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The first time Joy ate one of the birds was when she was twelve years old.
It was a cold winter day, so she had spent the majority of it watching a holiday cooking presentation that a chef was holding because they had a large oven that was always blasting fire. She peeked around the corner at the presentation, relishing in the little bit of warmth that reached the alleyway.
The chef prepared the food with skill. His knife tapped quickly and methodically on top of the vegetables as he made a sauce. Next, he brought out a headless chicken that still had all of the feathers on it, and plucked them all away with precision.
Joy watched with a strange fascination, leaning a little closer, as the chef’s blade navigated the chicken meat. It was a little bloody, but it wasn’t disgusting. The chef’s movements made it look more like an art. He removed the skin, organs and bones with precision, until all that was left was the good meat of the chicken breast.
The rest was back to simple cooking, slicing the meat and drizzling it with the sauce and spices, sliding into the oven and moving onto something else. Joy waited until the chicken was done cooking, and then she left, maybe dashing and stealing one or two pieces of meat on her way out, a fast little flash that left the chef shouting angrily,
“Thanks for the food!” She ate the meat as she ran, laughing at her success. It was delicious, flavors exploding on her tongue and the chicken cooked thoroughly with a soft texture that melted in her mouth. She finished it all in record time except for a small morsel she kept to give to the kitten she had found.
However, that night, wrapped up in old blankets in her abode, with nothing but a little fire on a pile of sticks to keep her warm and the kitten curled up on her lap, her stomach rumbled. That bit of chicken had been all she had eaten all day. Even the little cat seemed weaker than usual.
It was then, that from above, a raven landed on the grass outside her abode. Joy stared at it. It was fairly big, with thick feathers and beady red eyes. Joy tilted her head, and it stared back at her and mirrored her movement.
It was then that she had her terrible idea. Very slowly, she untangled herself from the blankets. It watched her, but did not move, perhaps not viewing the child as a threat. But Joy took a deep breath, and dashed forward to grab it.
“Come here!” It immediately took off, but Joy was faster, and shot forward like a flash of lightning to grab onto its foot. It tried to fight back, scratching at her arms and pecking at her fingers, but Joy was stronger and refused to let go even when her skin started to bleed, wrestling the raven down until she had her arms wrapped around its wings, successfully immobilizing it.
“Stop moving!” Joy shouted, and suddenly realized that for her plan to work, she would have to kill it. Her stomach twisted uncomfortably. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t eaten mice and little birds before, but something about the raven made her feel… off.
However, she didn’t have to worry about it for long, because all of a sudden, the raven went limp in her grasp, and with a pop, its eyes slid out of their sockets and fell onto the ground like a couple of red marbles.
“Ew!” With a gasp of shock, Joy dropped the bird’s body, which fell onto the ground. She looked between the now eyeless bird’s corpse and the eyes that lay in the grass. They were kind of disgusting, but they weren’t bloody nor did they show veins, and instead were purely red and very shiny.
Joy leant down to the orbs with a repulsed expression. Very, very carefully, she lifted one into her hand, expecting it to be wet and squishy, but was instead surprised to see that it felt exactly like a glass marble. She even tried to squash it in between her fingers, but the eye didn’t budge. They barely looked like eyes at all.
It was weird, but Joy didn’t know how ravens worked, she’d never tried to go after one before. Maybe she scared it to death, she’d scared mice to death before, but its eyes didn’t just fall out when it died. She didn’t think any more into it, taking the two eyes and the body and returning to her abode.
The kitten was waiting for her when she returned, and the fire was weakening. Joy groaned as she placed down the raven and it’s eyes. There weren't a lot of ways to get firewood in Lumina City unless she stole it, and she didn’t feel like going back out into the cold so late at night, but she had to if she wanted to cook the raven meat the way she had seen, “Aw man. Okay, I’ll be right back-“
As she turned to leave again, her foot accidentally brushed one of the raven’s eyes. “Oops.” It rolled towards the fire, and while Joy didn’t really care, they were just shiny trinkets after all, she was not expecting what would happen next.
The eye hit the flames, and in the next moment, the fire exploded in heat and color, Joy gasped, the kitten hissed and scampered away, as the fire turned a crismon hue and seemed to grow three times as large in an instant, warm and bright and not dying down even after a few seconds had passed.
