The World of the Aviary Wars
The story of Talondot, Heschland City, and the war that ended all wars — until one bird broke everything
By David H. Smith Jr., creator of the Aviary Wars universe
I. The World That Would Not Die
Far from Earth, in a quiet corner of the universe, there is a world where wings decide everything.
Talondot has no highways, no cities of glass, no memory of humankind. Its dominion belongs to the winged — hawks and owls, raptors and songbirds, and stranger creatures still: winged leopards, griffons, serpents that swim through the air, and dragons old enough to remember when the mountains were young. For uncounted millennia they carved out survival across forests and wetlands, volcanic highlands and boreal tundra, coastal shores and stone-bound heights.
And for most of those millennia, they were at war.
Species fought species over dwindling food, over water, over territory that shrank a little more with every generation. Each conflict left the planet more scarred than the last. Disease followed war the way carrion birds follow armies. Whole lineages vanished — not with a final battle, but with a final egg that never hatched. Vast aviary fortresses rose across the land, part sanctuary and part stronghold; some housed entire species, while others sheltered the last few survivors of clans that had once darkened the sky.
By the time the wisest among them looked up from the fighting, the arithmetic was undeniable. If the wars continued, there would soon be no one left to win them. Talondot was not merely at war. Talondot was going extinct.
Something had to change. And the answer came from the one people who had refused, for thousands of years, to fight at all.
II. The City of the Owls
The owls of Heschland built their city on three things: observation, memory, and restraint. While the rest of Talondot burned, the owls watched, and recorded, and waited. Their neutrality was not cowardice — it was a philosophy, kept for so long that the other species stopped questioning it and started depending on it. When two aviaries needed an arbiter, they came to Heschland. When a treaty needed a keeper, its words were carried to the owls.
So when the peoples of Talondot finally sought a way to settle disputes without armies, it was Heschland that offered one. The wars would not end — they would be contained. Each conflict would be decided not by legions but by chosen champions, emissaries who would fight on behalf of their entire aviaries in ritual combat. Victory would bring resources and honor. Defeat might mean death, or the quiet end of a lineage. But the world itself would no longer be the battlefield.
They called these contests the Aviary Wars. And the arena built to hold them gave its name to everything that followed.
The Gyre sits at the dead center of Heschland, and everything in the city bends toward it. It is a colossal open-air coliseum unlike any other ever raised — part stonework, part living wilderness. Inside its ancient walls grow real trees; real water pools in its hollows; meadows, ravines, broken walls, and uneven ground form a battlefield that shifts beneath the open sky. By day the fighting happens under natural sunlight. By night, directed torchlight throws long shadows across the arena floor. Armies are forbidden here. Only emissaries may enter — through a mossy stone archway the warriors call the Threshold, beneath a keystone carved with the sigil of Heschland: an owl with spread wings, clutching a broken sword.
The city around the arena hums with purpose. Heschland fills a V-shaped valley — narrow at the south, where the whole valley converges on a single roaring waterfall, and opening northward into wide highlands nearly eight miles across. It is a medieval place by choice as much as circumstance: stone and timber, torches and braziers, ox-drawn wagons on cobbled streets. No machine hums here. No light burns without flame.
Walk it, as every new warrior must, and the city unfolds like a story.
West of the Gyre stands the Armory, a stone fortress whose vaults hold weapons forged across all of Talondot — from Escrima fighting sticks of the far Philippine masters to shields hammered on the banks of the distant Rhine. Its policy is absolute: no hoarding, issued weapons only. Power in Heschland is regulated, never stockpiled.
Southwest, across a stone bridge over a river that turns to molten gold at sunset, rises the Roost — a sprawling gothic dormitory of grey masonry and dark oak beams, ivy in the mortar seams, twin owl statues flanking its steps. Every species is housed here equally; behind any candlelit dormer window might sleep an ally, or tomorrow’s opponent. Deeper in the southwestern lowlands, the amber lanterns of Talon’s Trove glow from a warm cave-mouth marketplace — the one place in Heschland where the weight of destiny can be set down for an evening.
Southeast of the arena, twisted timber and thatch lean together into the Molt, the healing house named for the way a bird sheds ruined feathers and grows new ones. Its interior glows an eerie green with potion-light. Warriors limp in; warriors walk out.
East, on the heights directly opposite the Armory, stands the stone academy of the Carsius War College, where discipline and strategy are forged — of which more later, for its founder carries the city’s best-kept secret.
