Book One – Chapter 19

From the top, they had looked down through their field-glasses upon thirty-one females, young and old. They had gathered waist-deep, clutching one among them as she writhed. Her convulsions lasted for what was one of the longest hours in Yu’s life. It had been so violent that she once struck her head against the stones, and yet the others carried on and held her steady, as if this agony were expected. They revelled in it. Then the child came, breaking surface in a smear of blood and river foam, hauled from the murk into the air and passed from hand to hand, while all of them shrieked and cried and ran around like mad things.

The infant, however, had been the most revolting thing. Human newborns are nothing but disgust given form through flesh, writhing and wailing. They are a horror of naked skin, slick and raw, with no feathers, no fur, no scales, and no clean break into the world. There is nothing whole about them. They are not born intact, not sealed in the safety of an egg, as fina were. They will never know the solace of a hatching ceremony. They are pulled into a world of savage screaming, ruptured right from one body into another.

Yu had sworn, after that first time, never to see another birth. Yet over the years, this resolve had eventually been overtaken by the compulsion to test his memory. It is an odd phenomenon; the urge to seek out past experiences, to awaken the resting traumas just to confirm their existence; the need to suffer them again just to see if they had truly been as abhorrent as one recalled or whether the mind simply distorted and exaggerated the memory until all truth in it was lost.

In Yu’s case, the memory had held true. Both times. He had witnessed two more births. His feathers lifted even now, as the images came back in ever more detail. Three times, he had seen how violently the females tore apart their own bodies in the water, screaming into each other’s faces until their flesh split and the waters reddened. It was at the height of this pain and extasy that they spawned more of the same.