The seas around the stack boomed and shook, the swell heaving against the broken rock around its base. She flew once around the pillar of rock, twice, three times, getting lower with each pass. She instinctively avoided the spray, but in amongst the flashes off the rock faces, she could detect something moving at the wave-washed base, clambering over the boulders.

It was no more than a pool of darkness, gliding from shadow to shadow, but she knew what that meant and who hid beneath it.

She swung back up to the top of the stack, contending with cross-winds and updraughts, and landed on the weather-struck rock. The wind continued to ruffle her feathers, and when she looked out over the ocean, she could see the lowest quarter of the moon blocked off by a band of black cloud.

The stack was larger than she’d thought: any bigger and she would have called it an island. To seaward, it sloped down to a rocky beach, but it rose from that low point to form cliffs on the other sides. She couldn’t climb, and she couldn’t talk. All that came out was a screech. Having found Crows, she couldn’t get close enough to him. Not as a bird, and even as she crouched low over the ground to stop the wind buffeting her, she wondered what she could do.

She hadn’t always been that way, even though it felt as natural as breathing. She remembered walking upright, swinging arms as she did so. She’d had hands that gripped, a strange flat face with a curious button nose and lips that could pout, and hair that fell from the crown of her head in black coils. She had a tongue, sharp and quick.

She was cold. She stumbled, and she steadied herself with a five-fingered thing that it took her a moment to recognise. She was still bruised and cut, and now she was also in her vest and pants, exposed to the strengthening salt gale.

The muscle in her mouth lengthened and thickened. She could taste copper and bile.

‘F… Fu …’ she mouthed. She had teeth, and tried not to bite herself as she formed the word. ‘Fuck.’

For a moment, she wrapped herself in the strange-angled limbs she had instead of wings and lay in a rough rock-bowl, rocking against the sudden pain and shock, trying to cushion her mind from the sense of howling loss.

She could no longer fly. She’d put it down and she didn’t know whether she could ever take it up again.

Slowly, she unwound, and had to relearn how to stand on feet, and how to use knees, and how to swing hips. Awkwardly, stutteringly, she started down the slope to the shoreline.