The Eagles flew over the lands, but slowly descended closer to the treetops. Once distant shrubs, they were now bustling, swaying bodies of leafed wooden limbs. 

From below the leafed green masses were bodies of grey and red poking through the green and rustling the undergrowth, tumbling through it. 

They scant seemed distant from the hills of red and brown rock that buttressed the trees on their sides and overlooked the woods in towers that loomed every which way, fading into the blur of the blue sky’s havens. 

But the grey, red and brown objects moving at a fast pace on the forest surface were not rock crumbles or rubbles broken off the jagged cliffs. They moved at too fast a volition and speed to be mere rocks and stones where no wind blew. Branch by branch, they grabbed vantage. The stream flowed from the very bottom of the forest up into the tree branches. 

Why! They were monkeys. 

Hoots bombarded the air. They were shrill, but lilting with lightheartedness. Bubbling like laughter. 

Monkeys scrambled at the forest floor and mounted the trees. They chased after the Eagle’s airborne path. Almost as if they were trying to grab ahold of Father Hawk’s legs. 

Suddenly, upon the first dozen monkeys reaching the top of the trees, they split at the peak, diverging into two different paths that raced across the leafy roofs. Bounding over different trees, the two streams, slivered in their furry brown masses across different stretches of woods, separated by dozens of trees in between. 

Amid a frenzy of frantically moving masses of monkeys vying for leverage, climbing over each other and grappling branches. They climbed above, around and to the sides of each other. They were a web of interlacing threads, constantly shifting and rolling. 

However, amid the frenzy, the masses always separated into the distant lines, rivulets receding away at distantly separating paths. 

Father Hawk watched in fascination below him. The cascade of hollering monkeys climbed up the trees, creating a squawking high pitched clamor. Yet, monkey by monkey, they dropped down, melting into highways, moving further and further apart the more the monkeys strolled. 

The highways hastened underneath Father Hawk until they surpassed the Eagles’ flight. Their shouts faded to a shrieking din and their bodies settled back into the undergrowth. At the far reaches of the highways, their presence dwindled to mere splotches of grey and red, bubbling and popping in between the leaves and trees. 

Father Hawk looked back up the woodlands, trying to see the monkeys’ onward path. 

Rising in front of him were two rock monoliths, ascending from mounds of lower rock grazing the trees. 

They rose like dry mountains, peaking at the blue haze of the higher heavens. 

The monoliths were bridged by a craggly rock ridge of orange protruding from the poking trees. 

As Father Hawk neared the ridge, he spotted a small monkey, frozen atop the ridge, watching intently with beady black eyes large enough to be seen from so high. 

Once Father Hawk and the Eagles neared the ridge, the monkey flailed and screamed. He jumped on all fours as Father Hawk passed over, shouting into the trees below. 

The Eagles suddenly swooped to the right, shifting their left wings upwards. They swivelled and glided below, moving fast and skimming the treetops where the clamor had left them behind, turning into an increasingly distant chatter. 

Smaller birds fluttered here, flitting away from the oncoming bodies of Father Hawk and the Eagles.

The wilderness here seemed more active, teeming with buzzing, darting critters and scuttling bugs and mammals, scampering up tree bark and, the forest floor and slithering out of crevices in leafy foliage and clustered sticks. 

The life and movement was spread out larger than in the Eagle’s haven. Larger than anywhere in the Shadowlands. Here, the life was so spread out that its din of chirping and buzzing created a general din emanating from all directions. 

The Eagles broke formation allowing those on Father Hawk’s side to hover to the earth in between the trees. 

Swooping to the treetops, they left the safe haven of the skies for the gently rumbling, teeming leaves topping the trees and blossoming in the buzzing undergrowth. 

The Eagles separated, flying farther and farther away from each other, but staying in a constant line. Father Hawk’s chest pinched and a fuzzy faint semi-consciousness flooded him. It bled darkness, obscuring the forests and cloaking the Eagles’ destination.