And in the far southeast corner, older than everything, waits the Treasury of the Ancients.
The Treasury is the oldest structure on Talondot. It predates the owl clans. It predates memory. Its facade slopes inward with the severity of a pyramid, sheathed at the base in riveted iron gone green with age, framed by timber beams hard as stone and carved with glyphs no living scholar can fully translate. Twin stone dragons crouch at its doors — not the dragons of legend, but something older, their eyes set with polished black stone that reflects torchlight like watching voids. What enters here is kept. What is kept here is protected by powers older than any aviary can claim.
High above it all, on opposite ridges of the northern highlands, two towers watch the city: Heschland Castle in the northwest, seat of King Hoojah and Queen Xiao and their Council of Owls, and the white stone spire of the Peace Chapel in the northeast, reached by a contemplative path that passes — unsettlingly — through the skeletal grey trees of the Dead Woods, a blighted forest that stands as a haunted reminder of what the old wars did to this world.
This is Heschland. A fragile peace, held in stone. To understand how fragile, you have to know where its greatest treasure came from — and that story does not begin on Talondot at all.
It begins on Earth.
III. Before the Wars: The Forgotten Woods
Long ago on the blue planet, after humankind had mysteriously vanished from it, there was a place called the Forgotten Woods — and in those woods lived the fairies.
The most beautiful and virtuous of them all was their queen, Griselda. But Griselda searched in vain for true love, and when her younger sister — the fairy princess Ecilah — found it instead, something in the queen broke. Ecilah had been saving a deer from a hunter’s arrow when a tree sprite named Arborello rescued her; they fell in love, and their engagement lit a jealousy in Griselda that consumed her from within. Her beauty twisted into something hideous. Her virtue curdled into cold evil. And in her rage she cast a curse upon every fairy in the woods, transforming her own people into an army of eyeless, fire-spewing demons with flaming crowns and rows of razor teeth — and commanded them to burn the woods and exterminate every tree sprite alive.
Arborello’s sister Fey, the Keeper of the Trees, was among the mightiest magic-wielders the woods had ever known — raw power to rival the greatest wizards. It was not enough. Fey did not survive the Dark Fairy onslaught, and Ecilah would carry the grief of her friend’s death for centuries. The First Fairy War drove Griselda’s demon army away to another realm, but the woods never forgot what it cost.
Ecilah survived by disappearing. She hid in plain sight for hundreds of years under a name that was her own name turned backwards — Alice — a fairy so small she could fit in the palm of your hand, living inside a cast-iron frying pan beneath a kitchen sink, furnished with thread-spool chairs and matchbox drawers and a sponge mattress with handkerchief sheets. She healed wounds with incantations in the old tongue. She commanded the wind. And she kept safe a purple amethyst amulet with her true name inscribed upon it in the old script — an artifact whose importance no one, perhaps not even Alice herself, yet fully understood.
Generations later, Griselda returned — this time for the magic beans of the bog, portal keys to hundreds of realms she meant to conquer. What followed was the Second Fairy War, and it drew in every people of the Forgotten Woods.
The mice marched under Dousey, the Family Protector General — a big-shouldered country mouse in dark armor with a boomy voice, a weakness for great cheese, and command of the 113th Cavalry Dragoon Battalion: four hundred and fifty mice riding domesticated cats into battle. Beside him fought General Mackie of the Squirrel Mobile Infantry, a textbook soldier with spearmen, archers, net launchers, and wolf cavalry, who laid a perfect ambush at the North-South Crossroads — and was blindsided anyway when Griselda’s true army of two thousand Dark Fairies rose out of the bog water behind his lines.
The alliance that saved them was Alice’s doing. She flew — carried on the back of Silas, the ace of the Air Courier Guild, a flying squirrel fast enough to outrace a fire raptor queen, and the only creature ever to witness Alice’s magic and keep her secret. She sailed — ferried by Sasha, the red fox captain of the Slippery Eel, the finest sailor on the Winding River, who would rescue Alice from open water twice and never take payment. (“Don’t be silly, Alice. This one’s on me!”) She bargained — with King Mavlick of the Mountain Elves at Wizard Rock inside Crystal Mountain, who brokered peace between his crystal-mining elves and the fire raptors, and who gave Alice a locked box to purchase one final alliance, with strict instructions that it never be opened.
