For hours and hours he walked and hour by hour the light of the outside vanquished. A cool humidity settled over Father Hawk in the woodlands the farther on he walked. The farther on from the water he walked, the lesser the power of the gusts became.
It was a long walk that soon turned into a trek. Father Hawk’s desire to embark to the light and exact vengeance on the wolves who hurt him, dissipated as soon as he got to the thickness of the darkness where even the tiniest fragment of light rays from behind him had been stolen by the distance he traversed. It was the middle of the woods where left, right forward and back were all equally as expansive, equally as disorienting and equally as relative. Father Hawk didn’t know where any of those directions began or ended in the sea of vegetation, dirt and thick crowding tree bark.
It was also here that Father Hawk felt he could no longer ignore his injuries. His eyes twitched rapidly, beset by bruises and battering. Where feathers had been ripped out and bare flesh was exposed, the raw bumps of the skin throbbed, burned and felt as if it was being stabbed by the icy daggers of the cool and dank forest air.
Upon entering the woods of the shadowlands, Father Hawk had found the moist, fresh scent rising up from forest soil and foliage refreshing, natural and even soothing. However, now having spent enough time in here and having traversed deeply enough, he found the musty odors rising below his feet suffocating, moldy and blighted. The darker the shadowlands, the more sickly the vegetation was. The courser it became. Starting out, Father Hawk’s feet had simply squished or flattened the plants he’d stepped on. Now, his feet crunched them and they crinkled and scraped under his feet.
He slowed to a still, overwhelmed by the deathly atmosphere, putrid aroma and endless darkness. Standing still, he could hear the faint buzzing of insects he hadn’t noticed before. They were few in number, but could be seen flitting lazily in the distance, buzzing and when they flew away from surfaces, they let vegetation crinkle as it released and extended without the weight of the critters.
There had been a piercing pain shooting up Father Hawk’s legs and biting in at every cut and bruise checkering them. Standing still, he could feel the pain seep in like it never had before.
Above his legs, his underbelly heaved and prickled with the pain of his injuries there. Father Hawk’s heart beat faster and his vision swam in blurriness. He inhaled sharply, but felt like his exhalation was caught in his throat.
The shooting pain in Father Hawk’s legs became too piercing and unbearable. They gave, loosening at the middle and letting Father Hawk fall down. In the dimness, Father Hawk could make out the darkest of all shapes; the black masses of tree lees, spinning above him.
For the first time in a long time, gusts broke through to this dense and deathly midsection of the shadowlands. Icy, shrieking winds sliced through the leaves, making them scrape against each other.
The spinning world above Father Hawk seemed as if it was going to close in on Father Hawk. Spinning around, it appeared to be on an inward path towards Father Hawk as the focal point. It threatened to suffocate him.
“No. No. No. No. No. No.”
He couldn’t die here. Not after everything he’d been through. And everything he’d accomplished. What would it all have been for if he’d just died here and failed?
“EAGLE!” he shrieked over the noise of the roaring tsunami like winds. “EAGLE!” He mustered every last receding breath. “EAGLE, HELP!”
He hadn’t seen her eyes yet, but if he wanted to be saved, she seemed like his only chance.
“HUNTSMAN, WHERE IS SHE? WHERE IS EAGLE?”
The winds suddenly died and the spinning trees slowed down. They were just slowly spinning edges. The vortex that had been closing in on him now widened.
As the winds quieted and then receded, the clamor of howling wolves replaced them. The howls were distant, faint, but ever omnipresent, fierce and collective. The trees were no longer whipped and reverted to swaying.
Replacing the frenzy of overwhelming winds was a frenzy of footsteps. Thundering beats of wolves’ paws rushed across the land from far away.
Panic engulfed Father Hawk and he tried to get up, only to slump back down on his stomach and face.
“Eagle?” he called, breathing heavily. He moaned.
There was a sharp fluttering of leaves in the treetops above. It occurred in spurts, inconsistent, but present and becoming closer. Short periods of fluttering leaves were followed by softer ruffling.
Father Hawk tilted his head up, but to no avail. He couldn’t move much and he couldn;t spot the cause of the clamorous leaves.
What if it was—
“Eagle?” whispered Father Hawk.
As if in response, a soft, but firm and berating feminine voice spoke:
“You fool!”
