Black Wings

Three were sent to kill a beast. One came back to become something worse.

Jannik tied his boot a third time. It always came undone right before something bad happened. Like his mother’s throat. Like that cow last full moon. He looked up at the moon and tugged harder.

“It’s getting fatter,” muttered Gils, the youngest. He carried the torch backward, like a candle on a grave.

“No, boy,” said Soren. “It’s just getting hungrier.”

They were the lowest the castle could offer. Scour-boys, barely trained, dressed in pieced-together armor that smelled like other people’s mistakes. Every three months, after the fat bat took someone, the gate would creak open and out they’d go, like loose teeth spat into a ditch.

The swamp greeted them with its usual perfume: dead roots, wet meat, and something older that smiled beneath the water. Somewhere ahead, the bat-beast was sleeping or counting ribs. No one ever found the bodies whole.

Jannik held the rope. Soren had the cage. Gils, somehow, had been entrusted with the blade.

“I’m not killing it,” Gils said. “I’ll do the trapping, maybe a poke. But not the killing.”

“No one ever gets to the killing part,” Jannik said. “That’s why we’re here.”

The castle behind them vanished in the mist. The path curved toward the black stream that reflected the moon’s dark red belly. Trees stood like punished monks, all leaning away from the hill that birthed the shriek. The one they never put on the maps.

Then it came. The howl.

It wasn’t sound. It was a pressure. Like someone whispering into your bones through a mouthful of rot. Gils dropped the blade. The torch went out. Soren said, calmly, “It’s coming.”

They saw the castle rise first—not theirs, the other one. It shouldn’t have been real. Jagged, angled wrong, perched like a bird with broken wings halfway up the cliff.

And then the wings. Not flapping—suspended, like a marionette forgotten mid-air. They stretched wide, stitched from fog and disease. The bat-beast uncurled, its mouth a lantern of bile-yellow mist. Sunflowers bloomed in the dark around it, growing from the swamp in time with its breathing.

The murder of birds—shadow-birds—spiraled up and around the moon. The beast shrieked again, and the mist from its mouth coiled down into the water like it was feeding something beneath it.

Soren turned to run, but the air held him still.

“I can’t,” he said. “I think I’m listening.”

Jannik looked at Gils. The boy had knelt. Not praying. Swaying. Matching the pulse of something no one taught him.

The moon pulsed once.

Soren vomited black.

The trees leaned farther away.

The bat-beast landed without sound. Its claws unfolded like surgical shears. Its belly swayed—fat from months of feeding.

Jannik stepped forward.

“You were supposed to slay it,” Gils whispered.

Jannik smiled without joy.

“I came to feed it.”

The next moon rose untouched.

And in the castle, only two scour-boys returned. One couldn’t speak. The other didn’t blink.

The third? The third was still out there.

Practicing how to shriek.