That final ally was Queen Jadayna of the River Nymphs, stone-faced and calculating on her stalactite throne beneath Nymph Island. Her price was the locked box. Her daughter, the warrior princess Mortanya, led a thousand swimming nymphs downstream to the Bog Canal and raised a two-hundred-foot column of water that drowned hundreds of Dark Fairies in a single instant — and, sensing something ancient in the water beside her, gave Alice the name the nymphs use for her still: The Alice.
At the Battle of Bean Bog, the combined forces of mice, squirrels, nymphs, and fire raptors destroyed the Dark Fairy army. Griselda died of her wounds on that field — recognized at the very end by the sister whose happiness she could not forgive.
But two seeds of the future were planted in that victory. The surviving Dark Fairies fled through magic-bean portals to other realms. And inside Jadayna’s locked box lay the largest emerald ever cut, crafted by an ancient wizard, holding the one magic river nymphs lack: the power to walk on dry land. Jadayna opened the box, understood what she now possessed, closed it again — and smiled.
There is one more thread, and it is the one that leads to Talondot.
Among the creatures Alice aided in those years was Solaríana, Queen of the Fireraptors — a species descended from the ancient union of velociraptors and dragons, forged in the fires of Earth’s highest volcanic mountains. Fireraptor females lay only a single egg in their entire lifetime, and when Solaríana’s egg was in mortal danger, it was Alice who saved it. Alice healed the Queen’s wounded tail. Alice brokered the peace between raptors and mountain elves, sealed by Mavlick’s diplomacy and carried by Solaríana’s own peace-maker emissary, Tuvaan — Pyranto in the old tongue — who bore the Elf King’s locked box to the nymphs and never knew what he carried. And when Solaríana at last prepared to leave the dying quiet of Earth behind — four thousand years after humanity’s unexplained disappearance — Alice gave her two parting gifts: the purple amulet, and the secret knowledge of gem creation itself.
Solaríana crossed the void to Talondot, a world the ancient scrolls described as a refuge for dragons and winged creatures. She carried her one precious egg, a trove of sacred documents chronicling Earth’s history, the purple gem, and a family of mice she had vowed to protect. And on Talondot, the egg hatched — into something that had never happened in the entire history of her species.
The child was not a fireraptor. She was a pure dragon.
Solaríana named her daughter Anndrid.
IV. The Keepers
Fifteen centuries later, Anndrid guards the Treasury of the Ancients — and there could be no truer match of guardian and vault, for she is a living treasury herself. She predates the entire aviary system. She remembers ancient Earth languages that survive nowhere else but in her memory and the scrolls she keeps. Queen Xiao personally asked her to teach the royal children in the castle’s great hall, and generations of young owls learned the history of two worlds at the feet of a dragon. She is the mightiest creature in Heschland by raw measure — a living fortress — and also its gentlest institution, a lover of trees who has given names to the ancient ones and speaks of conservation with the fervor of a creature who watched one world go silent already. What we protect today, she says, our grandchildren will breathe tomorrow.
Deep within her vault, among the Golden Eggs and Squawk Gems of every warrior in Heschland, among the Mayan tablets and the Earth scrolls with their unanswered question of where humanity went, she kept the most sacred artifact on Talondot: Alice’s original purple gem, the amulet Amulétara — the Amulet of the Ancients, origin of all gem magic in this world.
Kept. Past tense. But not yet.
Among Anndrid’s old students, one became the city’s living welcome: Nivaria, snowy owl daughter of King Hoojah and Queen Xiao. She could have lived as a princess behind castle walls; instead she serves as Sentinel of Heschland, guiding every new arrival, watching over fair play in the Gyre, knowing every road and turning of the city she loves. She carries no weapon. Wisdom is her weapon. Her silence, the warriors say, speaks louder than storms.
She does not watch alone. The Sentinel order holds the city’s edges: Garotus the griffon at the gates, whom the owls trust precisely because griffons serve no master, only territory; Tysius, the winged sky-leopard, first feline ever accepted into the order, silent and patient in the air above the rooftops; Jackstar, the winged serpent who volunteered for the most dangerous post of all, the Dead Woods border, because serpents understand darkness better than anyone; and Wyatano, the phoenix who guards Heschland’s eternal flame — the only sentinel who has died at his post and returned, hundreds of times.