For the majority of the flight, Father Hawk was in a half-awake daze. A helpless stupor of immobility and half open eyes that always threatened to close. But as his eye-lids closed, he’d always be jolted awake by the strain and motion of dangling in flight. 

The grey light with flickers of red fire shone through his eye-lids, but dimmed as the journey continued airborne. The insides of Father Hawk’s eyelids turned to a pitch black. 

The cracklings of burning trees, roars of wolves and the smells of sulfur and charred trees disappeared. 

The Eagles maintained a straight formation, soaring into skies above smoother, rolling landscapes. They rode high enough that the darkened trees of the Shadowlands were blotted out and made to a distant carpet for hills and cliffs perched higher. Above the Mark of Shadow. Touched by light. 

Higher above, the air was less musty. It was clearer. Light green trees swayed gently below them, dancing amongst each other. Unlike the cramped barked bodies of the Shadowlands below. Cliffs were snaked by shrubbery, climbing grass and vines. They had a dark reddish-brown complexion of scraggly rock that glinted in the light. 

It looked like the lands of the Eagles. Yet, in his stupor of half-open eyes, Father Hawk could still tell that he and the Eagles were not close to home. 

The lively hoot of a monkey echoing from below the treetops echoed this thought as well.

Upon leaving the roars and hissings of the water, Father Hawk was assailed by the raucous howlings of wolves. They growled, grated, barked and haunted the world with their eerie, high pitched cackling howlings.

It was a sea of unrelenting, booming cries for death, ringing in booming blood curling tones. 

Father Hawk was still engulfed in water that dripped off of him and was flung at him in hot droplets that fizzed from the lake’s surface. 

His body was pinched in an aching pain that throbbed from within his center and shot outwards. He was too weak to move. His ascent was propelled by the soaking Eagle who took slow, but strong and forceful strides to flap his wings to elevation. Water leaked from his airholes. The blockage turned the roaring and howlings to hums, collective and distant. 

Father Hawk struggled to blink away the water that dripped down and clung. Through the wet droppings were the blurred yellow lines rimming the ash-choked greenery of the trees. Smoke was a grey blur blanketing the sky and the edges of the treetops. 

The yellows, reds, blacks, greys and greens intermingled in a murky acne of a burning jostled forest coated by the water dripping over Father Hawk’s eyes. 

His body felt as if it were on the verge of giving out. He teetered on the edge between consciousness and unconsciousness. Weakness befuddled him. There was a flame of iciness flickering at his core, threatening to lash out and envelop his insides. 

The claws tightly grasping Father hawk jerked with each flap of the Eagle’s wings. It was disorienting, nauseating. The world spun around Father Hawk as he hung, limp, his claws, wings and head lolling back. The burning, shaking trees smeared by water eyes spun around and jerked to and fro. 

Father Hawk’s eyes involuntarily squeezed shut as coarse warm liquid pushed through his throat and beak. He opened his beak to let out the vomit. He grunted and moaned as the substance poured out, plummeting to the lake surface. 

“Shadow-seer!” 

The wolves yelled in unison, shouting that phrase of two words in their rough gravelly, barking howls. 

“Shadow-seer!”

Their united clamor resounded all around Father Hawk from the rim of the lake. Their voices sounded like groaning trees, roaring waterfalls and crashing rocks. 

“SHADOW-SEER!”

“SHADOW-SEER!”

“SHADOW-SEER!”

Father Hawk opened his eyes and moaned after the last stream of vomit left his beak. He blinked out the last drops of water. While water still dripped down his face and from his neck, he could see more clearly than before. 

In his pinched fuzzy vision, Father Hawk saw a ring of fallen trees surrounding the lake. Some had been uprooted, fallen to the waysides of the forest or had crashed into the lake, where their bark and leaves dissolved into little brown and green bits in the streaming waters. 

Many had been ripped off at the midsections of the stumps. Behind the edge of the lake were the raging fires of yellow and orange tendrils flickering and dancing through foliage and leaves. Some had made their way to the edge of the lake where they flared on stumps, grasses and groups of leaves. 

