• You drag your emaciated legs across the thicket of twigs, moulted feathers and scraps of shiny metal, towards the heap of partially digested meat on the other side of the huge nest. You have not really walked in the month that you have been here, but their deterioration seems rapid, they feel light, hollow. Collapsing against the rim, arm trailing down over the side in to the abyss, you don't even stop to inspect your daily meal. After several days of not eating, either out of disgust or protest, you had succumbed. You rationalised it, saying that when they returned, you would need all the strength you had to overpower them. And then escape? The thought returns, escape how? Perched against a sheer cliff, the only way out was the open sky, but you had so far remained deaf to its constant whispering. You force the thought out of your mind, as you have done each time before, and rip out a hunk out of the unidentified meat with your teeth.

    You barely attempt to clean the meat of the mucus like substance that coats it. It made little difference either way, and you found yourself beginning to not mind the taste. After washing your meal down with rainwater that had pooled in a small indent in the cliff face, you breathe heavily, exhausted from the short drag to and from the other side of the nest. You go to lie on your back, but the pain in your shoulder blades intensifies. Rubbing your hand against them, they feel swollen protrude out more than they should, forming a hard ridge underneath the skin. The bone inside throbs against the skin with every heart beat. At the lightest brush of your fingertips, pain shoots through to your spine. You wonder if you had been injured in the struggle, but do not think so. It was becoming hard to remember anything about before this nest, memories formed and dissipated like fog, less and less cohesively each time you drew them up. As you bring your hand around to your face, your fingertips are coated in a glossy red liquid.

    Elbowing yourself upright, your hands scrabble against where you had lay, feeling around the tight matt of sticks. You cannot find it; the gleam that catches your eye is only a ring, one of the many treasures the beasts had collected during their hunts. You struggle the think where you had placed it when your finger brushes against something sharp, cutting you. You lift it up, a shard of a mirror, around six inches long. Soiled cloth is wrapped around the wider end forming a handle, and the splinter trails off in to a jagged point. You found it your first night here, terrified and sobbing, the rain beating hard against your face. You tore futilely at the twigs and sticks, looking for something, anything, to defend yourself with. Even through the pitch darkness you could tell that the branches you had excavated amounted to little more than kindling, but then the flash hit, lightning illuminating the sky only for a second. The mirror blinked at you, a beacon, half uncovered by your efforts.

    You look in to the fragment, but your brain cannot comprehend it. Someone else is peering through the surface at you. The stranger’s skin is pale, almost translucent, highlighted veins partially hidden by a thin layer of filth. Their nose is large and ungainly, hooking over their mouth, resembling half a beak, and their teeth are stained yellow and brown. But that is not what strikes you most; it is their eyes, looking right in to yours. Large red eyes. You tear your gaze away and throw the makeshift blade from your hand, but then you see, for the first time you really look. It is not your hand; it is pale, with all too many joints in the fingers. You scrabble at your arms futilely attempting to wipe away the horror that has covered them. You press yourself against the cliff face, attempting to shrink away from the monster, from yourself, and then you hear it. You hear the whisper that had been attempting to burrow its way in all this time, carried by the wind. “Escape to the sky”. You force your way over to the lip of the nest, attempting to outrun your body. Before strength escapes you, you roll over the side, and fall. Face down, the dark pit below, you are afraid to turn around, to see the monster over your shoulder. The whispers of the wind have become screams, shrieking in your ear, and your heart thumps an ever quickening rhythm for your body to march towards the ground to. The blood pumps through every part of you. You burst to escape your skin. And a pain rips across your back. Spreading out across the sky, you are caught by wings you never knew you had. The wind hitting your face is no longer screaming, but cheering, and as you raise yourself towards the open sky, you find your head clear, and you no longer remember why you had been so afraid.