Bird Words: A Cithara Tale
The First and the Last Chapter
A city. Manehatten. A hole, in the side of a tall building.
Midnight. Winter.
There's a storm howling.
Oriana sat across from Ovidus, a rusted sheetmetal barrel between them. Keeping them warm were their heavy coats and the fire within the barrel. The structure offered no warmth, since there were holes in its walls and the wind would blow right in. The holes had been around longer than the two griffons had. Much longer.
"Are we certain this is where we're meeting him?" Ovidus asked, his eyes drawn to the dancing orange light licking at the snowflakes just above the rim of the barrel.
Oriana's downward feather plume flickered, a moment of thought passing. "Are we?" Her eyes were locked on a hole in the bottom of the barrel, where a glint of light was poking through, like a needle in the eye. She figured they were in the right place. She didn't care if they weren't. The wind was too cold and too hellishly violent for any flying, and the stairwells and hallways in the tower would be billowing with focused gusts. Even if there were somewhere else to be, they were ill equipped to be going anywhere else.
"I'd say we are. What do you say? He did say to meet at the barrel. It'd be the only one lit, he said."
His sister pulled her coat further around herself, finding it insufferably insufficient in the wind. Organic material was nice for retaining warmth, but it was doing her poorly protecting from the cold. There was a good reason the city below grew quiet this time of year. The cold killed faster than bullets. Well, sometimes.
"There could very well be another barrel in another building, though I'm sure we both agree that would be an oversight on his end," she said, exhaling sharply out her nostrils after speaking.
"He's got another thing coming if he thinks we'd move in this storm."
"And what are you going to do to him? Poison his beer again?"
"Two drops phenolphthalein, 'stead of one this time. Give him the shits for a week."
"You only got the first vial from our last visit to the Tenpony eggheads, and there's no guarantee they'll have more-" She paused, looking up at him, her eyes in a squint. "Say, what'd you do with the rest of it? That compound was expensive."
He chuckled, looking out into the whiteout. The wind howled for a moment, the metal scream of colossal infrastructure shaking the rebar and I-beams as two hundred years of erosion and damage made its presence clear.
The silence that followed was filled by the rushing winds. There were times when the whole city felt haunted, and this was one of them.
Ovidus shuddered, pulling his coat tighter and getting closer to the flame. "Yeah, uh, remember that job a few weeks back? The one with the-"
"Chainsaw cannon or the thing with the jaw?"
"The bird thing, actually."
"The flaming one?"
"No, the big, white one without any feathers. Screamed like hell? Liquefied some of those other mercs we were with?"
"The lab job, right. Thanks for reminding me."
"Right. Well, while we were waiting in the chem wing, I took a peek through one of those formula catalogs and found myself some, uh, learning material. Can't remember what I had to use, but those flashy vial explosives we used as distractions were made from, you know, all the stuff. Had to time the mixtures right, though. Stuff cooked fast."
Something in the burn barrel shifted and the fire flickered, embers drifting up and getting snuffed out in the wind.
Oriana closed her eyes and sighed. "I want to lie down. The air is cold and the fire is warm and comforting. Probably what he wants us to do, then he'll show and squawk at us for sleeping."
"You really think he'd stick out in this weather just for that?"
"Well, no. He's obviously got something else on his mind. Knowing him, though, if he isn't pressed for time, I think its something he'd do."
"You know him better than I do, so, I'll take your word for it." Ovidus was growing weary. "Normally when he asks us to meet, there's cover, or something we'd be able to shelter behind. This time feels odd. Our only cover is the storm. Things can get through the storm."
Oriana sighed again, this time a little more anxiously. "I know. It's been concerning me. We can assume there's no one out there because of the weather, but still. There're ways around the cold, and this barrel's not exactly keeping us hidden."
"It is keeping us warm, though," Ovidus said, his upward plume feathers ruffling a bit before he tossed his hood over them and pulled it down snug. "Sadly for us, this warmth is anchoring us here out of convenience. So, he definitely wants us here."
"Hrmph." Oriana pulled her scarf up a little higher, over her beak. "I'm really starting to hope this isn't about another job. It's been miserably cold lately. Jobs in the cold suck." She was pouting a little, blowing air out her nostrils again. Ovidus shifted his wings, his feathers ruffling and shuffling quietly, and he sighed too.
They were quiet for a little more, eventually staring at each other, looking at their near-identical faces, both of them breathing slow and quietly. They were like gargoyles huddled around a pyre, lapsing into mutually grim silences. When it was deemed acceptable to speak again, questioned by a slight shift in eyelid positioning and confirmed with a calm blink, Ovidus broke eye contact and stared once more into the dark, his focus drawn to the dark doorway to his right and Oriana's left. Further inside, the rest of the building sounded like a mix of a chorus of wails and the most chaotic racket of trash being blown around you'd ever had the displeasure of hearing. Ovi frowned. Oriana noticed his look and spoke first, peering out into the violent flurry to her right.
