Author: Sparkle Itamashii

Title: (untitled)

Working Title: Tipton

Notes: I can't title this yet. I don't know where it is coming from or where it is going, but it certainly does merit some investigation on my end. This will probably be my Nanowrimo story so come November you may see a rash of updates for this.

My name is Arther Tipton and I was not always a hawk.

There was never a time when I was a normal person, per se, and so I will not lie to you and say otherwise. There was, however, a time when I was human- perhaps as human as you or your parents or your neighbors. I grew up in a normal town in a normal house with a fenced in backyard to play in with my loving parents. My mother worked at the local hospital and my father was an aviator who spent a more of his time thousands of miles farther off the ground than most people would consider healthy. I attended primary and secondary schools of little note with averagely passing grades and unremarkable achievements. In the end I suppose there were only two note-worthy differences between myself and any other children my age, the first being that at the impressionable age of four years old, I ceased all effort to communicate verbally.

The second difference being that I saw them.

What are they? I cannot say for sure, even now. To describe their appearance would be an act of futility; they are made of light and color and shadows, sinuous and bright eyed like living jewels. Sometimes they are small, sometimes large, sometimes it is hard to tell where they begin and end which makes them terribly hard to keep track of much less judge a size. Some of them edge toward appearing feline, some canine or equine, but never human, never close to human. We are unique to them; it is part of what draws them to us.

They are everywhere around us- not crowded, but there is no place they do not go. Very few ever see them but everyone, from innocent children to world-weary grandparents, everyone feels them. The chill up your spine, the feeling people say is someone walking over your grave, is them taking an interest in your thoughts. Deja vu, so often mistaken as having done something before, is what happens when they touch your thoughts and leave someone else's behind for you. Have you ever forgotten where you were going or what you were doing? They've touched your mind, interrupted your thoughts... and who knows what they have taken or left for you to find.

They come and go as they please, although to say so is conditional. I don’t think they come or go at all; rather they are seen and not seen in such a way as we understand it as coming and going when they have actually been there all along and remain after we think they have left. Sometimes I might think one had left and another arrived only to find out that between one moment and the next the same one had merely changed its form.

There was only one I ever recognized for sure, only one whose shape never seemed to change too vastly for me to know on sight. Long neck, needle teeth, and a pair of ram’s horns that curled about his long-jawed face in the most comical way were the marks I memorized, the things I looked for when one of them slipped across the edges of my vision. I say ‘he’ only because I was raised in a world of he’s and she’s; I don’t believe Arkan’s kind has any concept of gender, nor do I think they would care to if the idea ever struck them.

I first met Arkan on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I had been tending quietly to a hot dog, neatly sliced into circles by my mother, who was on the phone two rooms over. The noise of a bird hitting our back window distracted me, drawing me to investigate. Slowly I drew open the heavy glass paned sliding door and stepping outside into the sunlight. Laying on the pavement at my feet was a chickadee, an unremarkable sort of bird who had happened to have very unfortunate luck that afternoon. Very carefully I knelt down and scooped her up in both hands. There was nothing I could do to save her and I knew it but much like it does for humans in their dying moments sometimes a warm presence at the end does more than any futile attempt to preserve life.

In the same moment that the bird took her last, shuddering breath, there was a similar warm presence around me. I held very, very still as Arkan – who I may or may not correctly assume was named Arkan before I met him – looked curiously over my shoulder at the feathered husk I still cupped gently in my hands. Ever-so-softly he reached out to the bird, brushing clawed fingertips over her still body. The light from his fingertips seemed to leech out and form into a small, color-light version of the chickadee and for a split second she perched there on my fingertips, examining Arkan and I with a tilted head. In the next instant she was gone, fluttering into the trees and disappearing into the light that streamed down into my humble backyard.

“What was that?” I breathed, more to myself than to anyone.

“A memory,” Arkan answered, looking askance at me with bright, shifting eyes.

I was four years old. I have not spoken a word to any human since.

Arkan did not leave me after that brief encounter. My silence often echoed his and he told me once that the way I didn’t speak called to him. Though I can’t say that I understood it any better then than I do now, I remained as quiet as I could manage. Often it was almost a contest to see who would keep their mouth shut the longest; I usually won as Arkan was a curious beast full of questions and knowledge. If I outlasted his patience, everything he knew seemed to bleed from him, as if he simply could not contain it alone.

And he knew a lot.

He knew about countries he had never been to and people he had never seen. He knew about the sun and the stars and the moon, about the tides of oceans he had never swam in and creatures whose minds he had never touched. All of this he took from the minds of the people who lived in my town and later my city and a good deal of it he felt needed to be relayed to me.

I cannot say why he felt this way, nor why he chose me over the precious few others in the world who could see his kind but I do not regret it. Even now, trapped where I am, I do not regret it; I would not give an instant of it back to redo.

You see, Arkan’s kind are precious to this world, more precious than you or I or anyone you have ever known, perhaps. They touch thoughts, play with them, trade them, change them, but they also protect them. Every great idea, invention, discovery, every gut feeling and every shred of intuition, they have had a hand in crafting. They are there for your dying breath, salvaging everything you have ever lived for to pass on to the next generation. They are there when a newborn baby takes its first breath of air, breathing into the child everything which it will eventually become. Without them, everything that humans have become might very well be undone because they are, to put it simply, life’s consciousness itself.

And they are being hunted.

Notes: I would appreciate some feedback for this. I'm still feeling out the story and I want to be sure I've gotten the feel of it right so any impressions you've gotten of character here would be more than welcome.