Is there something wrong with everything I know? How could what I have lived through have been all a deception of reality if I have experienced it? Why must I question what I know from the words of a woman who does not know me or what I have been through? I will admit, I am not someone who has suffered greatly, but just because my pain has not been grand, why should it not be valid? If it is not the person who ignores the truth of another, the real hypocrite? My feathers are ruffled, I can not help but think with agitation whenever I think of Lady Debrouhs and her scathing tongue. If she walked in my shoes, I am sure she would stumble in my footsteps.

And I hers....yes, without a doubt. I too would not wish to walk down her dreary path. There is something unnerving about her. It is not just her chilled eyes that follow everything and nothing at once, nor the quickness with which she spits her poison to those who try to test her or even the manner with which she goes about unfortunate truths with callousness and unflinching forwardness. No. It is none of those things which make me physically uncomfortable. 

If I am, to be honest with myself. There is a memory that comes to mind when I think of Lady Debrouhs. A memory buried deep within my child-like box of memories, with a core that grows as bright as a star in the sky when I brush my fingers along the vague notion of this emotion. It's the memory of one of my first flights, away from the flock, away from my family. I had wished to explore. So sure of my skills, so arrogant in knowing what I had to look out for. The words of warning everyone had given me before I left burned me like the sun on my wings, scaling my back after flying too high in scorching weather. Of course, I knew what to look out for, I thought with ire at the time. I am no idiot, I too am a bird of skill and instinct, with talons as sharp as any that catches its meals and rips into its enemies below.

All of that day I soared and I played and I did as I wished when night came I found the perfect tree high in the sky and after checking for any predators nearby I decided to take a small nap before I returned home. I would show them all their worry was for naught. My beak was high in the air as I danced circles around them. I went to sleep with such childlike thoughts. 

It was the silence that disturbed me first.

Then the puff of air fanned around my head. Not my own.

My heart took off in my chest. I knew. I knew at that moment, I had been very wrong. I waited for it to take a bite of me. To finish me in one golpe. When it did not, I forced my head to turn slowly. Perhaps it would let me see the face of the one that would end me. Nature was cruel like that. I understood my father's warning now. I truly did. I hoped they would not miss such an arrogant little bird. The first thing I was was a blood-orange shade. Glossy and almost never-ending. As afraid as I was I also knew something was odd. Shiny? How could that be? 

Then a line of black. Another shade of blood-orange. Black. More blood-orange and then black. I did not understand until it blinked. It's eye. Its eye was behind me. It was behind me. It blinked again as my heart took off as an eye bigger than all I was, turned sideways before straightening up again, the tree, darkness, a pitch black shadow moving with it. Its head, I realized as the large eye pulled back and it began to fully turn to look at me, eyes larger than anything, a body made of darkness, and a long purple neck looked down at me silently. I shook in a way that made my beak clack. I did nothing as it watched. I do not know if I would have been able to muster to spread my wings. I felt the fright of it all trickle down my legs, my feathers stuck to me like the embrace of death itself. It could have been minutes and not seconds as I awaited my fate. All I could think was that I did not wish to die. A little bird's prayer for my family and quick death.

Then the creature made a sound. It took me years, and many tried to realize the sound was of amusement. As if my fate had been funny. Or perhaps I was not a worthy snack. It made the sound once more before there was a flash or a large grin, with small but pointed teeth that stretched wider than its eyes, covering the night sky in a grin of darkness before it vanished from sight as if I had dreamt it all. Perhaps I had, for when I came to it all, my family surrounded me at the bottom of the very tree I had deemed perfect for a nap.

There are many things I could say I learned that day, but that would not be the point of me having spent so much time writing this down. No. The reason I unearthed this memory is that for as long as I have lived, ever since that day I could not find the name of that monster that watched me sleep without making a sound, without alerting my instincts until it was too late for me to make a decisive choice, to be watched by such large eyes that swirled with maddening interest and malice, to know that one choice was the difference between regret and peace. 