"All things considered, he did pick out an okay-ish meeting spot. Wind is mostly blocked by the debris, and almost nothing is coming from the doorway. Stuff's still getting blown around here, duh, but it doesn't seem as bad as elsewhere. Hard to be sure about that, though. Maybe his pick was random? Hard to imagine him being random, though. He's always been meticulous and particular."
"I'll take your word for it. You know him better than I do."
"Sometimes I doubt that."
"Doubt what?"
"How well I know him. For all his eccentricities, he's always been thoughtful."
"Thoughtful how? In a good way?"
"In a pragmatic way. He thinks. A lot. And that makes me wonder if there's some order to his chaos."
"Nah, it'd make more sense to call it harmonious chaos. Order means there's, well, order. Order and chaos don't mix. Harmony, though? Yeah, you can slot that in with chaos. Kinda like those scatter plot charts back in Saltmire Manufacturing. Looks like a bunch of random dots, but they usually all go in one direction."
Oriana rapped her talons on the concrete ground, thinking. "Well...Yeah, I understand that."
They lapsed into a more comfortable silence after that, the wind gradually dying down to a slightly less murderous speed and all the stress-inducing background noise lowered in it's oppressive volume. The two took the opportunity to sit back up and strain their ears, listening for approaching flapping. A slight break in the wind might've meant-
"You think he's coming? This'd be the first chance he'd have to make any sort of glide in hours," Ovidus asked, getting a little excited by the slight change in scenario.
"Shush! Keep listening. Last thing we want is to be taken by surprise. What if is isn't him that shows up? We need to be ready," said Oriana in a more hushed tone, barely audible over the wind. Nonetheless, Ovidus heard and nodded, steadying his breathing, listening with Oriana.
The wind picked up slightly in the next few minutes, before dropping down a bit more than it had before. The two griffons moved back, having heard a deep, leathery fwoosh not far off, and weren't surprised when the person of their mentioning landed not far from the howling edge.
Before them was a thin torso'd, heavy legged 'adolescent' dragon still in his biped years, dressed in heavy insulatory attire and a big, ragged red trenchcoat that was clearly meant for someone a bit taller than he. A big toothy grin was plastered to his face as he shook the frost and snow off himself, wiping his sleeves on a pair of thick flight goggles before pulling them down around his neck. His silvery eyes met theirs and he laughed rather joyously, fighting to keep his wings tucked in as the wind picked back up. He staggered forward after wresting himself from the torrent of air and knelt down next to the barrel, taking his gloves off and sticking his hands right into the blaze, sighing blissfully. The two griffons just stared, acknowledging his presence with icy stares. His approach had brought a lot of cold air with him, and his arrival had essentially tossed it all their way.
"Sorry about the rough spot. Wasn't anticipating the drafty weather n' all," the chalky pale dragon said with a laugh, moving a satchel from his side over into his lap after he had removed his now sooty hands from the fire.
"Mind telling us why we're here? You didn't exactly go into details in your note," Oriana said, leaning toward the fire again.
The dragon's expression lit up at the question, and he undid his satchel's loops and buckles. "That, my dear feathery friend, is a great question. A question that I will waste no time in answering and immediately get to without delay!" he exclaimed, puffing his chest up a bit as he talked. "Now then, you two have been fetching parts for me and doing all sorts of other nasty things that I never had the time for myself, and while I'm still maintaining my 'no-questions-asked' policy, I would like to share a little side thing I've been working on. Now before you start worrying about favors, consider this part of payment for the chicken thing. Honestly, I doubt there's anything that'll make up for having to deal with...it, so, yeah." He shrugged, an awkward silence hanging in the bitterly cold air until he reached down into his bag and pulled out three tall bottles of an amber booze, a custom label printed onto each.
"Had to clear and clean a huge swatch of a bottling plant to make these, so, do be careful? I'd like you to keep the bottles."
He handed over one to each bird at the same time, keeping one for himself. Ovidus looked at his, seeing an artistic print of a dragon's tail swooshing around a bottle, some words printed above and beneath.
"Quincy's Quivering Whopper Whiskey..." read Ovidus aloud, raising a brow at it. "You make your own moonshine now? Since when?"
"Since you put that devilish liquid in my swill and kept me stuck to a toilet for days!" replied Quincy with a laugh, his eye twitching a little. "Now hush, I didn't do the same thing to these. I'll get you back some other day, but today, we drink! I put a lot of work into getting this shit right, so, hopefully you'll like it as much as I do. I don't have a lot of folks I trust enough to drink with around the holidays, so, Happy Hearthswarming, I suppose."
And so they drank.
Author's Note
I like this.