Chapter 587

The first reports were easy to dismiss as hysteria. Strange lights in the sky, unusual atmospheric phenomena—the kind of things that conspiracy theorists ate up and spat out as "proof" of government cover-ups. Éva, a 42-year-old former history teacher from Debrecen, Hungary, paid them little mind. She had bills to pay, a garden to tend, and a life that, while unremarkable, was hers.

Then the planes started falling.

Not crashes resulting from mechanical failure or pilot error, but sudden, inexplicable drops from the sky. Air traffic controllers reported planes disappearing from radar screens, only for flaming wreckage to be discovered later in remote fields or dense forests. Initially, speculation leaned toward coordinated terrorist strikes, perhaps some new form of weapon no one understood.

But the reality, when it began to reveal itself, was far stranger.

It began with the birds. Massive birds, larger than anything known to natural history. Their feathers crackled with energy, their eyes burned with an unholy light, and their wings left trails of ozone in the air. These weren't birds, not as Éva understood them. They were something… else. Something born of lightning and wrath.

The Lightning Birds. That's what people started calling them, and the name, as much as it terrified Éva, felt right.

Éva remembered the day she saw one for the first time. She was on her way to the market, the scent of blooming acacia heavy in the air. A shadow passed overhead. She looked up.

It wasn't an airplane. It was too fast, too agile, and it moved with a predatory grace that no machine could ever mimic. The creature, its body wreathed in flickering blue light, turned towards her, its yellow eyes intense. Then, it was gone.

A wave of cold swept through Éva. It was followed by an even stronger dread, a fear that struck bone-deep, primordial, something left over from when humans were prey.

The world began to change rapidly. Air travel became a death sentence. The skies, once crisscrossed with contrails, became empty, silent, and menacing. People retreated indoors, huddling in their homes, listening to the growing chorus of terror.

Éva stocked her cellar with canned goods and water. Her garden, usually a source of joy, now felt like a strategic asset. She tried to convince herself that this was just a phase, a bad dream, that everything would return to usual.

She was wrong.

One night, Éva's neighbor, János, came to her door, his face pale. "Éva," he said, his lower lip trembling. "They took my grandson."

János's grandson, fifteen-year-old Pál, was obsessed with drones. He would spend hours flying them over the fields, recording videos that he uploaded to the internet. He'd been warned, everyone had been warned, but teenagers thought they were immortal.

"He was flying his drone," János choked out, "and one of them… one of those birds…"

Éva put her arm around János and brought him inside. He kept repeating the scene, his speech peppered with pleas to the virgin Marika and dark obscenities directed at the cruel beasts now reigning in the skies. As dawn began to streak across the sky they drank together and planned.

"We'll find him." Éva attempted to provide comfort but inwardly she knew Pál was already passed away. "He cannot be left to them!"

They took János' truck and sought for two days before eventually finding the boy and his crashed drone. The area was ravaged with trees ripped asunder and smoldering earth everywhere. Pál's body was unrecognizable, as a carrion murder of crows started appearing ready for the buffet. They took Pál back home in a coffin János constructed himself.

The incident cemented Éva's grim determination, hardened it. She felt it inside of her, this anger towards nature's cruelty, the absolute injustice of a world so quickly turned upside down. This fueled a shift within her, a move from passive victim to active resistor.

One morning, she heard a sound unlike anything she had heard yet. It was like thunder but more drawn-out. An amplified crackle sound that almost vibrated her internal organs. She stepped out onto her porch and beheld another lightning bird.

This one was wounded, sparking and twitching as it awkwardly tried to keep elevation above. From a festering gash underneath it's right wing, a dark putrid liquid streamed as it made strange crying calls that sent chills through Éva's very blood.

For what seemed to be hours, Éva spied on it from her home until, eventually, it could do no more. It crashed not too far away into the tall grass.

That's when Éva acted.

She grabbed her old hunting rifle from the attic, a weapon her grandfather had used to put down wild boar, along with her sharpest butcher's knife and a canteen of home made spirits, then set out for where the downed creature fell.

The journey to its crash-land site had Éva's senses tingling with caution. Even on the ground it still gave her a sense of dread. She had to overcome this because she could see this bird not as a predator anymore, but as something as damaged and hurting just as much as those passed away from it.

She crept through the tall grass until she located the wounded Lightning Bird.

It was much bigger up close, perhaps twice the size of a man. Its feathers glowed with a diminished energy, the yellow eyes dull, but still conscious. The damage was indeed significant, and reeked from infection and corruption.

A wing almost severed from it's main body would be impossible for her to fix. The most merciful step here was execution.