On the northeastern ridge, in the white tower of the Peace Chapel, the great horned owl called the Davaste tends to matters no blade can settle. In his purple chaplain’s robes he greets every newcomer personally, hears every warrior’s burden, and holds the highest wisdom in all of Heschland behind the gentlest eyes. He cannot fight — will not — and has never needed to. Even the deadliest warrior in the city comes, on rare evenings, to sit in his chapel in silence.
That warrior is worth a chapter of his own, because Heschland’s deadliest fighter is also its best-kept secret.
Carsius — Karsíon, in the old tongue — was not born to the owls, and was never welcomed by them. He hatched far away in the crocodile-infested waterways of the Panamanian jungles, a black-crested caracara among a species of scavengers and opportunists, mistrusted by many and respected by none. He learned early that strength without discipline invites extinction. So he crossed the seas to the Philippine Islands, where ancient masters of Escrima recognized in him something rare: not hunger for dominance, but hunger for understanding. They taught him flow, economy, and the principle that shaped his whole life — the weapon is not separate from the mind.
When he returned to a Talondot still tearing itself apart, he did not ask the owls’ permission to change it. He earned it. King Hoojah granted the outsider one chance — a trial bound by absolute adherence to the rules of the Gyre — and from that trust rose the War College that bears his name. Carsius built it, he says, not to raise armies but to reduce them. I train you hard, he tells his students, so the arena does not have to. Every warrior who enters the Gyre is his charge, and every death in it weighs on him.
But here is the secret only one soul in Heschland knows. Carsius is a shape-shifter. The quiet, warm-voiced great grey owl called Gyre, keeper of the Armory, who helps each new warrior choose a champion and find the weapon that fits — is Carsius. War Master by day, Armorer by night. Owl among owls; caracara alone. He can never fully belong to either of his lives, and he accepts that isolation as the price of his mission: to hold the arena’s integrity absolute, seen and unseen at once.
Anndrid discovered his double life long ago, and chose silence. They share no friendship, exactly — something sterner and better: mutual respect rooted in duty. When Anndrid speaks of permanence, Carsius listens.
For years, this was enough. The keepers kept. The peace held.
V. The Last of Their Kind
The warriors who fight in the Gyre come from every corner of Talondot, but the ones this story follows share a particular wound. The old wars did not only kill soldiers. They killed species. And the survivors of extinction carry a loneliness no victory can heal.
Bekárus — Beaker, to nearly everyone — hatched at dawn’s first light in the ancient Crimson Grove, a sacred woodland named for its red-leafed canopy. His white plumage blazes; his crow carries the promise of safety for all who seek shelter. He is brave, dependable, and beloved. He is also the last known rooster on Talondot. In all his travels he has never found another chicken of any kind, anywhere in the world. And so, when he founded his aviary west of the Gyre, he threw its doors open to precisely the warriors no one else would claim: the outcasts, and the last-of-their-kind.
That is how he came to stand beside Jorákon.
Jorak is ancient beyond measure — a red-crested cardinal who, in the age when Rome’s legions marched across Earth’s known world, served among them as a strategist whose brilliance turned the tide of battles. His kind once filled the skies from the western shores of the great continent to the Hawaiian Islands, their crimson plumes a symbol of victory. Then, battle by battle, campaign by campaign, Jorak watched his brothers fall until none remained. He carries a gladius and a legendary shield forged by Germanic smiths on the banks of the Rhine, blazoned with a phoenix — a reminder that even from extinction, fire can rise. His only weakness is the one he cannot put down: grief.
Beaker understood that grief better than anyone alive. Two warriors, both the last of their kind, standing together against extinction — their bond became the stuff of Heschland legend. So when a signal reached the city that somewhere across the world Jorak’s species might not be truly extinct after all, Beaker did not hesitate. He pledged everything he had to the search.
Around these two gathered the fighters every spectator in the Roost knows by name. Tamíra, the red-tailed hawk of the frozen boreal north, whose bo staff spins in a blur of gold and bronze and whose crimson tail feathers pulse with healing magic — a shadow with talons, so fast that by the time you see her coming, you are already falling. Her people’s windswept aviary perches on the northern hills above the Gyre, set high to catch the warm southern winds a hawk of the north needs. And Solaríana herself, the mage queen of the Ember Realm, still fiercely magnificent after two worlds, her flail almost an afterthought beside her fire.
And far to the south, in forests where no aviary flew a banner, there was a warrior no one in Heschland had ever heard of. Rishonna — Cardína — a northern cardinal who had lived for centuries in quiet solitude, believing herself the last of her kind. She kept no faction and fought no wars. She simply sang, and the forests listened. She had no idea that across the world a red-crested cardinal carried the very same grief with the very same silence.
