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All of it rising, swirling, gone

"Please," Neve whispered in its wake "I am alone" If her fear were a creature, this would be its bones Alone Alone This was the fear that wore all other fears like skin Her next words sounded like a bastard version of the catechis years, but they felt truer Cleaner "To your protection I commend e in the at its teeth Neve felt it

She welcomed it

Wisha

When the first ship o, its crew found no sign of folk--nary a chopped tree nor a circle of stones to hint that men had ever walked here The land was fertile and priroo

The black hill

It was perfectly symmetrical, wider than it was tall, and taller by ten than a haystack It looked, at a distance, like aIt was dressed all over in strange plu as neat as fish scales Far too large for crows, each plu as aas aOf course, no such bird existed, and because of that--and because of as inside the hill, under the plumes--the sailors set fire to it

And died

It was the smoke, said the survivors Oil-black as the feathers themselves, it … writhed

It hunted

The sailors ere upwind of the fire sahat it did, and ran for their ship

Some of them made it

It was a full twenty years before another ship came, and this one came ready, armed with God and shovels, and they didn’t burn the feathers this time but buried them, and they built a church on the hill and filled it with saints’ bones and ireen land a the place with prayer as they shaped it with labor, and the long black feathers becaht play at "quicks crow feathers and acting out gruesome deaths, but the true accursed plumes had not been seen for near two centuries