In between the fires and ravaged trees were howling wolves. They were the grey furred, large snouted, muscular creatures with glinting yellow eyes that Father Hawk had fought before. 

They edged the lake and crowded behind, deep in the forest, in hundreds. Their roaring rippled and blew their silvery fur, fanned by the many flames around them and shook the grasses, shrubbery and trees. 

Their roars pushed at the lake’s waters, creating a vortex of bubbling water that met at the center, right under Father Hawk, where it swirled and fizzed upwards like a hill of foaming columns threatening to engulf Father Hawk all over again. 

The trees were the size of Eagles and the wolves, the size of ants from Father Hawk’s height. 

A wolf at the center of a pack of his comrades directly in front of Father Hawk’s lolling head stood up on a boulder, visible above the rest. 

“Shadow-seer!” he growled. “You have seen and arisen from what most have been consumed by!” His voice boomed above the general rumble of “SHADOW-SEER!”

“Your dominion belongs with the Shadowspawn! You are the seer of both warring sides! Your powers do not belong to the righteous!”

The Eagle carrying Father Hawk buckled his legs, tucking in Father Hawk, bringing him closer to his chest. Father Hawk could now see the swarm of Eagle comrades who had arrived at the lake with him before submersion. 

They were blurs of black bodies and wings, speckled by white heads. 

“Your powers belong to the POWERFUL!”

The wolves rose on their hind legs, caught in an uproar louder than the last. 

“SHADOW-SEER!”

“SHADOW-SEER!”

“SHADOW-SEER!”

Trees from the lake edge and beyond were ripped from their roots, snapped in half and flung into the lake. 

Dozens of trees crashed into the lake. They resounded in a hot splash that cascaded into the vortex of water underneath Father Hawk. 

It morphed into a terrific geyser that imploded under Father Hawk and the Eagles. Torrents and jets of water shot forth, just merely missing Father Hawk. Yet, he felt their hot wrath. 

“RISE!” shouted the Eagles frantically flapping above. 

Father Hawk’s rescuer flapped furiously, this time flapping front and back, propelling away from the lake. 

All the Eagles formed a line swiftly passing over the lake, over the burning treetops and their missing neighbors. 

“No,” croaked Father Hawk. His eyes bulged. “Fight………..them,” he managed. 

“It is not time to fight!” said his rescuer. They left the lake and entered the space above the decimated woodlands. 

“It is time to rest.”

 

 

 

Tears seeped from Father Hawk’s stinging eyes, befuddling his vision  as they splayed out, merging into the volumes of the Shadowlake. The sight of Mother Hawk’s burning grew blurrier and distant. 

It was then at the welling of further anguished tears, trembling at the brink of the wavering scene of Mother Hawk that Father Hawk thought with clarity. Mother Hawk was haunting. That was all there was to her essence. When the brightness of the searing sight diminished under the blur of tears, Father Hawk could see clearer. The burning body below was merely a spectre of his projected fears and insecurities. 

He knew better. Mother Hawk was not at the bottom of a lake with the Huntsman’s soul. She was far up in Father Hawk’s former haven against the stars. 

“THE QUEST”

“DON’T-LEAVE-”

“Don’t leave the quest, muttered Father Hawk, spluttering as water seeped in his beak and he spit it out. 

“Don’t leave the quest!” he thought as clearly as he could. 

It was all he had left after all………

Father Hawk whirled his head, pushing against the weight of the lake’s deepness. He squinted at the pale grey light jutting from the surface, so as not to hurt his already stinging eyes anymore. 

The Eagle reaching for him appeared to be suspended in a slowed movement. His panic seemed frozen– etched in his still wide eyes, unblinking. Tendrils and waves of water slithered and morphed around him. They cascaded, frothed– vines turning into rock walls, melting into oncoming serpents and sea-stallions. 

Pressure mounted in Father Hawk’s chest. The distractions of the Shadowlake had blinded him to his own drowning. 

He’d pulled away and noticed the sensations too late. By now, the pressure and torrents of water streaming through his beak, suffocated him– hit him in a startling wave. 