Word of Jorak’s search would one day reach her. But by the time the two last cardinals found each other, something else would already be loose in Heschland.
VI. The Butcher Bird
He arrived as a craftsman, and Heschland loved him.
Laniandro — Shrike, in the common tongue — was everything a neutral city adores: talented, generous with his gifts, endlessly charming. He styled himself The Creator, and the name felt earned. He built things. He composed music. In the northeast heights overlooking the Peace Chapel he transformed his guild’s aviary into Club Shrike, a pulsing dance hall where warriors went to shed the weight of the arena — and there he presided from behind the turntables, DJ and host and life of every celebration, spinning tracks he had written himself while the flashing lights washed over the crowd.
The flashing lights hid what his eyes were doing.
Loggerhead shrikes carry an old, uncomfortable nickname among the birds of Earth: the butcher bird. Heschland would learn why. Beneath the charm, beneath the artistry, Laniandro was a cold and patient killer. He murdered quietly, indiscriminately, in secret — bodies appearing in the city without motive or pattern, suspicion falling on outsiders, on rival factions, on the Dead Woods. Never on the beloved craftsman. He was, after all, always the smartest bird in the room. He was certain of it.
And he wanted more than blood. From behind his turntables, Club Shrike doubled as a surveillance post; every warrior who danced there was studied. What Shrike coveted most sat a mile and a half south, behind iron doors three times the height of any warrior: the Treasury, and the purple amulet within it — the origin of all gem magic on Talondot. He had already taught himself to replicate Squawk Gems using stolen knowledge. The Amulétara was the source itself.
He waited years. That was the terrifying thing about him, Carsius would say later — not the knives, but the patience.
It was Anndrid who noticed it first: someone had been entering the Treasury archives at night. The sacred Earth documents Solaríana had entrusted to her keeping — the scrolls describing the blue planet, its history, its silence, and the way between worlds — had been read. By the time the pattern of murders and the pattern of thefts converged on a single name, it was too late. Shrike’s secret broke open, and Shrike was gone — vanished into the wilds of Talondot with the Amulet of the Ancients and the knowledge of Earth in his talons.
How does the most wanted fugitive in the world vanish without a trace? He doesn’t. He is helped — by the one bird in Heschland whose gifts could erase him. Rena, the fashionable red-winged blackbird who runs a little costume shop near the market quarter, is charming, disarming, and utterly forgettable when she wants to be. Which is exactly the point. Behind the warm smile lives the most skilled infiltrator on Talondot, a master of disguise and deception magic who can wear the face and voice of nearly any bird she has studied. And Shrike, who studied everyone from behind his turntables, had studied her longest of all. He courted her the way he courted the whole city — with charm, with artistry, with the flattery of being seen by The Creator himself. When he came to her needing to disappear, he spun her a story, and the finest deceiver in Heschland believed it. She lent him her craft. She covered his trail. She made the Butcher Bird vanish.
Then the murders came to light, and Jorak’s blood with them, and Rena understood in one annihilating moment what her gifts had purchased. The master of a thousand faces had been wearing one all along without knowing it: the mask of an accomplice. Some in Heschland say she was coerced; the truth is worse and simpler. She was deceived — out-deceived — and every corpse the fugitive leaves behind now is a debt written in her ledger. Rena does not deny it. She carries it.
For Anndrid, the theft was more than a crime. It was dishonor — a wound to fifteen hundred years of guardianship. The great dragon did something she had never done in all her centuries at the vault: she issued a challenge to the entire city. Find the Amulet of the Ancients. Bring it home.
Carsius put it to his students more bluntly. The Gyre, he told them, had always been training for something. Now they knew what. Do not underestimate Shrike. He is not just a thief — he is a killer. They call him the Butcher Bird for a reason. He is fast, ruthless, and patient. He waited years before breaching Anndrid’s Vault.
Others took up the hunt for pay. Among the Bounty Hunters Roost, the most capable operative is a harpy eagle named Hester — orphaned in the early days of the wars, raised as a squire under Carsius himself until a falling-out drove them apart, and now under contract with an unnamed client to bring the fugitive in. The hunter trained by the War Master, hunting the killer the War Master warned of.
