Member-only story
The Way a Songbird Dies
The cage is beautiful, but it’s still a cage.
The market is silent tonight, but it was not always this way.
Once, gods and monsters walked these same dusty paths. Horned women in crimson robes bartered with hags who were no more than four heads high. Men with skin the color of sapphires spoke in languages lost to human ears, and goblins offered handmade curses in exchange for secrets from the babble of babes. It had been a different time when magic coated the world like a cocoon.
But then the shell cracked, the metamorphosis incomplete, and the magic died on the lips of sorcerers whose names existed before written words and the ink that was their blood.
I wish I could say all shreds disappeared, lost to the ether of time.
But no. That is not the path this world took.
The market now exists in the hush between snatches of conversation.
And I?
I lost my voice — human, tranquil, mine — to the market when I was only a child.
They call me Songbird because the only thing that leaves my lips is birdsong.
They think it funny, the name they chose for me, because I do not have the power of words to say aloud my true name — the one I was given at birth, the…
