3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale by Danbert Nobacon

the floor in a scuff of feathers.
     
    It was a humble message bird, smaller than a hen. The poor thing looked exhausted. The Witch scuttled over to relieve the bird of its burden, lifting it on to the counter where a bowl of water waited. After the bird had gulped bird-sized gulps, The Witch untied the note wrapped around its leg, and unrolling it, read aloud:
    Keep your hair on, comrades. Eat a good breakfast. That is very important. I will be with you before it has settled.
     
     
     
    “It’s signed M’,” cooed The Witch.
     
    “Holy Joke!” ennunced The Fool. “Has the Bird ever come down the Mountain to visit upon anyone?”
     
    Stormy looked perplexed.
     
    “I mean wan has to go and find the Bird. He doesn’t come to you,” explained The Fool.
     
    “Is he on his way, Ma?” said Glamour with strange excitement. “Really? Truly?”
     
    “I never knowed it before, but that’s what he says,” said The Witch.
     
    To Stormy’s surprise, Glamour blushed. But she avoided her friend’s eye, and bustled about making breakfast.
     
    The next moments were filled with breakfast and speculation. Time passed slowly. But in the time it takes to cook up some eggs, eat them, and have a second cup of tea in the time it would have taken that cup of tea to cool were it not drunk still hot, a shadow crossed the eastern window.
     
    All in the room heard the beating of giant wings outside.
     
    “You’d better come out,” said a voice in a deep bass growl. “I wouldn’t take kindly to ruffling my feathers on your hovelposts.”
     
    Stormy, who was nearest the door, led the four of them into the warming mountain sunlight, and there, preening his enormously long feathers, stood the Black Bird.
     
    “Fool. Witch, and you must be Stormy? My, you have grown. And you are?”
     
    “Glamour, sir!” said The Witch’s daughter, blushing again. To her surprise, and even with other things to think about, Stormy suddenly saw that her friend had a crush on the giant Bird.
     
    And why wouldn’t she? Standing some twelve or more feet tall, the Black Bird looked part grackle, part raven, part raptor, and part handsome devil. Unusually, however this bird had teeth, which made its giant beak very severe looking.
     
    On each foot, his dangerously sharp talons were made up of three forward-facing claws, and a fourth opposable thumb-claw. Each claw was the girth of a man’s thigh. And just when it seemed the bird could impose his presence no more, he flared his feather pants. Hunching his shoulders back so the wing tips crossed behind him, he looked all the more regal.
     
    The bird was indeed black. Black feathers, black beak, black legs … black mouth lining as he opened his beak wide, yawning. But his eyes were different. The milky white-ish nictating membrane that protected them masked a brilliant fiery red ring around black pupils. Then the strangest thing happened. The bird blinked, and his third eyelid rolled back revealing those red eyes. With a birdish shake of the head, the vivid red faded, revealing a more natural looking brown, with unusually bright eye-whites. Shocking as this sudden transformation was, it gave the bird an altogether mellower and more approachable appearance.
     

    It was, in truth, a most staggeringly noble-looking Bird.
     
    “Just shaking the flight-sight,” he said to no one in particular. As if flexing that brain inside its massive head, the Black Bird shook his crown and bowed toward Stormy.
     
    “Hmmm,” he said, “you have a look of your mother.”
     
    Stormy bowed back. “You, who you … You know me?” she stammered.
     
    “Ah yes. But first you should know me. I am, in no particular order, the Black Bird, Black Beak, Red Eyes, Wolf-Bird, known to my friends as Emmeur, or M for short. Scientically as well, my kind defies the usual classifications so most people call me The Gricklegrack. The grackle part is scientically a misnomer, but it stuck. I was a good friend of your