Blood Memory
When a forest dies, the smell is both parts rich and acrid. Acrid from the cinders and ash blown about like grey snow by the firestorm winds. Rich from the scent of cooking meat and a thousand burning trees.
The fragrance of pine resin wafted into the terror bird’s nostrils as the mountainside was incinerated before him. Ponderosas and knobcones bursting at the seams whenever the inferno touched them, their centenarian trunks turned into matchsticks by the blaze.
He stood stoically at the forest’s edge, staring intently into the white hot funeral pyre of his world. To his left, his mate mewled weakly, ranging slightly closer to the fire. She paced back and forth in front of the flames as if attempting to match their demonic dance. If the two birds grieved differently what they knew was the same- that their nest had been devoured by this volcanic Gehenna.
It had been the male’s turn to hunt when the entire mountain exploded. The concussion wave slammed into him like the full weight of a mastodon. He was knocked to the ground, and when he staggered back to his feet the sky was already black as night and the only light left was the dull and evil glare of hellfire.
He sprinted up the fuming hillside to the nest, to his mate. She was still alive but the nest was gone, crushed beneath an old ponderosa that had snapped like a twig against the pressure blast.
There was nothing to be done for it. So they stood and watched the flames dance impishly closer.
Embers licked his face and little missiles of tephra pelted his flanks, but they bothered him not. Each crozzled flake seemed to carry with it a whisper of memory. Of the dozen battles he’d fought to claim this once-serene territory from his rivals. Of meeting his mate on the banks of a babbling creek flowing down the side of the mountain that was now in the process of committing suicide. Of their courtship, how his heart had raced as he performed his mating dance, every strut and wing-shake timed precisely to woo her.
Their first autumn together, hunting ponies and peccaries, pronghorn and deer on the chapparal at the mountain’s base. Preening each other after a meal. Chasing each other through the gallery woods, running simply to run. Their long, spindly legs carrying them over the shrubs like creatures of the wind. Their triumphant dance when his mate laid her first clutch, the clutch that was now just ashes to be spread on the bleak, lung-scorching wind.
And despite these memories of his own life, the sight of the blaze stirred up something deeper within his heart. A more primordial sense of doom.
This had happened before.
From whence this memory came, he knew not, for by his own recollection it was the first time the earth had ever torn itself to pieces and burned all that lived.
Perhaps it was mere concussed delusion; perhaps some echo of his first ancestor coming back to haunt him from a world lost to all but the tomes of the earth, remembered only on pages of silt and sand buried deep beneath his feet.
But he knew with every fiber of his being that he had been in such a hell before, here or a place very much like it, when all the trees were ablaze, and fire rained from the sky.
The terror... of the terror bird...