She made me feel like the young bird on the branch, unaware until the last moment of the monster that loomed above, watching, waiting, weighing my worth. Laughing. That is what Mykela Debrouhs brings to mind...

I can not wait until this is all over. The sooner she is gone the quicker I can return to my daily tasks, to achieve my goals and cease this foolishness, this hesitation in the things I know to be true. Because if it has all worked out so well for me, how can it be anything more than the honest truth of life? 

*                                     *                                              *                                       *                                      *

There were words I had once. There were words I wished to have then. There are words I wish to have now. 

Whenever I try to think of something to say about it all, I lose them. Sometimes I think I will lose myself like I lost my words. But there was a time when I had lost myself so I know that this is a different type of loss.

I just don't know what it is that is no longer here. I do not know.  

Like my words, I seem to have lost who I was because whoever he had been, I can not recall. He was innocent and I am not. I don't know what I am.

But I will continue to look for the words. With the words that remained. 

Yes. Yes. Yes. I will look. Look. Look and find.

*                                                         *                                                                   *                                              *

When they came for me, I knew they would. I knew it. I had known it all along, but I did not know why. I just knew that it was wrong and I would most likely never spread my wings again. 

I thought it was bad at first. I thought I would lose my mind in that small room. That my insides would eat one another in order to feel satiated. At one point I had laughed at the insanity of where my thoughts had traveled too. I had considered eating my feathers at some point. My pride. My joy.

They asked the same questions after that. Where was she? Who had she talked to? What did I know? Tell me more. Tell me it all. Come on Fleckff. Speak. Speak. Here, water. Drip.Drip.Drip. Speak.Drip.Drip.Drip. A name. A face. Nothing? Alright.

The next room was further down. The walls were bright. Everything in this room was bright, but if anyone asked me to name a color. I could not tell the difference. I just knew it hurt my eyes. When I shut them, it was still bright. My head hurt at first, the hunger had been satiated earlier, so now I was just tired. 

I.Could.Not.Sleep. 

I lost count. I kept counting, then I lost it again. I tried to cover my eyes at first, to block the bright from out of my eyes. Then they tied my hand down. Struck my legs from beneath me. Opened my eyes wide and left.

I thought I had gone blind at first when they finally took me out of the room. It didn't matter that they were putting food in my mouth. I couldn't taste it. I just wanted to sleep. To be gone from the body they had taken claim of. To be free from this endless bright sky that held no wind in its abyss, that blinded me as it did pin me down to its colorless world of existence. I wished to no longer feel the wrapping of the cloth I wore that scratched at my skin, like soil that had suffered the hardening of time. I lost a lot more than just time in that room. 

It was in the third room that I realized I was sleeping. It was dark. That's how I knew. I could finally recognize the dark inky abyss of nothing. The quiet was different. I finally got what I had begged the devils for.

It was the cool, blissful ignorance of sleep. A slumber that felt everlasting in some ways and a mockery of what I had prayed for so earnestly for. I was wide awake in my nightmares here too.

I think that is why they put me in the bright room first. So that when the darkness sang to me, I would sink in its embrace like a child clinging to its mother. I knew I was in the arms of a monster, I smelled the rancid odor of decay in her breath when she whispered sweet words that fanned over my face, saw the wispy stands of limp hair that trailed over my shoulder like seaweed adrift and tangled. I knew. I knew it all along and yet that did not dampen the strength I used to cling to the only kindness I had felt in I knew not how long. I would have embraces any monster that had taken me in and provided me with even the shortest of slumbers. 

 It asked me all sorts of things. I answered each one. Whatever it had wanted from me I would have freely given so long as I remained within that dark, silent embrace. But the longer the questions went on for, the more I gave the angrier the voice got. The same questions repeated. I answered but it was not the answer it wanted to hear.

