I am less proud than others of my specie, but I like the dangerous look of my paws.The strength of my peak and claws intimidate many. My race doesn’t use them lightly. Violence is not encouraged where I come from, but it is used if we feel endangered.
There is only one specie that makes us use violence as our only escape: the makkis. They invaded the mountains and ate our eggs, many of us flew to the north, others stayed and fought. For many years we have been trying to come back, but we are fought with cruelty. We want to come back. There is nothing like the mountains, they say. I have never been there.
My mother still lives. She isn’t as strong as she used to and she walks better than she flies. She says she can fly, but in my entire life, I have only seen her flying once. There is something wrong with her left wing, and for the first few years of my life I thought she was born like that, but then, she told me the story of how it happened.
She told me the day I saw an infant Makki getting near us and I told her how harmless they looked like, how I wouldn’t mind playing with them. I will never forget the look in her eyes when I said that: first I saw fierce, then concern and finally sorrow. But then she looked at my face and everything went away, you could tell she was happy to see me there. For some reason, I thought all those feelings were connected with me and the Makkis, but I did not dare to ask.
It all started with their First Great Invasion. We, the folk of the Raffirs used to live in the lower part of the mountain , near the river and would hardly ever go up, unless the summer was really warm and the snow had melted. We do not like snow, it makes our paws wet and cold. There are many of our kind, but my clan is described as “half raven, half panther monsters” by the Makkis. I don’t see anything monstrous in the way we look, I rather like it.
I dont remember much of our escape, only coming out of the eggshell and looking around. There were two other eggs next to me and before I could give my first steps, I felt my mother’s claws hold me tight and take me somewhere. I was put under a tree near the valley and left alone for about a minute until she came back bleeding and smelling like burnt feathers, looking defeated and desperate. Her claws were empty this time.
We never saw the other two eggs again. They were of different colors. She said mine was blue with grey spots and the other ones had different shades of green and red. I avoided talking about this with her. She only told me that one of the eggs, the green one, was stolen by the makkis before we could fly away. She managed to hide the other one before leaving, but she did not find it when we came back to the cave the next night.
For some time I had been wondering the things that could have happened to my brothers, had they ever been born.These thoughts were secret, not even with the infant makkie I would share them.
He said we were friends, but he was a makkie after all. I couldn’t trust him entirely. I couldn’t trust anyone but my mother. I had learned to hide before I could learn to fly. They thought no one had survived in the mountains after the invasions. We weren't supposed to exist, nor was whoever could have been born of those eggs. But I couldn't help to imagine how life would have been like having brothers or sisters.
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