“If one day I lost these feathered limbs, would I then be beautiful?”
The mountain peak looks down at the mortal hamlet. It whispers promises of riches and divinity, the heavens of a feathered folk proud to forsake the earth and the flightless.
Nikko looks out the window at the falling snow and sighs. She wraps herself in wool and covers her whole head. The humans never let her forget that removing them means her death.
Thus is the fate of a half blood: a beast to the flightless, a disgrace to the winged.
But the woods are calling. Ghosts, they sing. Winds carry echoes in gaps between the trees: the song of a hollow yearning, an abyssal longing for belonging.
“You can have what you desire, child,” says the witch in the woods. “Beauty, peace, acceptance and love.”
“For the price of a beating heart.”