An ice cold rain fell this morning.

Now that it comes down to it, I’m having trouble putting pen to page.

I awoke in the cabin to a pattering on the roof and a chill in the air. The edges of the doorframe were ringed in dew from outside, the wood catching the cold with me. I climbed out of my sleeping bag, pet the dog on my way up, and marched to the door in as few clothes as I ever wear to bed, in this case just my pants. I opened the door to a light fog and a strengthening rain that painted the misty woods a shade greyer. The rain came down without a hint of wind. It was near freezing. I stood there for a while, watching it come down, before retiring back to my sleeping bag where the rest of my clothes lay.

I put on my shirt and furs and boots, gathered my back pack, ax and gun, and went out into the rain. It soaked through my furs from collar down, streams trickling down my chest and back, sending shivers up my spine. There was no wind, as I’ve said; that is, however, the only respite I had. It was not a gentle rain. Yes, the drops fell without sting, but a downpour is a downpour.

I shuffled past the water-logged firepit, looking passingly into the filling stew pot, the grease from the previous night’s dinner now floating on a few inches of water, making rainbows on the surface. I untied Feltheart from his post, brushed his mane through my fingers, and walked on.

The smells of rain and pine filled my head while I trekked through the forest, pushing aside newly displaced brush along one of my many paths. I’d found a hill a kilometer from the cabin days before, where the trees cleared as the mound peaked. It is, as far as I know, the highest point within a day’s walk.

The trail began to disappear as I went, drudged into a mire with the rain. My boots were often completely lost in the mud, at times needing to be pulled away from the ground. The mud was soon hidden by a layer of water up to my ankles. I only came loose of it when I found the base of the hill, where my trail had been turned into a downward stream. I couldn’t help recalling the avenue in San Francisco where Harrison had fallen. I nearly fell myself, though my hand caught a branch on the way down. I looked down the hill while I picked myself up and saw, to my astonishment, that a good four feet of water now churned white below me, and was ever rising. The rain was falling so harshly by then that my eyes were being constantly blinded by it, and so I had to wipe them all the time just to be able to see. They stang. My mind turned to Feltheart and the dog, who were, no doubt, being overtaken at camp. They were, however, unchained and free to use whatever instincts and facilities they needed to survive the flood. More importantly, they weren’t of any immediate importance to the mission, and so I flushed them from my mind.

I dragged myself up the hill, pulling on needle-rich pine branches to keep my balance, finding footholds in whatever nook wasn’t made entirely of mud. My legs burned. A hot stone formed in my side, and my breathing pumped molten lead into it. All the weeks’ work found me at once, there as I supported myself in the deluge.

The trees cleared ahead and the slope leveled into flat ground. The river raged past, only a degree calmer there at the top. I stepped forward into the clearing, a circle of meadow not more than a stone’s toss across, and heaved breath against a tree. I threw the hair from my face and wiped my eyes clear long enough to guess a path forward. I went on, toward the middle, hearing the water gathering downhill, inching closer.

The meadow was a little hill in itself, the middle of it raised slightly from the edges, and it was there, on the peak, that I stopped and looked to the sky, waiting.

There came a rumbling from above, like a great, distant thunderclap. They should have been there, already; I should have seen them from the cabin, or so the prophecy said. I realized then it might not have been a prophecy after all, and that important things are meant to repeat, altered, like the rhyming of a poem. I realized the story may have been just that, a story, or a time-faded account of something real. Time is an illusion, after all, and what better way for time to obscure an event than when moving backwards? Is this what a prophecy is? Staring up into the rain I thought it all seemed a lot clearer than in Anne’s account. Living a myth. What a beautiful thing. What a frightening thing. The thunder grew closer.

I drew the ax from my back pack. I’d sharpened it on river stones many times over the weeks and never was it sharper than that moment. A silvery wedge on a wood stump, yet what power it held to me! Alone I was, perhaps more alone than any man before, and wielding a silvery wedge on a wood stump.