Joy tried to figure out what happened, waiting for the fire to die down, but it never did. Eventually, after enough prodding at the fire with sticks to try to find the eye to no avail, she decided it must have been a blessing, or maybe raven eyes just did that, and sat down with the bird’s body to do what she had originally meant to do.
With a little rusted pocket knife, Joy tried to not be too weirded out at the blood that gushed out as she cut off its head. Once the head was gone, it was a lot easier, peeling off the black feathers and throwing them into the fire as she went, the flame eating them up. She tried to follow the chef’s footsteps, messily peeling away skin to reveal the red flesh underneath.
Joy didn’t know where to find the organs or bones, so she just tore through the flesh and threw anything that didn’t look edible into the fire, until she was left with flesh that looked much less appetizing than the chef’s, but was very much her own handiwork. She gave the kitten a big grin as she skewered the meat onto a stick, and held it above the fire to cook it.
She ended up setting it on fire and burning it, it tasted more like leather than the soft meat she had earlier, and she didn’t have any spices to top it with either. But as she peeled off the more edible bits to feed the kitten and took a bite into her own, she couldn’t help but smile and laugh before the warm fire on the cold night.
-x-
Joy caught more ravens after that. She didn’t really feel too bad about it, each time she grabbed one it would die in shock just like the first one she caught, eyes falling out. It really must have been a shared trait among ravens. Personally, she thought it was stupid to just die like that if it was scared, what if she was just catching them for fun?
Regardless, she must have taken down fifteen or twenty ravens before she was finally intercepted. The people of Lumina City treated her like a poor thieving orphan (which she technically was but, logistics, logistics…) and generally did not seem to comment on her bird catching.
Joy was pretty sure they were glad she wasn’t stealing for once. She had yet to find a single city guard who could catch her.
The birds were not too well accepted in the city, they only appeared in large numbers at night and fed on trash and carcasses, so it wasn’t as if many people cared about their longevity. A dirty bird, ravens were called, definitely not made for consumption. Joy disagreed, she always made sure to take out the stomach of the bird anyways.
However, her bird catching and eating fun was brought to an end on one fateful day a few weeks after the cooking presentation. She was chasing after one of the birds right after sunset.
This one was pretty fast, but not too smart. It hopped out of the way of her first few lunges and flew some distance away to another perch, but did not take off, and that was its mistake. Joy grinned and narrowed in on her target.
In a practiced motion, she dashed and grabbed it before it could react, squeezing it into immobilization again, and on cue, it went limp and its eyes fell onto the ground. As many times as she had done it, it was still extremely weird to her, and not exactly pleasant.
Grabbing the dead bird around the neck with one hand, she leaned down and picked up the marbles- She preferred to call them marbles, not eyes. Eyes was weird. Saying that she had a bunch of marbles in her abode made her sleep significantly more restful than saying she had a collection of eyes.
It was when she was humming, straightening up to head back home, when a shadow suddenly loomed over her from behind, casting a shadow from where it blocked out the moonlight.
“Gah!” Joy shouted, jumping away and swiveling around to see what it was.
Crouched on the rooftop was a strange figure. He was dressed in a black cloak made of raven feathers, and even with what Joy proclaimed as her enhanced leonin eyesight in the night, she could barley make out his form underneath it.
However, his head was backed by the moonlight, catching on his vividly red hair, and his serious eyes reminded her of the ravens she had been catching.
Creeped out, Joy immediately tensed up, “Who are you?”
“You…” He narrowed his eyes. His voice was thick and scratchy, like he wasn’t used to talking, “You… Take the ravens?”
Joy made the connection between the currently dead bird she was holding and the boy, with his feathery cloak and red eyes. She felt her cheeks heat up, but still held her ground. “You don’t own all of these birds do you? Just for the record, I had no idea, I only took like fifteen- Okay maybe twenty- And! And if you wanted to take care of them, you shouldn’t let them go all over the city! They die when someone grabs them! That’s so weird-“
“No.” He finally cut her off. “Not mine.”
She froze, and then crossed her arms in defiance, “Okay, well if they aren’t yours, then why do you care?”
The cloaked guy had no response to that. He simply looked over at the eyes she held in her other hand, “…Why… Why you take those?”
“These?” Joy rolled the little red marbles in her hand, scrunching her face, “I throw them into my fire.”
“What?” The weird guy asked.
