There were so many Ravens in the sky that at first, I thought they were starlings. I saw a few perched here and there, but I didn’t make the connection to the swirling murmuration above me for several long moments. The reality was jarring. I’d never seen so many Ravens in one place.
Then there was the silence. It was so quiet the swirling, rustling of their flight feathers had heft, like a thousand people whispering. I’d just woken up and the whole thing felt like a dream. Unfortunately for me, this was going to be the high point for today’s normality.
My cat, Luke, looked nonplussed. But then, it's hard for a cat to do a lot more than that, and I guessed that to him a bird was a bird was a bird, and the fact that this was a large concentration of ravens, in particular, held no importance to him. Luke stood, stretched, and with what looked concerningly like a sigh, ambled over to me. He sat, fastidiously curled his tail around his front paws and looked up.
“You want feeding, dude?”, I asked, more to break the weird dream-like silence. I thought about the last eclipse. This had the same eerie quiet, as if all the animals, except the ravens, sensed something was up.
“Um, yes? But that’s not really the main priority right now actually.”
I gaped.
“We need to talk”, said Luke in an oddly accented lilt. Odd for a human from my town I mean. Obviously, any accent at all was pretty odd coming out of a domestic cat.
“Well apparently, we are?”, I stammered. “What do you think this means? Dreams mean something, and now I’m talking to a cat under a swirling raven sky”.
Luke’s eyes darted from me to the crows perched around, but he seemed to be avoiding looking up too much. Like someone trying to pretend the dark doesn’t bother them, but too scared to turn and look behind them.
“I think it means that you have some of our royal blood in your veins, otherwise you would be asleep and actually dreaming with all the other humans. This I'm afraid to say, is actually happening ”, he said.
“I’m not part-cat!”, I argued in surprise.
“No? Me neither.”
“Wait, what?”
Luke gave me the look a teacher reserves for the slowest child in the class. Trying to hide his frustration behind patience.
“Yes. Fine. I guess this was a bad call. It was a toss-up between ‘talking cat’ or ‘shapeshifting cat’ and I thought this would be easier to deal with, but perhaps I was wrong.” Luke stood and looked around again. This time he glanced upwards and shuddered. “I suppose my cover is not entirely intact anyway, so I might as well take it off. Hang on”.
There was a shimmer, like heat haze but thicker, and I found myself gaping once again. This time at the knees of a young man that now stood where Luke had once sat. My eyes tracked up his body until I met the green-eyed gaze of my 6ft, handsome cat.
“You’re human!”, I breathed.
“Nope, wrong again. Sorry about this, I feel like you are going to be wrong a fair amount today.”
“What do we need to talk about Luke?”, I asked, resisting the urge to stroke him and see if he would still purr.
He smiled warmly. “Well, that is a much better question than I expected under the circumstances. Maybe more than a dash of royal blood. There had to be a reason I was drawn here. We need to talk about the Ravens.”
I waited for a moment, but Luke didn’t continue. He was looking at me but using his peripherals to keep an eye on a couple of birds hopping toward us. “OK?”, I prompted.
“Sorry, yes. The ravens. I think I might have pulled you into something. My brother is looking for me. The ravens are his emissaries.”
“Your brother is not looking for you”, I said.
Luke frowned. “I can assure you he is. He has been for some centuries.”
“No. He isn’t. If the ravens are his guys, then he does appear to have, um, found you?”
He nodded mournfully. “Fair point.”
“Who is your brother? Who the hell are you? What is going on? Are we in danger?” I asked, my voice pitch rising with each question until I was basically audible only to dogs. Or 6ft cats.
Luke held out his hand to me, and I shook it on reflex. “Hi”, he said. “My name is Loki, and my brother is..”
“THOR?!” I interjected.
Loki’s face darkened. “NO! Odin. That sparkly dipshit is my nephew. Fucking Stan Lee. The ravens mean that Odin has found me. As for danger, I’m afraid I can’t be sure about that. We are about to have a conversation I’ve been avoiding having for several hundred years, and he is not known for his even manner. If you were 100% human, I’d say you are safe. But apparently, you are not.”
“What would Odin want with me?” I asked.
“I don’t know”, said Loki looking upward once more. Above us, the maelstrom of ravens began to condense. The birds flying impossibly close to each other, and swirling like a tornado. The tip of the ravenado touched the ground, and poured downwards, collapsing down into a shadowy form amongst the storm of feathers. “Shall we go ask him?”
