August 28th
West Siberian Plain
Late Afternoon, six hours after "Prelude to Singspiel"
"C-aw!"
The rubble left in the wake of Shiseiten's death - not to mention the colossal corpse of the creature itself had become a carrion feeding frenzy. Flecks of black riddled a clouded sky, so thickly they could almost have been thought to be locusts gathering to swarm - close, but not quite.
Hundreds, thousands of Siberian crows had descendied on the beast to feed, the air full of their trilling, guffawing, and the constant gnashing and pecking of their beaks. The meat was good - still fresh, and somehow warm, somewhere on the tongue and in texture between boiled crabmeat and rancid beef. The scavengers thought little of its slightly unusual taste - it was not rotten, and far be it from they to look a gift horse (or whatever sort of beast whose flesh this had belonged to, for that matter) in the mouth.
For the next hundred years, there would be a variety of interesting reports circulating from the region about some bizarre mutations and behavior of the local wildlife. The way they would follow those soon to be dead - and their strange, eerie silence as they did so. It would come to be known as the "тихое поле" - the Silent Fields.
Yet, that was likely not her reason for visiting.
Nestled amongst the debris, thankfully a fair distance from the corpse-feast, were bits and pieces of deep black shrapnel, studded and driven so hard into the earth as to be almost immovable, gleaming like obsidian in the fading light. Whatever was reflected in their surfaces was far from pleasant, as though each contained a fragment of a brooding, irate consciousness.
But, what of its owner?
West Siberian Plain
Late Afternoon, six hours after "Prelude to Singspiel"
"C-aw!"
The rubble left in the wake of Shiseiten's death - not to mention the colossal corpse of the creature itself had become a carrion feeding frenzy. Flecks of black riddled a clouded sky, so thickly they could almost have been thought to be locusts gathering to swarm - close, but not quite.
Hundreds, thousands of Siberian crows had descendied on the beast to feed, the air full of their trilling, guffawing, and the constant gnashing and pecking of their beaks. The meat was good - still fresh, and somehow warm, somewhere on the tongue and in texture between boiled crabmeat and rancid beef. The scavengers thought little of its slightly unusual taste - it was not rotten, and far be it from they to look a gift horse (or whatever sort of beast whose flesh this had belonged to, for that matter) in the mouth.
For the next hundred years, there would be a variety of interesting reports circulating from the region about some bizarre mutations and behavior of the local wildlife. The way they would follow those soon to be dead - and their strange, eerie silence as they did so. It would come to be known as the "тихое поле" - the Silent Fields.
Yet, that was likely not her reason for visiting.
Nestled amongst the debris, thankfully a fair distance from the corpse-feast, were bits and pieces of deep black shrapnel, studded and driven so hard into the earth as to be almost immovable, gleaming like obsidian in the fading light. Whatever was reflected in their surfaces was far from pleasant, as though each contained a fragment of a brooding, irate consciousness.
But, what of its owner?