She loaded her rifle but she hesitated. These creatures may be a terror now but she was no zoologist. There were things she didn't understand about their presence in the world. If nothing could live in the skies because of this animal, then mankind might need to understand it better to strike back with purpose. Knowledge might hold value where her gun cannot.

Éva set aside her rifle and approached the Lightning Bird cautiously. She spoke gently, in soft Hungarian. "Don't be afraid," she said, though she knew it couldn't understand her. "I'm not going to hurt you… unless I have to."

The Lightning Bird flinched but remained still.

Éva poured some of her spirits onto a cloth and used it to clean the wound as best she could. The bird cried out in something almost like pain but bore the situation with grim compliance.

She knew it was insane, what she was doing. Nursing a monster. But something in the bird's yellow eye struck a chord with her, something of suffering, of desperation.

Éva treated the Lightning Bird's wounds for weeks. She brought it food, water, and sang ancient Hungarian folk songs while caring for the infection as best as she could. Slowly, impossibly, a fragile trust formed between them.

The Lightning Bird began to respond to Éva's presence, nudging her hand with its beak, and listening quietly to her tunes.

She began to believe that maybe, just maybe, there was a way to live alongside these creatures. That violence wasn't the only answer. It would seem crazy to believe, but there it was. Maybe this single act might prevent another Pál to feed to the beasts of the air.

One day, the Lightning Bird was strong enough to stand on its own. It spread its wings, testing them. Éva watched, her heart aching with a mix of hope and dread. She'd come to think of her patient as an equal and respected the situation for its delicate balance, but something inside her understood that their time together could not extend much longer.

The Lightning Bird turned to Éva, its yellow eyes clear, grateful, and as if to almost acknowledge a form of debt paid and friendship fulfilled. Then, with a deafening beat of its wings, it launched into the sky.

Éva watched it ascend, circling once overhead before rising higher and higher, disappearing into the storm clouds that always lingered. She did not ever think it would stay in this prison for good, no creature could truly like the cage in perpetuity.

She had to stifle sobs from leaving her chest. The Lightning Bird would surely return to its home and she was no exception to believe its actions. Éva was a sentimental person and would dearly miss their strange quiet bonding but was grateful, and more surprised than anything, for her charge's appreciation of the work provided.

For a few weeks, life seemed to find its footing into a comfortable state once more. No birds appeared near her home and Éva began planting new vegetables to start fresh. Her home became her safe nest again, so her guard was never raised enough when the aerial terrors returned.

This time, they came for her.

She was outside in her garden when she heard the crackle. She looked up to find a flock of Lightning Birds descending from the clouds. Not one or two, but a dozen, their eyes burning with malice. Éva recognized the one in front of her. The bird was scarred from where the injuries would be on the wing she took such tender care in keeping alive.

Then she saw that one wasn't in the same glowing color as the rest of its species. This one took upon a black hue. Its voice cackled, a sharp crackle of malicious energy so foul that all comfort she has ever obtained completely faded. It then screeched, directly to her with words clear enough to be understood but sent such dreadful agony across her brain that all cognitive function dulled from that point forward.

"Traitor."

The Lightning Birds tore her apart. Her screams were brief, swallowed by the thunderous beat of their wings. Soon, her blood flowed back into the soil she had nourished, watering her freshly planted crop in a way so grim she may as well have always known. There was nothing left, not a sign she had even once made these grounds her life.

The Lightning Birds, satisfied with their execution, turned and flew back into the clouds, leaving only silence and the chilling scent of ozone in their wake, but one lingered over her destroyed garden a moment more than the others. It cocked its head. Then, it cried. Then with no remorse, it joined the others in leaving.

János found her body the next day. All the terror in the world could never have prepared him for what came next, a trauma and guilt that all boiled into an eternal suffering he would hold, for he could never forgive himself to fail her last wish: not a single body part of hers were recognizable.

Torn asunder to such an extreme degree the body lost all humanoid shape and barely gave hint there was an individual passed away in this spot. He wailed.

All he could see were small bits and fluids slowly being feasted on, as carrion crows once again descended into the property.

She wanted to make things better for her community. She wanted no more death, and sought to remedy with kindness and friendship... And it murdered her because of it.

A final realization came: some wrongs of the world could simply not be fixed, some people cannot be saved, and sometimes the greatest tragedies stem from nothing more than honest people trying.

As she ended, nature brought what it does best. A beautiful, vibrant and full life. But as he was on his knees crying, no rainbow could ever come close to erasing what just took place as something wicked turned his world a ghastly shade of wrong.