There is a panic one experiences, an anxiety that claws at the mind and throat as both scrambled to think, to say the right answer, regardless of what it costs because the body knows. The body knows when danger is about to strike. I  was desperate to dig for the correct answer, to offer the skin off of my body, the bones from my back as long as the tranquility remains. 

But no matter how many feathers I plucked. No matter how many nails I bit down to the quick as I searched through the ashes of my memories, I could never give the right answer.

Never the right answer. I never had the right answer. An answer that was right. I still don't know. I don't know. I told them I did not know. I still don't know. I wish I knew. I had wish Id known. I still don't know. 

But I think I could come to know now. 

*                                                     *                                                                     *                                                            *

The final room. The room I was removed before I could even make sense that I had been placed in another room. Before all of my senses left me completely. Honestly, I do not know how I managed to piece myself back together enough to even think back to it all now. The memories are all painful and unnerving and...I still can not find the right words, but now I know that I might never be able to.

I did not know when I came to leave the darkness when the monster had stopped embracing me, but I only came to it every now and then, and when I did I only knew I was alive because of the dryness, the ache, and the pain of my throat as I screamed at all that I saw and heard. 

Past and present and past and future and future and past. Seconds within hours. Minutes within seconds. Every memory distorted, flipped. Choices changed, outcomes were filled with disappointment and pain, and cries. This is where I completely lost Fleckff Virty. As he watched what was of his life, what could have been of his life and all he had done in his life, right or wrong, all crammed down his throat, down my throat, the boy broke as something else remained to scream. There are things no one should know about another. There are things some should not ever come to know about one's own self. 

In the middle of it all, at the end or maybe in the beginning, long-limbed, knobby creatures with no faces, but a voice as cold as time would speak to me, mock me, question my choices, and speak of their own. It was hell, to see what I could not comprehend play before my eyes, to kill with hands that were not my own as I watched myself rip myself limb from limb even when a part of me knew, it was not truly I in any body but my own. 

Time did not exist. Hunger did not exist. Day and night were partners that existed all at once. But the space I was in was the domain of pain and existence, of torment and torture.

This, I imagine, was why only the woman who had managed to get me out of that hell, had been able to break me from the shell I had intended to bury myself in. 

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I had forgotten how to fly. Even if I had wanted to try, I had no winds. I would never take to the skies again. 

Janice spoke of the girl who had lost sight of the sky. The girl who walked through mud. She told me that if I had lost the ability to fly, if I were to keep my head down, then I could at least walk beside the river and watch the reflection of the sky in the water. 

The girl in the mud had no reflection of sky as she marched forward, dragged by chains so large they covered her sky and bent her neck. 

I did not pay much attention to her at first. The girl in the mud. No, I was buried within my own, neck deep, for a while.

But there was something about Janice. I think it was her earthly ways as a witch, or the sad strength she looked at me with, unlike the pity and uncertainty my own mother looked at me with. It was as if she knew I would be fine. 

Before long I found myself looking into her eyes, to make sure she still thought that so that I too could start believing that one day I could be. 

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The last day I saw Janice was the first day I came to care more about the girl trading through the mud than I did about wallowing about where I thought the mud was around me. 

She wasn't always walking through mud, she started, she loved walking through flowers and playing in places she wasn't supposed to. She laughed loudly, spoke even louder, and was often chided to quiet down. The girl who walked through the flowers, and the trees and enjoyed the forest always muttered to herself out loud about the strangest things. The trees were suspiciously too cluttered in one area of the forest. The flowers were always slow to grow in certain shades, but quick to be plucked by others. The spells were easy to memorize but always left her feeling sticky and ill to cast. She wanted to be someone helpful to her coven, always going around to study as much as she could. 

When she was taken, she looked back once, face blurred to all who tried to find her expression, and then she was gone. 

Years went by without so much as a whisper of her name, of her laughter, her voice, her presence anywhere, but her mother knew that day by day her child's head was being pushed down. The crown on her head pressed to the filth of the word, her back bending, but her mother knew not if her spirit would break or follow suit and bend. 

