, for today the swishing and swashing of the sea was enough to ram waves against the wall of his abode, humming and drumming and thrumming, patters of rain on sheets of ruffled tin, the kind made for sheds and roofs. It sprayed through the open second-story window, a mist of brine and salt. Claiken removed himself from his sheets and slipped two ancient, worn feet into two ancient, worn slippers. Though as soon as the man stood and awoke, he felt something was not right.

With a sudden urgency the man donned his long flowing worry-coat and abstained from the morning’s meal, opting not even to so much as pour himself a brew of coffee. He was hearing a kind of noise, see. A noise that disturbed him, coming from somewhere outside. Something he’d never heard, not once. It was very much a “something,” very much a dark “something” that nary had accurate words in which to describe, although given the chance he would have tried first with the term “encircling,” being that it came from every which way, and over the sea beyond. Rubbing away the crust gathered in the corners of his eyes, the Captain peered out of the window, across the bay.

It appeared that the encircling noise had a source not too far or too strange. For a great flock of shapes with dark, sharp features were approaching overhead, in flight. Captain Claiken was groggy, and peered at these shapes in a state of poor wakefulness reserved for those who sleep far too much to wake up refreshed.

Birds, he mused, despite their odd cawing.

Then… he looked again.

So it was despite this grogginess that Captain Claiken was able to witness the great oddity of these beasts. They were not geese; they sounded and looked nothing of the like. They were not gulls, for their hue was black and their size was large, larger than dogs, larger than men. They reached the island in a clipping of time where it seemed as if the sun had froze, clouds pooled around it, a masquerade halo of mock light, drawn forth from the sheer animosity these larger than dog, larger than men, black winged horrors carried with them.

And yet, entirely like geese, like gulls, they made perch on the black stony shores of Windle Rock.

Unsightly as it was to see beasts of unknown, it was hellish and horrific in much greater terms. The winged horrors—which bore human faces, long black fangs, upturned piggish noses, and two spiraling horns—had brought with them prey upon which they’d been feeding, clenched in their talons. One gripped a shrieking maiden, her eyes clawed out and belly torn apart. One held a man lacking legs, instead bearing bloody stumps like that of half-axed birch logs, bone and blood and sinew out like threads of red knit yarn.

They numbered in the thousands, beast and catch, over and over. So dense in number they blocked all light.

Then they dropped their bodies beside the lighthouse, piling up child and infant and mother and father. People hunted from somewhere beyond the lengths of the bay, their deaths anything but swift and painless—for they writhed, and mewled.

Captain Claiken stood silently, living a new madness.

Thousands of the horrors had now crowded round the pile of anguish, putting face to limb and gnawing, tearing, biting into the collected flesh with armies of sharp teeth. The Captain was beyond any measure of fear. He could only watch as the volume of beast and body greatened, horrors swopping abound, above, dropping more flesh into the pile. More refuse to sob and fester.

The stench was unbearable. Meat and waste, fish-iron blood and mucus, musk, marrow—

The sound of tearing leather didn’t so much as compare to the sound of torn innards, pulled from bodies, great chains of crimson. The winged horrors unraveled bowels, unbolted eyeballs, unfastened brains, eating with an atrocious ferocity that had no end.

One spied him, looking up into the window.

It did not hiss, or shriek, or caw. The whites of its eyes were so human… but not quite. Fixated on the Captain, flapping its wings twice as it stood in place, it continued to chew.

And though the beasts that did park over Windle Rock came in great number, none more appeared over the horizon. But Captain Claiken had no worth to be thankful; his mind had unraveled. In his sixty-six years the man had never seen as much torment as he saw on this morn. And so sudden… he hadn’t a single inkling of reason left. His psyche had been pried from him in mere seconds by the horde of howling daemons and their glutinous feast.

Their stock, their game, had all but become a globule of brackish tar. Bones and grease.

And in time, more winged horrors did come, bringing more prey. And lo, Captain Claiken pled with the sun and stars above to forget this—it seemed he did have an inkling of logic left, in his stunned and tortured head. For he realized one thing; that these unworldly beasts need not eat so much nor kill so many. Yet, they would continue. Their apathy was unlike that of the wealthy when looking at the poor. It was more like that of a god, and an ant. Not a child ready to crush it, or man ready to stomp it. This was something far more sinister, and goliath in size and hunger. When he let go of that last realization, he lost himself. His only compulsion was to end the screaming in his head, end the sight before him, and no longer have to hear the crashing waves over Windle Rock… waves that gave orchestra to this supper of madness.

Captain Claiken pitched himself out of the lighthouse window, falling to a death he had wished to see forty years later only hours ago, yesterday night.

But no such death came.

For instead, he fell down unharmed into the cushion of carrion, and realized that none of these victims had passed. All of them continued to breathe and move in tandem like the very waves of the surrounding sea; all at once… as lungs expanded and hearts pumped, or fingers and toes, arms and legs, twitched and stretched. Desperate to be rid of their anguish. Then he felt the fetid breath of the putrid horrors as they coughed cold spittle into his eyes, putting talon and tooth to his face. They tore deep into his flesh.

Captain Claiken, no longer a man, lapsed into the pulsating mass, becoming kin to the meat he drowned within, and thus melted away as part of a new creation. For the winged horrors—howling daemon of black-feathered wing—were not simply eating. They were building. A process of chomping and chewing at still-living thing, and regurgitating a bile of human glue to feed and fix the twisted shape of their newborn babe.

Claiken saw no more. But in him, dozens of tongues were licking, dozens of stomachs were rumbling, miles of innards were gurgling. When it seemed like no end would come and he and the victims would continue to breathe but not think, feel but not know, the howling winged horrors took to the skies and left their monster on the stony shoreline edge of Windle Rock, flying back to where they had come.

And when night fell, new predators roamed. Owls came down from the skies. Turtles crawled up onto land. And insects of all creeds scuttled from their burrows.

This time, they truly did feed.