The sky was sickly yellow in the twilight as the factories all over town belched toxic smoke into the air. The setting sun set the industrial park aflame with fierce orange light and long shadows. Small groups of people could be heard yelling and clamoring over the cobblestones, between the slowly dying buildings. Their shadows lumped together to form some bizarre and unkind creature, all pitchforks and spikes and guns.

They mocked and jeered and called into the into the air as they stomped and danced down one street and up another, with no sense of direction or purpose. Past the edge of the sun’s creeping tendrils, where less of these drunken madmen dared to go, one voice, ragged and desperate lilted between the unkind stone walls and down the dark streets, calling out the only name it knew for him.

Meanwhile, in an abandoned attic, all wire mesh and hay, a mangled form dared not make a sound, holding its broken beak in malformed hands as blood stained clumps of feathers fell to the ground.