“Ed!”

"Heda," came something more like a gasp than a real voice.

"Go."

Heda began to shift. Daryl might control the ground and the mist, but Heda would control the skies. She went all the way into her eagle form and flew upward, trying to spot her brother, but the dank fog had become too thick to see the ground. She should go for help.

But if she did, Ed would probably not live until she got back. She saw an area that seemed devoid of the infernal mist, so she flew there quickly and shifted into her half-form. She wished she hadn't.

She wished she had not had to see what lay at the center of Daryl Mosley's forest retreat. He had surrounded a small clearing with camouflage netting and inside, it looked like a slaughterhouse.

There was a small, crude wooden altar decorated by candles and a human skull. The skull still had hair and skin on it. Around the table, a crude circle littered the ground. Littered was a more appropriate word than "drawn," because the circle was made up of the remains of the dead. ALL manner of animals, from cats and dogs to snakes and birds, had been ripped apart and left in bloody heaps in the form of a circle. And mixed in amongst the animal parts were things that were . . . once . . . human. Fingers, eyeballs —

‘Where did he . . . he —' Heda thought, then was forced to fight the urge to vomit. ‘He's fucking insane. How could anyone —'

Heda heard the slightest of noises behind her, and she jumped straight up, but not in time to completely avoid the blow that had been aimed at her head. Instead, some heavy object slammed into Heda's leg, which sent her tumbling directly into the circle of carnage.

"You insolent bitch!" Daryl screamed, raising a monkey wrench over his head.

“Elitist, unworthy -

If you had asked Heda to list all of the things that she would probably never do in life, “bludgeoning an insane spell caster with a human skull" would probably have been on it. Before that night.

But she found another skull under her hands when she fell, and she used it as an instrument of destruction on her enemy's face.

"Shut up!" she squawked, her eagle mouth not normally suited for human words, but managing to spit those out. The sound of skulls cracking was cringe-worthy, but to his credit, Daryl did not go down.

He went backwards, colliding with a tree. His human form was no match for Heda's half-form in a straight up fight.

Daryl, bleeding heavily from the nose, spat blood and words in Heda's direction, and a chill wind blasted the eagle-shifter in the chest with the force of a hurricane. Her body bounced across the ground like a tumbleweed at a rave, coming to an uncomfortable rest in a thorny bush.

"You would be Like Him, wouldn't you?!" Daryl screamed.

"A pathetic monster with a crown and a throne?! I will not stop until you have all heard my Message, and until you have all been judged!"

Heda had to end this quickly. Edgar was out there in the mist, possibly dead or dying. His blood was on her hands as it was. She could not handle being responsible for his death.

She fixed her eagle eyes on Daryl's face, and things started to move in slow motion. She waited until she saw anything . . . a face twitch, a sneer . . . anything that would signal his intent. She saw the corner of his eye crinkle, as if he were preparing to stare really intensely. She clambered quickly towards him, finding her talons underneath her and she spread her wings, making herself as big a target as possible. She had to make it irresistible to her opponent.

Whatever Daryl had been thinking, he changed his mind and began pulling in magic, pooling it, and began to create the vessel through which that power would flow. That was when the charging eagle-shifter screamed.

Heda had never used her battle-cry against a living creature before, and there was a reason for that. An eagle only gave the cry when he or she was going to kill someone, and Heda had never been in a position where it was appropriate before. But she had no doubt that she or Daryl were about to die.

Her cry did what it was supposed to do, namely it froze up her enemy.

It did not last long, but it lasted long enough. As Daryl removed his hands from his bleeding ears, his eyes widened, and he tried to regain control of the magic he had summoned. Loose, wild magic was a dangerous thing. As he tried to bring it to bear, Heda closed the gap.