When the first article, the first image of the girl came to the mother's attention, she knew the answer. The expression, blurred the last time she had seen her was as clear as day, but it was cold as night. She knew not the woman in the young girl's body, but it was the murky look in her eyes, and the ridged shoulders that told her of the sacrifices it must have taken her to reach the surface again.

The girl walking in the mud was out, but her eyes did not go to the sky. They stared at nowhere and everywhere at once. There was no destination in mind. No freedom to long for. No warmth for hope. This was a girl made of stone, where mud slid off as rain poured from unkind skies.

Janice was afraid. The first sight of her child and she trembled. 

Still, she did all she could, talked to all who listened and all who could be swayed, did favors, and asked for them. She dug as far into the earth for what she could to hear about her child from sources that were not tainted by public knowledge, who knew firsthand, who saw what they were not to see and spoke what they were not to. Again, Janice trembled and at times, fell ill at the stories she heard, the cruelty used to bend those they wished to the Council's will. It pained her to not know which methods were used on the girl, but it always grieved her to learn of the ones she had been put through. 

As time went on, the woman of stone appeared many more times, but it also became apparent to Janice just how deeply the chains had been imbued within the girl before she had hardened with time and experience. She told me of the cruelty that had been done to the girl. Then she spoke of the cruelty the woman came to do to others.

In those moments, she whispered. I was too afraid to look up at her expression, to see what pain her eyes held. 

She did not give up, but she also knew she would not be the reason the girl in stone would ever be able to break free. 

But she could help me and so she did.

She just wished to know of the woman in stone. Her last days. Her last words.

The girl in the mud. The woman in stone. The woman who reminded me of death that lurked above. The woman who rattled my world and beliefs with harsh words and unpitying eyes. 

Mykela Debrouhs.

*                                                              *                                                            *                                                                *

When Janice left, it was as if she had taken all of the nightmares with her. In their place, curiosity remained.

At first, I merely wished to know more about both women. I collected articles and clippings. Found testimonies of those who had ever come across a Debrouhs: conflicts and confusion.

Then, in the mids of my search, I knew that if I continued to dig further, I would have to delve into the hell that had taken me so long to escape from, but it seemed my curiosity burned fiercer than my fear. Slowly, I entered the cave of horrors, peck by peck did I nibble at the walls of security and secrets. As my courage grew, I found my anger growing as well. Rage for myself and what I had been unfairly put through and then as I learned more about the woman known as Mykela Debrouhs, the Councils Huntress, that rage for myself sizzled as shock and horror-struck my soul.

The rooms. The rooms I had been placed in had been used on others. On her. For punishment. 

She had come and gone many times. And each time she had returned. Awe.Fear. How had she done so? For how long? 

Why were they allowed to do these things to us? To whoever they wished? 

I delved further than I had ever wanted to in the search for the girl of stone and stumbled down the rabbit's hole. 

The boy had died within those rooms, broken beyond repair. The man had come back, a phoenix reborn from the ashes of midnight, a flightless bird who burned brighter with each injustice he learned about. 

I was but a small man, with great influence and flashy materialistic things at my disposal.

And I was going to use it all.

Things would change. They had to. 

Because I had the chance to walk where I could not fly.

I could look at the sky whenever I wanted. Be it by lifting my head, or watching the reflection on the water. 

Not many others could say that, but somehow, I found myself looking at the ground as I walked. Looking for the trail left behind by the girl who walked through mud. 

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I wish I knew where Mykela was. I owed her an apology. She was right. So painfully right. The world is not at all what we live to think it is and we are not all that we think we are.

It must be lonely for people like her, who see the truth of it all so clearly and yet receive scorn for not playing along to the ruse of it all. 

I wish I knew more about the ending of Mykela Debrouhs if only, to ask her the one question I had been wondering since I learned of her story. Her strength. Her perseverance. Why?

When did you stop looking at the sky?