Owls and humans have never been friends.
You knew this from the start, when man spread like a plague through the
Valley of Lo, burning dryads with their trees and forcing the faeries, Nymphs and fauns that once wallowed carelessly in the valley glades to Near-extinction.
You knew this from the first time an owl screamed in the night, searching for its mate and hearing only its own tortured cries in answer. For as horrible, as heinous as the humans' crimes against the old races were, none compared to the slaughter of the owls.
Humans wiped out entire clans of them, using their eggs and flesh for food, their feathers for stuffing pillows and mattresses, and their sturdy beaks and talons and bones for fashioning tools and decorations and flutes. By the time the last owl fled the valley of Lo for Mount Ornithon, their numbers had been so violently depleted that the remaining owls feared the coming winter might eradicate them completely.
It took time for their numbers to build again, but they did, and steadily.
Season after season, their nests teemed with life, spilling the new generation forth and keeping the memories of old deeds hot and fresh. Vengeance, they agreed, must be something swift and lasting, and not soon forgotten.
Their course decided, the owls of Lo took wing.
Her windows had been open, as most windows in Lo were when the winds grew warm and the rains seemed far away. She cried and whimpered as she was put down for the night, but this was nothing unusual.
It began almost as soon as the door clicked shut, the instant the knob completed its turn. Adrienne's shadow had not yet even moved from beneath the door.
The baby stopped crying.
Adrienne stopped cold, her maternal alarm raised by the silence beyond the door. But she could not have heard her daughter's tiny gasp of surprise, nor could she have seen the shadow of waiting wings once the door had closed behind her. She cautioned inside once more, chiding herself for such a silly concern...
The room had become very cold, in spite of the evening's warmth. The baby usually kicked her blankets away, but tonight she'd not yet had the opportunity to do so.
Adrienne staggered back.
"Theresa," she whispered, and gap there in horror at the empty crib.
A new plague had come to Lo, a plague fueled by memories of spilled blood and burgeoning life stolen from violated nests.
On this moonless summer night, a parliament of owls thick enough to blacken the noontime sun settled over the human village, screeching from their avian souls, and lifted the fleshy human babies away in their sharp claws.
The screeching of owls filled the inky sky, coupling with the maddening screams of the human children. Babies howled in the darkness, nearly drowned out by the frantic cries of mothers young and old. Every mother and father in the village left their elder children with grandmothers and grandfathers and congregated at the town center, weapons in hand, screaming their challenges in a host of raw and shrieking voices.
The owls' answer fell from the sky, as swift and lasting as any justice the humans could devise.
One of the human babies - the Chancellor's tiny daughter Theresa, judging from the peach-shaped birthmark on what remained of her torso - tumbled into the dust with a wet crunch, released from the calculating talons of an owl elder. With a nerve-splitting shriek, the owl retreated into the darkness, its warning delivered.
The owls' message precluded any further discussion of revenge for the moment. The men and women of Lo dared go no further for fear that their own children had met the same end. It is a universal truth that no parent should ever outlive a child, but to see that child's death, to know that its passing had been anything but quick and peaceful...
In desperation, they turned to the Chancellor for guidance.
"Chancellor."
He turned from the sight of his daughter, from the nightmare of his wife's tortured sobs, and listened carefully to the words of the old soothsayer. Her wrinkled face wore another ten years tonight as she spat upon the ground and tossed a cup of owl bones as easily as parlor dice.
"Tell me, Hylah. Tell me what has been foretold."
Her heart was heavy with grief for the Chancellor's baby girl as she poked and stirred at the bones for omens. After an age of muttering and strange incantations, the old woman uttered their pronouncement.
The Chancellor gathered his people and with a numb spirit, told them the old soothsayer's words. In spite of his constituents' cries for war; in spite of his heart's demand for expiation; even in spite of his wife's bitter, heartrending tears, the human Chancellor - a wise man, now colorless and distraught - declared that there would be no more bloodshed.
The crowd rose up, driven to madness by the apathy of their leader, but he held his trembling hands above them until they were silent, and spoke to each and all.
"The soothsayer tells me the owls have taken blood for blood," he began, hardly able to keep his eyes from the sight of his baby daughter sprawled in the dirt like some strange carrion. "She tells me that the only payment for death is more death."
"Blood will have blood!" someone screamed, and every voice lifted in agreement. "Let us destroy every last one of them!"
"ENOUGH!" The Chancellor boomed, and a stunned silence fell upon the people of Lo. "Would you draw out this madness until we are all dead? Shall we return the strike and doom ourselves to a war between species? You are my people, and your words have always guided my hands, but mark well! None of us - not I and not one among us! - has the right to condemn our nation for this loss, no matter how great."
The crowd protested violently; grieving mothers screamed out their anguish beneath a deaf sky. Some cried "traitor"; still others called for the Chancellor's death. But not one among them had the courage to take the Chancellor down.
"We have all lost our children, yet we know only the fate of one. Your children may still be alive and well. But mine..." he trailed off, and was surprised to feel his wife's hand clenching his shoulder, using him to support herself.
"This ends here, tonight, with the burial of my daughter Theresa," he declared, and there was no argument to be heard. Lo's people were of good stock, mostly, and bowed to the wise words of the Chancellor.
Some, of course, did not.
Those few who stormed up the mountain bearing torches and blades and clubs regretted it soon after. One or two overzealous fathers - unaccustomed to the dark lands beyond lost their sight when sharp beaks punctured their eyes as easily as warm grapes in the nighttime mist. Still another foolish grieving mother stumbled back to town with a host of deep gashes on her face and neck, marked by the same talons that had spirited her child away only hours before.
"Join me now," the Chancellor implored those who could still bear to listen. "Pay your respects to the child who in time would have taken my place as your Chancellor. Together we will mourn our losses and find peace in our neighbors during this difficult time.
"But hear me now," he proclaimed, his eyes flashing in the torchlight. "As of this moment, no owl, not a single one of those winged devils, shall ever again pass through the gates of Lo."
In the shadows beyond torchlight's reach, a single pure black owl blinked in agreement and launched itself into the moonless night to deliver the proclamation to its kin.