But Shrike, on the run with nothing left to lose, had already fixed his eyes on something farther away than any bounty hunter’s reach. The stolen scrolls spoke of Earth — the distant blue planet where humans had thrived and then, four thousand years before Solaríana’s departure, vanished without explanation. The documents hinted that humanity had left something behind. Shrike became obsessed. Earth held answers. Or at the very least, Earth held a place where no one knew his crimes.
Before he could make that crossing, he would commit one more — and it would be the one Talondot never forgave.
VII. The Last Song
The miracle came first.
Word reached Heschland that another cardinal lived — a northern cardinal, singing alone in the southern forests. Jorak’s quest, the search Beaker had pledged everything to support, finally had an answer. Jorákon and Rishonna found each other at last: two warriors of different cardinal lineages, each of whom had spent centuries certain they were the last, standing wingtip to wingtip against extinction itself. They fought side by side. For the first time in living memory, neither of them was alone.
Then Shrike struck from the shadows.
Desperate to keep his secrets buried, the fugitive did what shrikes do. Jorákon — survivor of Rome’s wars and a species’ death, the Iron Will, the living monument to a forgotten people — fell to Laniandro’s butcher knives. The strategist who had eluded a thousand battlefields was murdered in the dark by a coward.
He did not die for nothing. Because of Jorak, because he searched and hoped when hope was irrational, the cardinal line survives — carried forward by Rishonna and the new generation that will follow her. But the cost was unimaginable, and Talondot has never stopped paying tribute to it. In the years since, the cardinal has become the most sacred symbol on the planet: the emblem of the truth that out of death comes new life. To this day, when a cardinal appears, the peoples of Talondot say a loved one is watching over you from a different realm. Jorákon’s sacrifice is never forgotten. His song echoes forever.
Heschland has a humbler echo of it too. In the city there lives a common citizen cardinal named Richard, no warrior at all, known only for one unfailing habit: he sings at dawn even in the harshest winters, perched on the highest branch while everyone else huddles in their nests. The city has come to depend on him. Perhaps that is what the symbol means in the end — not vengeance, not glory. Just a song that refuses to stop.
Rishonna could not hear it that way. Not yet. When she learned who had murdered Jorak, something broke inside her — and something far more dangerous took its place. The composed, regal warrior of the southern forests took up her golden spear and made a vow: she would hunt the Butcher Bird to the ends of the universe.
She would need to. Shrike had already gone farther than any fugitive in Talondot’s history. Using the knowledge stolen from Anndrid’s vault — the sacred scrolls, the science of the ancients, the way between worlds — Laniandro fled the planet entirely, navigating the void toward the blue planet of the silent humans. Somewhere on Earth, the Butcher Bird now walked free, styling himself once more as The Creator, carrying the Amulet of the Ancients and secrets that could unravel everything.
And Talondot could not afford to wait. In the mist-shrouded hills northwest of the castle, a shadow of the old world was stirring. An aviary glowed faintly there at night — the Aviary of the Dark Fairies, the most enigmatic faction ever to arrive in Heschland. Its first emissary was a wizard called Ninzatia, once of the Seeing Eye, Griselda’s elite assassins — the ones with a single eye where their sisters have none. Her presence proved what the old stories only feared: the Dark Fairies who fled Earth through the bean portals had found their way here. Whatever survived the Fairy Wars had come to Talondot. In the Dead Woods between the arena and the chapel, the skeletal trees had begun — impossibly — to bloom. Not with light.
The keepers of Heschland understood what that blooming meant. The Amulétara was more than a stolen treasure; it was the origin of all gem magic on Talondot, the deep wellspring of the peace itself. In the vault, guarded by a dragon, it had anchored the world the owls built. In the talons of a killer, on a planet the Dark Fairies knew of old, it was something else entirely: the one power that could arm the darkness gathering in the hills — and bring true war, the kind that ends species, screaming back to Talondot. Recovering the amulet was no longer a matter of honor. It was a matter of survival.
VIII. The Five
Rishonna meant to go alone.
That was the shape of her grief — one huntress, one spear, one vow, a vessel built from Anndrid’s ancient star-knowledge, and nothing aboard she could lose. She had spent centuries alone before Jorak. She knew how to do it. When the keepers pressed her to take companions, she refused them at the gangway, one by one.
