It's Still Life

15 of 27: Featherhung – The Fragment: Unfinished Flight

The soundtrack comes first this week: Best read with this music stitched to its unfolding glyph. Broken Dreams By Milad Ghavipanje.

Part 4: Lindisfarne, Holy Island, 7th Century 

Brigid hunched over her desk — a slab of bog oak, black as a raven’s throat — when, halfway through Psalm 91, her quill slipped and left out the word not, so You will not fear the terror of night became something far truer than scripture ever meant: You will fear the terror of night.

Felreil, then a young scriptorium crow, saw it — ink still wet on the fragile line — and he let it stand, though he could’ve fixed it in a heartbeat… later, he claimed he was only preserving what she truly meant (some truths must be witnessed so they sting, he said, with the flat certainty of someone who’s never feared his own handwriting).

They argued, but not about the error:“You let it stand,” she said, not looking up from the ruined psalm, and he, preening a wing too casually, replied, “You meant it to,” (Brigid’s quill snapped in her hand) — “I meant to write God’s word, not my cowardice,” she hissed — “Then why does your hand shake more when you write not than when you write fear?” (his voice soft as vellum tearing), and in that moment, their quarrel cracked open the difference between damage and design.

For three moons, she wrote night as knife in every psalm, and for three moons, he gathered the scraps, binding them into the spine of the Book — a gospel made of shavings and omission, titled Here Lies the Word She Couldn’t Swallow: The 28th Glyph – The Worm.

The tide eventually rose, and time softened the quarrel, but the negation she dropped became a feather stuck in every candle she lit, a ghost that nested behind her ribs.

Now, on Holy Island, many centuries later, she hears the wind whisper it again — you will fear, you will fear the night — until Felreil, perched above her on the ruins, drops a black obsidian pebble, pearl-etched with one word only: Not.

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Part 5: Featherhung – The Unfinished Flight

She woke with the knife in her fist, the dream still clinging to her skin like salt, and found herself once again at that flat slab of bog oak — the desk from Lindisfarne, real or remembered, it didn’t matter — carving her name not in Latin, but in crow-tongue, the letters crooked and defiant, like light breaking through stained glass.

Felreil clicked his beak and muttered, “This is heresy,” and Brigid, eyes sharp with stormlight, replied, “No, this is me.”

She left NOT omitted in the vellum, but beneath it, in ink salted with last month’s Driftspire, she scrawled a footnote: You will fear the terror of night until you learn how to become it.

Felreil tried to object, but the air turned holy as Brigid burned NOT backward into the desk — one glowing glyph in a script that answered only to her.

“You can’t rewrite scripture,” he said, pacing the margin, and she shrugged: “Watch me.”

When she walked away from Lindisfarne, the tide whispered yes, and Felreil flew above her, his wings feathered with her name, the wind learning to speak her language.

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Written for Denise’s Six Sentence Story including the word “flat“.  Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2025.