The Crow Goddess's Name (2/2)
The Crow child wakes up in a barred cart, slowly inching its way across the countryside. Her arms and legs are in chains, and her wings have been stitched together with a needle and thread, to prevent her from using them to escape.
She spends many days carted across the nation's border, where she's sold as a slave in a foreign country full of humans.
Because she's stuffed in a dark box and put to sleep when they get to the fortress marking the border, the girl assumes that slave trade is VERY illegal where she's going. Why else would they smuggle her?
Maybe it's because of her strange race, but she picks up a detail later from the humans around her that selling "beast people" slaves is even illegal in "the empire" for some reason, though they don't have any laws against selling other humans. It has something to do with not wanting to anger the beast people clans.
Being unable to be sold on the common market, she's instead sent to be a servant in a famous prison. Many prisoners from many places are kept here, so she'll blend in more there.
… Just to be sure, the slave traders lop off her wings to hide her racial heritage, then make up some lie about the 2 vertical scars on her back when they sell her off.
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The prison the Crow girl is sent to is completely underground, so after she's sent to the cramped, dark halls, she quickly sinks into an even deeper depression.
With her wings gone, the Crow child feels incomplete… but even if she still had them, she has no room to stretch them, and she has nowhere to fly. In addition, with no sun to warm her skin, this place feels like a cold hell to her.
The other servants aren't very happy to have her around either. None of the humans in the prison have heard someone speak her language before.
Presumably, the humans in this "empire" are rather proud of their nationality, so upon seeing someone who's clearly a foreigner (though they don't know from where), she's bullied mercilessly.
What's even worse is that with the language barrier between them, the child is unable to even make any friends.
On the verge of giving up, the Crow child slowly becomes less and less energetic, and she even puts less effort into her chores, despite the harsh punishments she receives when she slacks off.
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…One day, a loud commotion explodes in the hallways. The men and women all around her are screaming in terror then falling dead in a burst of their own blood.
Beast people are spiritual beings at heart, so the Crow child is able to see what's really going on. Great black hands made of complete, abject darkness are snaking their way through the halls. Like a monster, they kill everything in sight, without rhyme or reason.
What's worse is that these black arms are transparent, and all the guards are unable to see them at all.
Feeling scared, the Crow child hides in a barrel and uses her latent racial blessings to hide her spiritual aura from the strange monster slaughtering everything. She keeps her head down and hopes the strange black monsters don't find her.
Just when things seem to calm down a little, the Crow child peeks her head up from her barrel and sees the human mages working with some strange material. She's picked up enough of their scattered language to know these mages are trying to find a way to seal the monster away, which apparently came from underground.
The child's imagination runs wild, and she thinks of some ancient demon sealed underground, or perhaps the grudges of the executed prisoners coming back for revenge against the living.
Even still, she knows that these mages are using the magical stones on their carts to make a barrier around the monster's origin.
…Unfortunately, the invisible black arms of death find the mages and slaughter them all before the mages can finish laying the last brick on their magical formation.
Staring at the black hands hovering protectively over the formation which nearly sealed them away, the only living person on this floor of the dungeon feels immense fear in her heart. Something about the black energy in those long tendrils of Death feels…
The Crow knows perfectly well that if she leaves the black hands free, then she'll have no way of escaping, and she'll die in this dungeon.
On the other hand, if she runs up and pushes the last brick in place – finishing the monster's prison, then the black monster will kill her the moment she reveals herself.
She ponders for a moment over her decision, when she realizes something she's always known, but didn't want to accept.
'Everyone dies eventually.' She thinks of her family. 'Even nature is founded on the idea of things killing others to sustain themselves. The bandits sold me to fill their pockets, and this black monster kills the living up here to keep itself free. Everything I eat was also once living, so does that make me a bad person? Good or bad. That's just nature.'
Thinking this, the girl hardens her heart, then leaps out of her barrel with a squeaky, high-pitched war cry. She doesn't sound intimidating at all, but at least she has spirit.
The black hands notice her, and they all reach for her at once…
…Yet when the spectral arms touch her, she doesn't die like the others. Instead, she feels a torrent of foreign emotions assault her spirit. She feels despair, anger, determination, and the quivering helplessness one feels just before they die.
Even more, the Crow child feels her own impending death. In her own mind's eye, she sees herself twitching on the ground, screaming in terror as her spirit is ripped from her body by a titanic force.
"I DON'T CARE!" she shouts at the strange monster. She has no more reason to live right now, so it doesn't matter if she dies here anyway. What DOES matter is that she at least goes down fighting before the end, like her elder brother, then her father before him.
With a huge surge of power, the Crow's spirit bolsters brightly… and something changes inside her.
What was once an oppressive, aggressive force trying to kill her, yet now... the feeling it gives her seems to change at that moment. The black energy inside the ghostly arms no longer feels dangerous. Instead, the longer they touch her, the stronger her spirit becomes.
It's in this moment that she realizes what this black energy is. "Death Aura."
Beings who can control Death Aura are rare, which is why she's shocked. Aren't the Death gods the only people who can control this spiritual Aura? Is the being down there some fallen deity?
Whatever it is, it's none of her business.
She looks down at the final brick and looks down at the ground victoriously. "Hah!" she gloats aloud towards where she presumes the monster's true form is, "I'm not afraid of you! My spirit isn't something you can break so easily!"
The black arms quiver in rage seeing the child stand unaffected by its power. As a spiritual being, this creature can only directly attack another's spirit... and her spirit is too tough to be killed.
Ignoring the dark demon's frantic thrashing, the child puts the last brick in its place. "Go back to hell, demon."
The moment she puts the brick down, she feels herself grow dizzy, and she falls unconscious, just as the spectral arms thrash in fury, then disappear.
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Inside her soul realm, the Crow child hears a mature female voice speak to her mind, "Life is conflict, and conflict is war. Life is a shared experience, so war is a shared experience. One who has never been in conflict has never lived, so one who has never lived is dead at heart. To refuse conflict is to lie down and die, for life is war, and death is peace."
Once the girl gets her 1st Name, she snaps awake and sits up, startled. She was 12 before, but now her body is the body of a 4-year-old.
'No matter that my clothes don't fit anymore.' She looks down, still feeling ashamed of her missing wings. 'This prison is dead and deserted now, so there's no one to see the scars on my back.'
She looks up to where the surface is. 'I wonder how warm the sun is right now…'
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End of Volume