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What do you think of when you think of feathers?
Soft and light, surely. A gentle thing, floating down. A patchwork of flight. Separate they are merely a collection of little useless trinkets. But when sewn together with vanity and wax they allow little hollow boned things to fly.
Such a beauty. Soft, harmless, and benign. Tied to the backs of angels and songbirds and hope.
For Oswald they were something altogether more foreboding.
The feathers he knew were black. They were attached to birds, yes, but not the little ones who sat in trees and sang songs. Rather, ones who beaks spit fire, and whose wings called chains. Well, three birds, one creature more akin to a monster out of a fairy tale, and another something in between.
Perhaps this was just a sinister fairy tale after all.
He didn’t like the ceremonies. But he would never tell anyone that. He had no choice but to through them. It was a great honor.
There was no blood relation, no heredity. But he was the successor all the same. It wasn’t a job he could just refuse. Puppet strings. Something like destiny.
We like to think of destiny as some divine inspiring force, but maybe in the end, all destiny is the puppet strings we don’t like to admit are there.
For other kings and princes and dukes, succession is a grand and wonderful honor. It happens once, when they come of age. A harmless, gallant and gallivant affair. Like a bird being pushed out of the nest, discovering his light and gentle and marvelous feathers allow him to fly.
Whoever heard of a prince having more than one succession ceremony?
Oswald would have five, each more bloody than the last.
The first happened when he was very young. He drank the blood of the Raven, and accepted its fire into his veins. Raven was gentlest, that’s why they always started with him.
The mark appeared on Oswald’s chest then, and he wouldn’t tell anyone but his sister than he cried that night, and didn’t know entirely why. But it felt like something in him had died.
The feathers fell the day, like ink splotches on the floor, on the pages of his life. Inerasable. Sealing his fate.
These feathers didn’t allow him to fly. These feathers were Chains.
The next, a few years later, was the Dodo, and though the boy’s eyes had always shown him much more than anyone else’s, the illusions told him this wasn’t all sane, or the same. That sometimes people lied.
That would be an important lesson to remember later.
The next was the Owl. The little creature with the big, starlit eyes, and the night’s wings.
The darkness suffocated.
And the feathers. Every time. Always the feathers. At the end of the day, all that was left wasn’t the fire, or the illusions, or the dark. It was the feathers, like a hole in the pages, revealing the truth of who he was becoming. He may be becoming a thing with wings, but they were flightless wings, merely for decoration, and intimidation, like the eyes on the backs of a moth’s.
Next to last was Gryphon, the one that allowed him to open the way. It was bigger and scarier than the first three, but he accepted it, tamed its blood, like the rest.
The last: Jabberwocky—(and it’s true, this didn’t make any sense at all)—the one that’d allow him to erase all his sins.
It looked altogether monstrous that day.
…Or maybe he did.
He drank the blood, and he looked at his sister—a flower bud, disallowed to bloom—and he raised his hand to her forehead, and he tried not to break.
He was the prince of the breakdown. This was the price of the crown. Sometimes one must put down their family for their profession in the end.
The feathers sprinkled the world like blackened snow as the chains ran her through.
And she smiled, and she said something he couldn’t make out. Her spirit may have been devoured that day, but the ghost of her unspoken last words would roam these halls until he was torn apart.
The feathers were all that was left of her when she died.
The feathers became his mark, as they had been his predecessors; the knowledge that Glen had been here, and had done something wonderful, and possibly terrible. The moth’s eyes.
He didn’t have to use them often, but sometimes there were deals, and duels, and neither were quite fair.
He always won. It was five against one after all.
—(Until that day. When that one was a bloody black rabbit)—
When others saw those feathers, they saw the seal of a noble king. The proof that he flew, and he fought, and he knew, knew everything, knew a little too much—(Do I really know anything at all?). They were the signet that he was Glen, a more telling mark than any brooch, medallion.
When Oswald saw those feathers, he could only see Lacie’s blood, like melted wax.
Sometimes he even thought he saw a drop of red in the black, until he understood it was nothing more than the memory of her eyes pooling in his brain.
He used them all the same, and he tried to remember that these feathers were his crown.
The only day he saw them as something different was that day. The day when the Chains that held the world together came down, and the sky was falling. He sent his Chains to hold it back up, their feathers a trail of hope for any who came across them, knowing that the five would use their wings to hold the sky up if that’s what it took. He rarely had to use all five, nor understood why he needed so many. On that day he understood. On that day…they were beautiful.
But, sending them into the fray left their master defenseless and exposed to friends, and their scythes.
The family held each others hands tight, sweat carving tracks across their skin, breath shallow as a tide pool. They didn’t understand what was happening, but the Earth was shaking, and Sablier was burning.
They ran through the streets, unsure where exactly they should go—and, clearly, neither did anyone else—just trying to get away, wherever that may be.
A building crumbled before their eyes, falling with a deafening thud upon the street before them to a chorus of screams, and they skidded to a halt, looking all around.
The mother looked to her husband for guidance, and the father tried to look brave, like he knew where to go next, but pain and panic was infecting his eyes.
His daughter held tight to her parents, trying not to cry.
Even the son, who always liked to seem brave, bit his lip as he looked up at his parents.
But what could they do? Everything was falling apart, and no one had any idea why, or where to go. What hope was there? They didn’t even know which direction to run towards.
As they were standing there trying to figure out where to go next, and not lose hope, a great gust of wind rushed by them, and drifting down to them upon the ashen air, the light shape of a black feather.
“Papa what is this?” The daughter asked, reaching out to catch it.
“It’s Glen-sama,” he exhaled.
He looked into the horizon to see the wings of a great and terrible beast; a Chain that in that moment was the personification of hope. He wrapped his arms around his family, both a smile and tears breaking out across his face.
“He’s going to save us.”