Over the trees came three specks of black in the cloudy grey, quivering with the wind, shuttering with hunger. Somehow I could feel what they felt. They were creatures of Earth, of the painting, and so they were me. I felt their bloodlust, the consuming emptiness, and how unnatural it all was. They flew closer, so that I could see their great, black wings flapping, mangled and matted. These were vessels, unwilling vessels for a power beyond their understanding. Their hunger was a trick. I pitied them. They would never know love like us on this Earth. They are that part of us which is destined to be destroyed in the name of good. Most don’t have a choice.

I saw their faces, old and grey, tired. A whole lifetime spent under the spell of the Other. What would it feel like? Did they wish to be free, once? Did they ever try to escape, to fly away in vain? There are some things you can’t fly away from, I suppose, chief among them being yourself, or what lies inside.

I raised my ax to the air, pointing the edge to them. Soon, they were above the hill, hovering over the trees. I could taste formaldehyde and sulphur, even over the rain. Their wing wind battered against the trees, bending the boughs away from under them in a perfect circle. The wind whipped at me, beat on my ears. I held my ax steady against them. They showed no fear.

Two of them dove to my sides, the leader coming at me from the front, the three of them forming a perfect triangle with me in the center. Disoriented, I grabbed the ax with both hands and went to block the two behind me. It was no use. I managed to catch two talons with the hilt, but the other four found their marks in my side and back, ripping gashes up and across my body as they passed. I was nearly deafened by the sound and cried out in frustration, the kind one feels when trapped in certain pain, present and future.

The three of them whipped around me, turning again to strike. The time for honorable combat was over. I pulled Coen’s revolver from my pocket and aimed it at the leader, who dove toward me, and shot. Bang. The wings crumpled and the black mass struck the muddy slope with a terrific crash.

The other two shrieked and finished their new swiping runs, their bloody talons slashing my back from shoulder to leg. I fell into the mud and, with the impact of the fall, lost the gun. My back screamed in blistering pain, the rain falling into the canyons where their attacks had carved my flesh apart. The mud around me was painted crimson as I dripped into it.

From the ground I heard the wings turn again. My only thought at that moment, at the precipice of death, was that I had failed. Charles Duval wasn’t the right man after all. I had chosen wrongly.

I heard another screech from behind me, a shriek of anger. Only the free, I find, are allowed to show their anger.

I turned to see a third figure in the sky between them, one much smaller and swifter than they. The two diverted course in fear, but in vain. Alice intercepted one as it broke to the left and attached herself to its wing. They danced in the air, twisting and tumbling into each other.

Seeing the threat had been evaded, the other redirected back to me, though its path was now clear. I had lost the gun, but my right hand still clung to the ax, and so I lifted it just as the harpy passed, and brought it down on its head. A third of the head sliced clean off, gushing brain and blood onto me, and the creature was sent into the muddy river below, twisted, dead.

I used what strength I had to stand and found Alice still attached to the third creature by the wing. It writhed on the ground, covering its black coat with brown and red. I came toward them, each step flexing open my wounds. They were locked in a death match, each fighting with the ferocity of a wild beast, ripping tufts of feathers and flesh from each other. My legs couldn’t carry me fast enough. I raised my ax and brought it down on its neck, severing its head from its body in one swing, like the ax of an executioner.

I collapsed into the flowing water next to it. My breathing was ragged and the world spun. My vision became cloudy as I laid there, head toward the body.

Out from the feathers and mud came the slight frame of the darling child, my sweet Alice, who waded through the water to me and settled into my outstretched arms. I pulled her into me and brushed the mud and blood away from her feathers. Feathers.

“You’ve grown so much, sweet child,” I said, my voice low. “You’ve grown real feathers now, haven’t you?

She cooed and pushed her head into my chest. I felt warmth unlike any I’d ever felt.

“I haven’t missed too much, have I?”

She lifted her head to meet my eyes. She smiled.

“Dada.”

My tears mixed with the rain. I sat up and held her in my arms, feeling the blood pour from our wounds and mix in my lap. I ran my finger through her feathers. Her eyes flickered.

“You are free, Alice. Go on. I’ll meet you there.”

Her smile widened as her eyes slowed their flickering, and stood still, open. I closed them for her.

I sit at my desk in the cabin, a beam of sunlight shining through my window onto me. My mission is complete, and now I’ve accepted another. I must meet Alice. I promised.