“My fire!” Joy held one between her fingers. Maybe normal people didn’t know about how raven eyes worked. She thought that maybe everyone would hunt them down if they knew their eyes could make fires burn for hours, but one person couldn’t hurt, right? “Raven eyes are really weird, they’re hard but if you put them in a fire it’s like firewood! The fire gets hotter!”
“You… Put into fire?” The guy’s face contorted like he was expecting something else. Well, really, Joy would have been expecting something else too. “You do not give them to anyone? Do not give them to your boss?”
“What?” It was Joy’s turn to be confused, “What boss?”
The guy did not answer her question. “…Do not kill any more ravens.”
“You can’t tell me what to do!” Joy stuck her tongue out at him, “Who are you, anyways?”
Once again, the guy did not answer. “Do not kill ravens. For your own good… I can not control what happens if you do…”
Joy tried to decipher his words, before she finally out everything together. His cloak, the spooky feeling that followed him, his downcast eyes and mask, even his weird hair, “Wait, you’re like one of those fortune teller things, aren’t you? Is it like bad luck to kill ravens or something?”
“What is that?“ The maybe-fortune-teller stared at her.
“Do you have one of those magic balls under your cloak? Is it sparkly and purple? Can you see the future?“ Joy bombarded him with questions while he physically took a step back to stop from her leaning forward to try to see what was under his cloak.
“If I… am a fortune teller.” The guy spoke the words like he had never heard of them before, making his voice twist weirdly, “…You will not kill more ravens?”
“I mean, I don’t really believe in that stuff.” Joy twiddled her fingers. “But I’d think about it. I mean, it’s a little weird to kill them at all, I guess. I don’t want to get cursed by bad luck.”
Maybe that was why she felt like the birds were so unnerving. Joy shuddered. Was her instinct warning her the whole time? That would be really ironic. And stupid. Luck was stupid.
“Okay.” The guy seemed to think long and hard about what he would say next, “I am a fortune teller… Do not kill more ravens.”
“Why?”
“I cannot tell you.”
Joy liked to pride herself in not being too stupid. Was this guy actually a fortune teller? Probably not. In fact, he looked like he could kidnap her on the spot if he wanted to. But he clearly had some strange reason for not wanting her to kill the birds.
Maybe the reason he was dressed in that feather cloak was because he killed ravens and made cloaks out of them and wanted Joy to stop because she was killing them. She sort of regretted burning all of the feathers to fuel her fire, maybe she could have sold them to him.
She decided to ask. “Are you like a raven killer too?”
The guy had a physical reaction to that this time around, flinching, making Joy believe that her absurd theory could actually be true? His expression darkened, “How do you know… about…”
“Your cloak thing.” Joy pointed at it. “It’s made out of raven feathers isn’t it? A lot of them. I’ve never seen anyone sell that, so did you make it?”
“I cannot let you go… you know too much.” Was this an evil monologue or something?
“…Do you hate answering questions, or something, dude?”
“Raven killer.” Joy specified. Did he really need her to spell it out, “You kill ravens, right? Like the thing I’m holding right now?” She lifted her hand to show the bird, “Then you take the feathers and make cloaks and stuff?”
The guy stared at her. “I do not kill ravens.”
“Then why did you act like you just did?” Jeez this guy was slow or something. Couldn’t he just give her a good reason or go away? In fact, it was getting late, and
“You said raven killer.” The guy admitted, “I… misjudged…”
“So what are you?” She tried again.
“…Fortune teller.” He replied. He didn’t even smiled, no emotion or humor on his face, but Joy thought it was hilarious.
“Oh yeah! I forgot about that one.” She snorted.
“You are not a threat.” The guy seemed to determine at last. Joy almost took offense to that- at her grand age of twelve and height of four feet something, she thought she was very formidable, “Stop killing ravens.”
“Pretend I’m saying yes.” Joy shot back. Would it kill her to just say yes? Yes .
The guy looked at her for another few seconds as if he was thinking, and then straightened up without even a goodbye. He straightened up to stand on the roof, and turned to walk away.
“Wait!” She called, half-joking, “Hey, fortune teller! Can you tell me anything about my future? Will anything good happen?”
The guy looked back at her briefly. His eyes seemed human like this, catching in the moonlight. He took a second to speak, as usual. “…Yes. You will find… Good people… Keep on smiling.”
