Salt crunched beneath Morwyn’s fingers as she grasped the top of the rocky tower. Brackish mist rose from the ever-pounding waves upon the sea stack, wetting her lips yet parching them, obscuring the waters beneath so this spire and the others nearby breached the fog like rotten teeth.
The crown was a haphazard tangle of wood and bone, home of the creature she sought. Crawling on her belly through ancient stonelike twigs and clawing branches, Morwyn slithered her way through to the centre, a great bowl, in search of the Rocbird.
This was the final nest, surrounding spires topped only with bleached bones older than her most sacred of songs, those her mother’s line had kept as they fled grasslands with giant beasts and deadly flies.
One of those sang of a cureall: scales of a Rocbird taken in conflict; ground with a mother’s blood given willingly; simmered beneath the pure notes of a child’s song. Boiled in broth it would cool fever and banish red boils. Boils her daughter and half the village wore.
Dense twigs caught her dark hair, elkskin jerkin, and the haft of her axe; its flaked edge planing the dead wood of the inner nest as she inched her way through. Her hands found empty air and Morwyn heaved through the dense wall into the open sky. The creature was not here, but three great smooth stones, laced with quartz, sat upon a bed of fetid loam.
She dug into this rotting carpet, grease and ichor smeared her arms as she quested with cold numb fingers for the verdant green scales of the creature. She found none.
A piercing mewling cry cut over the reverberating waves, and Morwyn saw a shape like a spear cut through the root of a spreading cloud. The nest was open and the floor dense, so she dove into the rotting mulch, wrapping it around her like a warm pelt fresh from its first wash. Its clawing, clogging, stench filled her nose and ears as she wriggled beneath the surface, keeping a small opening in the rot to spy the outside.
The great worm plummeted into the nest, slowing itself with a single mighty beat of its scaled wings, as wide as the boughs of an oak tree. It circled, feathered crimson eyes scanning, forked tongue darting; sniffing at the small hole Morwyn had torn in the floor as she entered. Then it curled its spined hulk around the giant stones, settling not a hand span from where she hid.
A wall of life saving scales sat within reach, Morwyn quietly dug into her skreppa for a flintknife, wrapped and glued with sinew by her daughter. She carefully reached out to scrape.
The Rocbird exploded into movement, unwinding, spines flinging twigs, dirt, and Morwyn around the great bowl. It quickly moved to put itself between her and the false clutch; then charged.
She tried to dive to the side but was slick with filth and fell awkwardly. Great talons cut into her body as she was caught and lifted into the air by the beating of wings. The spire with its tangled crown fell away, and they quickly reached the realm of clouds and stars, the swelling ocean far beneath them.
It would drop her, follow her screams, and feast upon the bloody pulp she would leave in the foam. Pulling her axe from the loop at her waist she drove the edge into the long scaly belly of the beast. She drove it hard and deep, to cling to its body like a leech, to hang and stick too close for its limbs to reach her.
With a stone grip she clung to her axe, free hand still holding the flintknife which had awoken this raging beast. She stabbed, cut, and sawed at the shimmering flank of scales before her, flensed them away, exposed the deep red flesh beneath.
It screamed and roared with every stroke of her blade, tumbling, flipping, and spinning; each attempt to dislodge foiled as every cut gave Morwyn new purchase, such that her legs now tucked safely beneath the slimy skin of the creature, cushioned by the innards she butchered and discarded to the sky.
She broke a great white tendon in the charnel cave she had carved, and it whipped her face, turning her world red and dark, as a deep cut bled from a ruined eye. The wing above collapsed, folded in on itself, and the pair plummeted to the ocean; a duet of screams and fury. Morwyn did not close her eye, yet the force of the Rocbird breaking upon the water extinguished her mind until she woke within a dark and choking struggle beneath the waves. She wormed out from the corpse and kicked to a surface of air and seaborne rage.
Only after the cutting stones of a beach welcomed her to land, after scaling the steep cliffs to the sharp bracken did she relax the grip of her hand to see with her remaining eye the iridescent scales of her salvation.