The sun hadn't risen yet, but I knew it was coming. That thin lavender edge of light was creeping across the eastern hills, painting the vineyard rows in mourning colors.
I hadn't fed in weeks.
The thirst scraped down the back of my throat like sandpaper. My skin felt stretched thin over my bones, everything tasted of iron and silence.
I wandered the edge of the vineyard, just past the crumbling irrigation line, where the orchard lay in the distance—half-forgotten, half-dead. The trees had gone feral, tangled and overripe. Their branches gnarled into clawed gestures, heavy with fruit that had begun to rot where it clung.
It had once been a place of quiet. But today, the air there felt wrong.
There was a tension to it,
Like something waiting.
---
The orchard used to be mine.
When I was young, I would hide there with books stolen from my father's study. I could name every tree, every stone in the soil, the old boulder near the cypress tree where I'd carved my initials in a fit of pride and solitude.
Now, I couldn't tell if it was memory pulling me here or something darker.
I stepped into the orchard barefoot. The grass was brittle and sharp against my skin. A few bees clung stubbornly to fallen fruit. The wind carried the scent of fermentation—sweet and rotten and cloying. The hunger in me sharpened.
I didn't know why I'd come here.
To remember?
To disappear?
I felt strangely hollow—as if my body were only the echo of itself, paper-thin and fluttering in a breeze that didn't quite exist.
Then came the sound.
---
A single scream split the air—high, jagged, distinctly human.
I froze.
My mind scrambled to identify it. Male? Female? Old? Young?
And then came the flapping—an impossible number of wings, rising all at once, blackening the sky.
Crows.
Hundreds of them, thousands.
They erupted from the branches as if the orchard itself were being exorcised. Their cries were deafening. Not bird-like at all—more like knives dragged across glass, or shrieking metal. Some even sounded like voices.
I fell to my knees, covering my ears.
The wind lashed through the trees, hot and hard and sudden. Branches cracked, fruit exploded on the ground. The sky above was a cyclone of black feathers and noise and chaos.
I waited for claws, for beaks. For the inevitable tearing of flesh.
But nothing touched me.
And then—
Silence.
---
I looked up.
There were no birds.
No trace.
The orchard stood still, as it had always stood. The branches unbroken, and the sky clear.
My breathing was ragged. I pressed my hands to the earth to steady myself and found the ground cold and indifferent. There was no feather in my palm. No blood on my skin, and no scent of birds in the air.
Only the sour rot of old apples and the metallic sting in my throat.
Had I imagined it?
It felt too vivid and too near.
But maybe that was what madness did. Maybe, after all this time, it had finally crept in. I had spoken to bottles, argued with shadows. Sung lullabies to a deer that didn't understand me. Maybe this was only the next step.
Hallucination.
My mind rebelling against the body's starvation.
---
I rose on shaking legs, still dizzy from the noise that hadn't been real.
Or had it?
I didn't know anymore.
The cellar had been safe, quiet and predictable in its decay. But the orchard had opened something. Memory or madness—I couldn't tell. The lines had blurred.
When I reached the stone path again, I looked back.
The trees stood as they always had. Nothing moved.
But the feeling remained.
Like something had touched the world and then slipped away.
---
Back in the cellar, I didn't light a candle.
I didn't want to see myself. The trembling, the wide eyes, and the hollowness.
I sank to the floor, back against the wall. My mouth was dry, my jaw locked tight. I could hear the wind brushing past the slit in the ceiling, and I imagined it carried the scent of crows.
Not wine.
Not blood.
Just smoke and feathers and voices that weren't mine.
I told myself I was simply tired.
That the hunger had finally broken something.
But I couldn't stop thinking of the orchard.
How the crows had screamed in a voice I knew.
How they'd vanished without a trace.
And how, for one terrible moment, the world had felt like it wasn't mine anymore.
It belonged to the illusion.
Or worse—
To something watching me through it.