A flurry of shaking and snapping branches overhead to the left in the encircling treetop was followed by a large dark and feathered body with outstretched wings swooping across.
But it was only a blur. And as soon as it appeared, it disappeared into the trees opposite whence it came from.
Father Hawk’s breath caught in his throat. His eyes darted around he staggered to swivel his head in all of his pain.
The barking grew closer— louder. So did the wolves’ footsteps which sounded like raindrops, pattering on the forest floor, growing more incessant every second.
There was more ruffling in the treetops, but now a few feet away to the left. The bird broke through. Its wings were outstretched, dark and menacing. They were flexed and allowed for descent. Its head was a shocking white contrasted with the darkness of its lower body. Inset above a sharp, angular downwardly curved yellow beak were brighter and piercing eyes of the same hue.
Underneath her body, from feathered tufts came large orange claws, bumpy and with razor sharp nails protruding.
In a motion swifter than its descent, the bald eagle clenched Father Hawk from the spots in between his winds and his body and lifted his ailing body off the ground, battering some injuries more as she had to drag his limb limbs off of the ground first.
In seconds, he was airborne. The Eagle’s claws dug into his body painfully. The trees around him seemed to slide away under him. They receded and the treetops turned into decreasing masses of leaves. Broccoli heads. The air screamed around them and whipped Father Hawk with cold.
Father Hawk wailed incoherently.
“Shut up!” commanded the Eagle in a shrill voice. “You’ll alert the wolves to our location! The shadowlands want you to give in and surrender and that is what you have done.” She tucked her wings in momentarily and tilted to the right. Father Hawk writhed helpless underneath, folding to the right. Diving for a few seconds, she extended her broad wings, slicing the air around them and carving a smoother trajectory far away from the movement and clamor of the wolves.
Father Hawk only moaned, yet his noise was muffled by the screaming rippling force of the two of them soaring above the woods. The Eagle began furiously flapping her wings, gaining altitude as well as distance away from the wolves who were thundering below the dark and distant treetops.
She flapped her wings even harder, beating at the air. Father Hawk jiggled dangerously, the movement befuddling his senses.
The air roared and pushed Father Hawk’s lower body backwards, causing him to feel as if he was being dragged through the currents of a forceful ocean of darkened air.
The treetops blurred underneath them. The dark grey havens and their smoky clouds grew ever more omnipresent as they soared closer to them. A circular glowing patch of sulfurous wisps hovered amidst ashy colored clouds. It was a reminder of a sun that traversed a sky above the shadowlands.
The Eagle whistled in a high-pitched warble. She whistled once loud enough to peirce the roaring air. Then, she whistled repeatedly, so loudly that Father Hawk cringed at how much it hurt his ears.
Similar whistling warbling sounds returned her call in repetitive patterns. More and more beaks responded, now seemingly more than a dozen. They all sang in high-pitched voices from far away.
Suddenly, rolling hills appeared out of the horizon. They were oncoming like a huge tidal wave in an ocean. Father Hawk’s eyes widened in fear, but the Eagle did not slow down. She persisted, still flapping furiously and heading forth on the same trajectory.
Rock formations appeared out of the elevated humps of treetops. Cliffaces and rocks were adorned with vines and crowned with more trees.
The closer they got, the more visible dozens of hills and rock formations became, all fading into the background where, wrapped around in smog, was the tallest structure of all: Coyote Rock.
The immediate hill beckoned over them as they zoomed closer, opening up like a hand closing in on them.
The Eagle did not hesitate. As the treetops emerged from green masses to the arms of green leaves, she simply zipped over them.
When the hill rolled over underneath them, the Eagle tucked her arms to her sides, plummeting. Before Father Hawk’s les could graze the treetops, the Eagle extended her arms, swooping downhill and around the bend to the right in a graceful glide.
A leafy roof as wide as an entire hill emerged to the side of the hill they passed. The Eagle passed under it, emerging over a ginormous nest of bark, twigs, sticks and branches as wide as a plateau, encircling a monolith of a trunk.
Here many Eagles milled around, spotting every visible side of the nest. Below them awaited three rows of Eagles, staring directly at them.
“Your training begins!” shouted the Eagle carrying Father Hawk. She swung him back and tossed him to the rows.
G.R. Nanda 