It seemed like he’d moved from one terrible sight to the terrible reality of struggling for air in a lake. Which one was worse?

The Eagle winced, his eyes squinting and his beak opened wide in a gurgling scream. 

“COOME…. HAAA..WWK!”

Father Hawk clawed at the water helplessly as it bubbled with a rising force that seemed to crowd him out. Just when his wings sloshed down in defeat, a hot bubble swelled under him, searing his back and pushing him up. 

The bubble’s fizzing consumed his hearing as he shot up, jiggling on its burning viscous surface. He rose swiftly, quickly passing many of the surrounding bubbles that had overtaken and loomed over him in their ascent. 

Father Hawk was fixated on the Eagle and his capsule of slowly descending froth. The Eagle barely receded in size while the walls of rising bubbles blurred away in a passing vortex. A vortex leading to the Eagle. 

Father Hawk’s rear was slipping back along the bubble. He was also getting blasted with an intake of water as he struggled to control his beak. He turned to the left and used his right wing to slap his beak. 

His movement caused him to teeter off the bubble. As he fell over it, the bubble burst under his cascading weight. 

The scalding slippery surface dissolved into a wave of heat that emanated outwards before dissipating. 

Father Hawk was once again fighting against his weight in the rapids of the sizzling, bubbling furnace of dark water. 

He frantically waved his wings ahead, trying to swim in and dent the thick liquid. 

The vortex seemed to undergo a reversal; the Eagle slowly receded and the bubbles stopped moving back. Instead, they flew up past him in their usual latitude.

The pale grey light of the Eagle dimmed. 

“No!”

Father Hawk kicked his legs. A bubble burst at one of his kicks, creating a heat wave that pushed him farther up to the side. He could use these waves to shoot up! Father Hawk had moved to the right, further away from the Eagle. 

He kicked a bubble rising underneath him to the left. It fizzled in its dissolution and sent a rippling wave of heat, pushing him up. 

 He kicked another bubble below. Pop! He rocketed up, doubling over in the process. His vision blurred. He was choking on water. The arrays of rising bubbles started to merge at their blurred edges in his eyesight. 

He quickly kicked another bubble. Pop! Phoo! Father Hawk shot up. 

Kick! Pop! Phoo!

Kick! Pop! Phoo!

Kick! Pop! Phoo!

Kick! Pop! Phoo!

Father Hawk was near the surface. The Eagle hung above him to his left. He kicked his  claws, mustering his final strides before his body gave way. 

The lake’s surface and the Eagle’s cascading froth no longer glimmered just a pale grey. Splotches of yellow, asky grey and orange sparkled and slivered around the froth and across the roof of the Shadowlake. 

Pinpricks of yellow flashed through the lake surface. 

Father Hawk mustered his final kicks, shooting up so his legs grazed the Eagle’s froth. Father Hawk doubled over backwards in his motion. His face neared the surface, allowing him to make out the faint green shapes of trees, whipping to and fro. A mass of leaves lunged backwards and shot over, snapping from the rim of the trees. 

As Father Hawk’s head dipped back, falling through the water again, he could hear the jangled, rippling crash of the leaves and their branches, splashing into the lake. 

He arched over, causing his head and the rest of his body to dive back. 

He had risen, only to fall once again. 

“My story doesn’t end like that,” thought Father Hawk. He screamed in fury, allowing more water to enter his beak. The shrill noise was warbled in the water. He waved his wings above him and kicked his legs a few more times. The vortex closed in on him until the tip of his left wing lapped the expanse of the sky reflecting on the water surface. Then, his body did give. Father Hawk’s pressure threatened to pinch his entire body and being into oblivion. His eyes dimmed, eyelids closing in. Black creeped across his vision. 

A roaring torrent ripped through the water above him, sending whirls and waves of froth pushing into him. A thick wing of drenched dense black feathered plumage snaked around Father Hawk’s wing, pulling him up out of the Shadowlake. Father Hawk’s eyes reopened to a hellish world.