It was Rena who broke her refusal — because Rena would not be refused. The blackbird came to her not with sympathy but with a confession, complete and unflinching: what she had done, how Shrike had done it to her, and what she alone now carried that no tracker or warrior could. I know his faces, she said. I made some of them. Rishonna, who wanted vengeance more than she wanted breath, understood in that moment what the spy was offering — not comfort, but the key to the one door her spear could never open. Shrike had never lost a fight he couldn’t flee. To finish him, someone would have to see through him first. She stepped aside, and Rena boarded, a deceiver sworn now to a single truth: vanquish the Butcher Bird, and carry the Amulet of the Ancients home to the vault in Heschland City, whatever it cost her.
And once the door was open, the others walked through it.
Hester came by contract and stayed by something older. The harpy eagle was already hunting Shrike for an unnamed client; a bounty hunter works alone, as a rule. But the night before the launch, a great grey owl visited the Bounty Hunters Roost — and spoke, briefly, in a voice Hester had not heard since he was a squire. Whatever passed between Carsius and his estranged apprentice, Hester arrived at the vessel at dawn with his contract folded away and his old master’s escrima drills in his wings. The War Master could not leave the Gyre. He sent his regret in the only form it has ever taken: someone he trained.
Tamíra came because every hunt bleeds. The red-tailed hawk had watched too many warriors carried to the Molt to believe a voyage like this one would need no healer — and she brought the other thing the crew lacked, the thing Shrike had never once been beaten by: speed. A shadow with talons, chasing a bird whose whole genius was escape. Let him run.
And Bekárus came because a pledge does not die with the one it was made for. Beaker had promised Jorak everything for the search that gave the cardinals a future; he stood on the gangway now and made the promise again, to a huntress instead of a brother. The last rooster on Talondot had opened his aviary to the last-of-their-kind. He was not about to let one of them cross the universe without him.
Five, then. The huntress. The spy. The tracker. The healer. The heart.
They launched at golden hour, because on Talondot it is always golden hour — the vessel rising from the northern highlands past the towers of castle and chapel, over the Gyre with its roaring crowds gone suddenly silent and staring upward, over the river turned to molten glass, over the southern waterfall where the whole valley converges and lets go. Anndrid watched from the Treasury steps between the twin stone dragons, fifteen hundred years of guardianship burning in her upturned eyes. Somewhere below, a common cardinal named Richard sang at the top of the highest branch.
Then Talondot fell away beneath them — the forests and the wetlands, the Ember Realm’s far volcanic glow, the scarred and stubborn world that had refused for so long to die — and the vastness took them. Five warriors in the dark between the stars, most of whom had never in their lives been anywhere else.
Five was a miscount.
Deep in the hold, folded between the supply crates with the patience of a creature who had once resisted eating a flying squirrel out of pure diplomacy, waited a fire raptor. Tuvaan — Pyranto, though the old tongue of his first world had named him Tulvaan, the peace-maker, a destiny assigned at his first breath — had told no one he was coming. Not the crew. Not the keepers. And above all not his queen, Solaríana, whose personal emissary he had been across two worlds and fifteen centuries, and who would sooner have chained him to the Ember Realm than let him make this crossing.
But Tuvaan was the only soul aboard who had ever seen the blue planet. He alone remembered it — the barley fields and the thunderclouds, Crystal Mountain rising over the Forgotten Woods, the long river-road to the nymph queen’s cavern. He had flown those skies at Alice’s side in the age of the Fairy Wars. And he carried out of that age a debt no one else even knew was owed: it was Tuvaan who bore the Elf King’s locked box to Queen Jadayna — the box that held the wizard’s emerald, the gift that would one day let the nymphs walk on dry land and dream of conquest. He never knew what he carried. Neither had Rena. The peace-maker and the deceiver were mirror souls, unknowing accomplices of two different villains — except that Rena had confessed her debt on a gangway in front of a huntress, and Tuvaan had folded his silently into a cargo hold.
Earth had unfinished business with him. He meant to answer for it.
So it was not five who left Talondot, but six — the huntress, the spy, the tracker, the healer, the heart, and hidden beneath them all, the one who remembered the way. Ahead, invisible at this distance, a blue planet waited: silent of humans, ignorant of the killer walking free upon it, holding somewhere in its shadows a purple gem that two worlds now depended on.
Behind them, the song refused to stop.
Here ends the first chronicle of the Aviary Wars. The hunt on the blue planet is another story — and it has already begun.
The Aviary Wars universe — Talondot, Heschland City, and all characters and places herein — is an original creation of David H. Smith Jr. and Beakin Network Developing LLC, Corning, New York. All rights reserved.