A/N: I'm trying to get back into PT writing mode but having a hard time with ideas. So far, this is the only thing I've really managed to finish. In part inspired by Manda-chan's Beneath Black Feathers and its role-reversal. I thought I'd try to explore what a raven!Duck might look like. I'm afraid she doesn't seem very *Duck* anymore...
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Cuckoos, the old man laughed, will steal the nest of other birds, eat their offspring into starvation.
But a Raven, when desperate, may steal even a duckling and dye her feathers in his own black blood.
She took one scarlet tipped finger and pressed it against the pulse at his neck, as he stood stock still, captured by the jewel-hard glint of her sapphire eyes. "Straight from the heart," she smiled, feeling his blood pulse beneath her finger. And then it was just the scarlet fingernail, and not the softness of her finger against his skin, a scratch, a slight welt, as she traced her nail down his neck, down his chest, and stopped above his heart.
"I have a quest for you, my knight."
She had appeared before him like a living flame, her skirt of red and orange scraps that flared about her like tongues of fire, covered with the most delicate black lace (where there is smoke, Fakir's disjointed thoughts clamored as the lace splayed out around the spinning scarlet) as she spun towards him on her toe-shoes. Her long fiery hair fanned around her and she danced, flame within flame, a vision in red like the eye of a raven. But it was her eyes, blue, unforgiving, that burned the hottest, like the icy blue eye of a candle flame.
Blood. Raven feathers. His mother's face half covered by strands of her dark hair, by trails of her bright blood. He saw raven claws arching in her dance, her fingers curved like wicked talons. His father's eyes plucked- He trembled in fear, his knees buckling, and he knelt before her as a knight to his lady.
"A raven besieged our kingdom, trapped my father in a tower. Won't you free him?" she whispered in his ear. And he saw himself as he had always desperately wished to be, and yet had never been. He felt the pull of a hundred thousand stories, of endless adventures, of dragons defeated, kingdoms won, monsters vanquished, the prince saved. He thirsted for her words, half drunk on dreams, on desire. "Your heart is the key to the tower. Unlock the tower door. Give him your heart."
"O flame of my eye, O beloved daughter," her father crowed. "Bring me the knight's heart. I remember the taste of his blood from long ago." And then her ravenous father laughed and she flinched, for his laughter always meant pain. "His own blood made me, so long ago, his own blood gave me life so long ago. If I drink it now, surely it well set me free from this infernal cage. I will drink his writer's blood strained through generations, I will tear in two his knighted body. Lure him to me, with a story, with a quest."