Joy stared at him. The last part felt really weird coming from his gloomy demeanor, but he ironically spoke the words with complete seriousness, not even a smile on his own part, like he wasn’t the one speaking but instead repeating the words of someone else. She didn’t say anything else, and neither did he, as he dissapeared from her vision to go wherever he had came from on the rooftops.
Joy glanced down at the red eyes that she still held in her hand, and then at the bird body. Was it really bad luck? She didn’t want to believe in things like chance had luck, but for now… Maybe she wouldn’t try to catch any more ravens for the time being…
Later, she flopped down in her abode with a groan. The kitten curled up by her. Managing up a grin, she pet it and smiled, “Well. It’s back to stealing, I guess. I’m thinking we get ourselves some nice warm meat pie and a slice of cake tomorrow. Sound good to you?”
The kitten meowed in response. Joy only laughed.
-x-
“You’re back.” Rod Sidon acknowledged as one of his Ravens slipped through the doorway. That was extremely fast. Earlier that day, Sidon had tasked Julian with a mission of tracking down whoever had been disposing of his ravens. He had asked some of the others of the Raven forces to do the task but they seemed to come back even more confused.
Julian was perceptive, though. He was strong too, and although Sidon liked to keep his Scarlet Raven close to his chest as a secret playing card, someone knowing that he control his ravens to survey the city was an immediate threat that he couldn’t risk. It could mean a traitor among the Ravens, as only those who worked directly under him could have any idea that he had such an ability.
“Did you find the answer to this predicament?” Sidon asked Julian as the boy approached to kneel before him, looking just as he always did, serious and cold.
“Yes.” Julian nodded.
“Good, good.” Sidon let an eerie smile spread under his mask. He would exact whatever revenge he needed against anyone who tried to stand in the way between him and becoming Archbishop. He could feel the unease of the current Archbishop with each passing day. “And, what was causing this problem?”
“A… cat, sir.” Julian responded, very slowly.
“A cat.” Sidon repeated, turning towards Julian who was still knelt, looking at the ground as it was customary, so he could not see his face. “Look at me, my boy. You say it was a cat.”
“Yessir.” Julian lifted the gaze of his crimson eyes to look at Sidon. There was a specific intensity to them, but no wavering.
“And where is this cat?” Sidon inquired.
“It… Got away.” The Crimson Raven spoke these words without the shame an ordinary person would have in his position, but this emotionless demeanor was perhaps the most intimidating part of the Ravens.
“You couldn’t catch a cat?” Sidon asked, not knowing whether to be confused or concerned in the ability of his Ravens.
“I failed. I apologize.” Julian stared at him, not defiant at all, body relaxed in a way that opened himself to be a subject to Sidon’s anger if the bishop wished so. Whatever. It didn’t matter. It was just a cat, and Julian was basically incapable of lying to him.
“Right… Right. You’re dismissed.” Sidon rubbed the front of his mask as if he were pinching his temple. All of his anguish was caused by a stray cat? How stupid. He would have to train the birds to stay away from other animals, then. He waved a hand in the air, “I’ll draw them all back for now. I can’t lose any more.”
That night, as each remaining raven returned back to him, Sidon did his routine check through their eyes, but nothing of importance had happened, only some more developments on some of the Empire’s plans that he didn’t need to worry about yet. He stopped the birds from leaving again- He could not accept that they were getting eaten by a cat, so some training was in order. He would rely on his real, human Ravens for the immediate future. It was good that his ravens would lose and deactivate their eyes if caught, so if anyone were to stumble upon them, his secret would be safe.
He requested his meal be brought to his office in his diocese, as he tried to figure out how a cat could take down his fast birds, rolling each red eye in his fingers. When hours had gone by without a single resident worker bringing food, he went to the kitchens, angered, only to be met with a commotion, the kitchen workers frantically rushing about and shouting in confusion, “How did all of our meat pies and cakes disappear!?”
Somewhere else in Lumina City…
“I’m off now.” Mila smiled, her hands wrapped around a basket of bread she was taking to the Church. Spring was coming, so she and Arlott had figured out a fun technique to slice the loaves before baking that made the tops look like little flowers.
“Stay safe.” Arlott nodded in response, a small smile on his face as well. The little dog they had brought in a few weeks ago ran around his ankles, barking. Mila giggled at the sight.
In some other time, a beady-eyed raven would be recording their every move and fly back to report to Rod Sidon. At this time, the skies were clear of birds, and Arlott waved Mila off as she departed for the church, humming happily all the while.