The Three Owl Sisters

A continuation of the one before. Less dark? If Necrophilia and murder are less dark.

Grandmother, Skalula, Great Owl out back, had never been good at taking care of children.

The wolf girl, Rachel, The crying one, was fully grown by the reckoning of her folk, but so much a child in Skalula’s eyes. She had never been good with children, but as she aged they had all become children. The people called her - Queen Skalula, lady of ghosts, Lich queen of the Nlaka'pamux - They called her Grandmother now.

Yet she had to admit, as she settled down on her beam, eyes glazing over, lids fluttering back into their lazy senescence, that she was a grandmother. A great grandmother. A grandmother with too many greats to count. She watched with shadowed eyes, her senses extending through all of her descendants, as they crisscrossed the night sky, screaming delight at a kill, frightening a child inside at night with the intensity of emotion, the sudden bursting shriek.

That was their job now, the barn owls, death owls, common owls, church owls, Tyto Alba. They carried her voice forever, that scream she had made as she held the knife to her son’s neck, that terror in his eyes. They repeated that moment over and over again as they crossed the countryside on silent wings.

Grandmother, Skalula, lady of ghosts was startled into awareness again by the howl out behind the tree, answered, echoed, by distant dogs. That was right. She was going to call the wolves.

Then a lone Coyote joined in, then two, then three. Where the wolf’s sorrow had brought her out of half dream, the coyote pulled her under again. She remembered.

Skalula had lived a different life once. A young woman, daughter of the village leader, She was the middle of three sisters. The eldest, A’enk, was a gossip and narcissist. They used to nickname her ‘A’enk the long eared’ to make fun of her for always listening in on things she should not. Skalula had been the solemn one. She was the one who heard whispers when she slept, and wandered the woods alone. The youngest, sweet Poxpo, had always charmed them all, but Skalula had long suspected she hid another face beneath.

Yet they did everything together, as is the way of sisters. When Skalula met Raterat in her wanderings, and he invited her home, she brought her sisters with her. As she courted him, nights spent talking in the dark under cloud covered skies, her sisters were charming his two brothers. When Raterat proposed to her, drawn in by their shared love of death, his brothers did the same on the same day, and they were all married together.

Grandmother nodded, remembering. Two arms, feet with five toes apiece. She had been a beautiful woman once. It had been a happy time. She’d born him two children, sweet Ati, and noble Maqua.

But then it had broken. Ati had learned the secret Raterat had hidden from them all. Raterat didn’t really love death as Skalula loved death. He saw it rather as a gateway to something beyond. Death was to him a path you could walk down and then return - but changed somehow. Half themselves and half other, he could raise people from the dead to serve him with undying loyalty.

Sometimes you learned that kind of thing about your husband. Skalula kept her knowledge secret. An unspoken wound in the honesty they held with one another. A lie that underlied it all.

But when sweet Poxpo followed her husband, and found him sleeping with her mother - dead two years now, and raised by Raterat’s power for his brother’s whims. When after he had gone she ran to her mother and found her skin cold, and her breath hollow, and her eyes half baked, and her tongue slow and unsure - something snapped in sweet Poxpo. She killed her husband that night with his own feces disguised in his food, and then admitted it to the entire city. She outed Raterat. The people rioted, his guards fought back, and when they fell they rose again until Raterat emerged as their new leader.

Skalula remembered trying to make him stop, holding a knife to her own son’s neck, threatening, begging - trying to tell him that this unlife was not the same as life. That raising his son would not be the same as letting him live out his natural life, but he wouldn’t listen and she couldn’t do it to prove a point, to save her father. Her husband ascended and she fell.

Yet he had not killed them. The three sisters. They had been imprisoned together until Coyote came on his yearly rounds. Full of Trickster’s justice he listened to the story the men told, and listened not at all to the women’s pleading lips. “To you,” he told Ati “You were always listening where you should not, always limping to get attention, you I will make a long eared owl,” and with that she and her maids and slaves, all changed and flew away.

“To you,” he told Poxpo, “You murdered your husband with feces you collected, so you will collect the dung of animals around your door, you I will make the first burrowing owl,” and with that she and hers changed and flew low in the woods to find new homes.

“He is lying,” Skalula had tried to say, but Coyote was not listening. “You frightened your own children by night, and so this will be your task.” Skalula felt herself changing, growing smaller her skin whitening, her ears shifting, her arms sprouting feathers . . . she had fled as the others had fled. Her servants and children scattered to the winds, some of them she never saw again.

But perhaps there had been some justice in Coyote’s magic. Maybe Trickster had tricked his disciple. Skalula and her sisters endured long past any owl’s life span. Skalula’s talent with ghosts grew stronger in this form, and she unraveled her husband’s magic from afar, even as he searched for the secrets to eternal life. She released his minions one by one until the people rose up against him, and though he had died many thousands of years ago, she lived still

Grandmother, Skalula, Biggest barn owl of them all, tilted her head, remembering, as she still so often remembered. The time before she changed was so vivid, and the time after blurred as one century ran into another. She had settled in this spot a mere five or six hundred years before. She had settled other places before though she struggled to remember where or when.

This place had been - different. Magic to rival Coyote’s twisted in this land, and she had settled here seeking it. She managed this land now, caretaker, guardian, Grandmother.

