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    "Look mama, look! Birds!"

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    The sky is filled black, smoke and grime blotting out the blessed sun like a perverse mist, and the stench of ash and decay hangs in the air, a warning to whomever feels the courage to venture out. It has been many days since the last battle tore the hamlet asunder, and yet still people are to afeared to make their way to their fallen families, too afraid of the gore and needless death that awaits them. Pestilence and famine are all that await regardless, for the bloated, halved bodies of fallen men poison the air and poison the earth, bringing death with their presence, just as they had in life.

    Heroes, they strove to be. Men of the cloth and sword, fighting for God and for the righteous path of their lords and ladies, and yet it is particularly fitting that their final resting place be not a glorious tomb or mausoleum, but instead the filth-filled mud within the outskirts of a poor village. The earth is stained rust brown with blood, flies rejoicing with the waste, buzzing around lazily to land and consume the fallen and yet to fall.

    Yet it is no surprise, no wonder, that such a tragic, traumatic event has taken place. The nobility cares nothing for those that fall in the name of their conquests. So long as they exist, there shall always be conflict; one shall always possess what the others desire. Greed motivates their every action, and through subtlety, intrigue, and all-out war, they attempt to intimidate each other, to kill, to murder.

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    "Mama, where has papa gone?

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    Their reasons are nothing more than foolish, spurned on by the need to acquire more wealth, more land, and more possessions then they could ever need in ten lifetimes over. Yet still they fight, sending forth men trained for the sole purpose of wreaking death upon each other, just like a perverse game of chess, only instead of cracked pieces and marble boards, the skirmishes are played out with flesh and blood upon hand-tilled land. The peasantry are merely pawns in that grand game, and it seems as if it doesn't matter if they are cut down like the crops they farm, so long as they do not hamper the efforts of the rich. Blood is spilled, families torn asunder, and yet still the futility and carnage continues. There are ghosts of cries for mercy in the still air, and the entire site seems to resonate with regret.

    Somewhere, a child cries, harsh, shrill, and clings to her mother with wide, curious eyes. She does not know the horrors of what transpired, of how small her existence is to those that lord over her. In time she will learned who killed her father, of why he was forced to fight for what he did not believe in, but innocence has yet to be tainted. All she knows is of the great black flock descending upon the open fields, of the ravenous screeching as scavengers descent to devour the flesh of those that have slain and been slain.

    Her small prayers for her father's safe return go unanswered as spirits in the form of great black birds arrive to consume the dead and take them to the afterlife. God does not watch over her village anymore. There is only strife, pain, and the eternal whisper of feathers littering the ground.

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    "Mama, what is that?"

    "Murder, bebe. A murder of crows."

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