As Rachel slept fitfully in the other room, Grandmother, Skalula, Nightwatcher, settled into her trance again, but this time she was conscious, lucid to the owls to who she was ancestor darting through the trees. Out across the road that made up the boundary of her forest, out over the farm, the owls circled, screeching their unearthly screams.

The dead wolves lingered there, howling unheard to the chorus of owlish shrieks. They were confused, troubled, their deaths had been too quick and they were not sure how to pass on. They peered through the mists of death seeking out the familiar. When Grandmother’s huge ghostly form flew through the spirit world to alight before them they howled her greeting.

“Grandmother, it is odd to see you in our land,” said the male
“Who?” She asked.
“I’m Henry,” he said.
“Henry - you are in  my land. This is where ghosts walk.”
He took his death well, coming alert and looking around, noticing perhaps for the first time the slight transparence of his surroundings. The three females around him startled at this revelation, all save one who seemed to have known. Grandmother pitied her - a soul that had taken its own life always drooped a little. She apparently considered herself responsible.

“What do you know?” Skalula, Queen of ghosts, mistress of the dead - commanded. They didn’t know much. A bear who could shake off bullets, and he had orcs working with him. Cursing herself for not doing so earlier she sent owl eyes off in the real world to look at “the Yorks,” An Orc homestead off of Landes itself. The Orcs often shot birds that got close, but a silent owl should be able to get a good look.

She was questioning them about the orc’s appearance - the one who’d died had already passed beyond best she could tell - when her eyes arrived. The Yorks property was a junkyard - old broken cars and dilapidated trailers littered the weedy field they kept free of trees. There was litter piling everywhere - half buried beer cans poking from among piles of cigaret butts. Ripped tarps still managed to pool with water over rusty motorcycles. A lone cement truck stood sunken into the earth, long dead.

But there were no Orcs. As she circled her watcher closer, more confident now, she saw that it seemed the Orcs had been gone for some time. Water was overflowing from the plastic buckets they’d set to catch leaks, and the dog kennels were empty.

Skalula, Lich Queen of the Nlaka'pamux, Grandmother, was startled back into the land of the dead when a woman dressed in armor came towards her through the mists. She was speaking.

“Grandmother,” She said.
“Warden,” The owl returned.
“I was wondering when you’d come. I’ve been asleep a long time, but not so long as to see your passing.”
“Almost two hundred years.”
The Warden seemed surprised at that. “That long?”

“You’re the last of the Den Akloo to die I think,”Grandmother added. Feed the ghosts information they would never share. Make them trust her. Find the truth.

The Warden seemed to understand her role. “I tracked the wolves when they left.”
“Who?” Grandmother asked with sudden focus. “Who do they serve?”
“I’ll show you.”

Together the Warden, wolves, and winged spirit flew through the night. The Warden followed the path the wolves had taken earlier, tending away from the road, up the incline West, then Northwest until they made it to the top of the ridge. A spire of rock jutted up over the trees here, the remnants of a wall at its base.

“We’re close to Winter’s old castle,” Skalua, Grandmother, Queen of the night noted with alarm. She had been a powerful force in Winter’s court - a faithful servant, and inclined towards Winter over any other season, but she did not trust many of the creatures who had served with her.

They stalked and flew as ghostly forms across the expanse of field on the other side of the ruins and came to a cliff, the taken dog pack huddled against it. The bullet ridden bear stalked back and forth in front of them, unsleeping. His nose sniffed and he seemed to see Grandmother for a moment, eyes blazing in hatred, before turning his attention to some other part of the night.

At the top of the cliff the orcs camped. Skalula winged her way up and found herself alarmed again. They were camped among warehouses and military jeeps, armed with guns. The telltale ghostly images of cellphones glowed below her. This wasn’t an orcish raiding force. This was a well funded Orcish army.

Everything seemed to point to the huge mansion at the highest point. Grandmother left the other ghosts behind flying up above, and circling low to peer through the high vaulted windows. Everything appeared immaculate - crystal chandeliers sparkled above hardwood tables - Grandmother easily passed through the windows and winged her way through the halls. She passed through the door leading deeper into the mansion and her already wide eyes grew wider. In the middle was a pool - the size of a school gym, but there curled in it was unmistakably - huge black scales overlapping each other, batlike wings folded across his back, long scaly tail wrapped around the edge of the enclosure, a dragon.

A single yellow eye blinked open, looking right at her. Grandmother fluttered back, trying to pass back through that wall, but from this side she found it as hard as a real wall, pulsing with a strange blue light that would not let her pass.

“Grandmother, Ssskalula, Great Owl out back -” the dragon spoke in Salish, rising slowly from the water and taking up most of the space inside the room. “Ssso niccce of you to join me.”
“Who?” Grandmother asked in the same language.
“You don’t remember? Grandmother - it’ss me, Amhuluk. I wass a great friend of the Winter Queen. It’ss sso ssad she wass betrayed.”
“What do you want?” Grandmother asked pointedly.
“Issn’t it obviousss? I miss winter. I misss order.” The dragon shook his head, his huge sharp horns clattering against the ceiling. “But what do I want? Right now I jusst want to be free of meddling grandmothersss. And right now, I have you trapped in my placcce of Ssstrength.”

Grandmother, Skalula, lady of ghosts, beat her wings against the walls as she tried without success to make her way to the open skies. The Dragon rose behind her, water cascading off his back as he hissed. “Sssskalula, I will clip those wingssssss!”