Young Writers Society

Ravenwood Academy: a name that sounded as though it were out of some long-lost fiction on the back shelf, with yellowed pages and a rumpled paper cover, inked words blurred and the scent of it reminiscent of some library that had since been left to fade into disrepair. Tucked away in the forest of the United States' northeast where the owls raised young in old ravens' nests and the blue jays skittered about the duff. Where, for a short while, he'd made his home.

Dusk had been quick to encroach upon the place. The deep calls of the great-horns echoed through the trees, punctuating the twilight's descent. Grey cast itself over the place, the blanket of a muted betwixt. The only truly vibrant color was the titian tip of the cigarette that Cornyx held between his fingers, illuminating the sharp angles of his aquiline countenance, reflecting in those dark and owlish eyes. Gazing towards the building. Unless the schedule had changed since he'd last been here--which it very well could've, with the twenty years that had passed--the children would be on their break and it would've been largely abandoned but for what few teachers opted to stay.

It was unlikely he'd be noticed unless he chose to enter, which was an option he entertained for scarce few moments before dismissing it entirely. Aunt Enid was the only person he thought he'd care to see again but the fond remembrance was tainted by the recognition of how things had changed. He would've much preferred that she remembered him as the boy who'd left Batman comics hidden in her office and left her with a badly-drawn-but-well-meant strip rather than recognizing him as what he'd become since those years. Besides, to him, she was one of the few teachers who saw him; to her, he was one of hundreds students over decades of teaching. She had no reason to hold the same value towards him as he did her.

The smoke seared through his lungs, burning down his throat, the taste of nicotine bittersweet on his tongue. His salvation as much as it was his condemnation. He sighed, the plumes of it billowing out of his nostrils, resting his shoulders back against an evergreen tree. Twenty years ago, he'd been the quiet boy with a stutter, the one in the back of the classroom who rarely paid attention yet read the textbooks in his free time. Who rarely kept up with what was happening but would argue literary analysis at lunchtime after ditching class or pretending he was injured to escape to the nurse's office instead. Where it was quiet, and where he could watch birds out the window. Where he'd deliberately failed classes to try to get them to keep him over vacation, a ploy that never worked, and where, eventually, he'd gotten himself expelled for his flunking grades and blatant disrespect of rules and habits of substance abuse and taking books without permission so he could re-read them when he couldn't be there. The last straw had been a fight, though not one he'd volunteered for or tried to get into, and then it was back to home sweet home.

He'd smoked then, too, although he'd been subtler about it. How many days had he crept into her office midway through first period, the noise of the teacher thrumming against his headache, because he'd managed to get ahold of some alcohol here or there and been an idiot the night before? It was harder to get into trouble at a boarding school in the middle of the forest but he'd managed it. He always did. Even when, for once, he probably could've succeeded.

He drew the last of the smoke in through clenched teeth, then tossed the butt onto the ground, crushing it underneath his heel and letting the ice creep out to ensure nothing caught. He would've left, but he didn't. Where was he going to go? The podunk town a few miles out to some dingy motel with cockroaches? Worse, actual home? He was an impure and dethroned despot in Hell, a beast and traitor in Heaven, a criminal and addict at home. Here, at least, he was just a stupid kid and not a monster.

Cornyx gazed upon the building for a few moments longer, then reached into his pocket and fished around for the cigarette pack. Although he'd grown taller over the years, of course, but in spite of his maturity, he didn't look all that much different. His hair was longer, pulled back into a ponytail, and he was now nearing six and a half feet with no sign of stopping his growth any time soon. A few strands of white had crept into the black and his eyes were tinted slightly blue. The edges of rose petals inked on the side of his hand were visible just jutting out of his sleeve. He was less afraid, now, or came across as it, but tonight there was a melancholy about him that he'd almost forgotten. He'd sacrificed everything for avarice, in the name of instinct and fear and the illusion of fulfillment, and now that had been taken from him. Now, he was nothing more than he'd been the day he'd come here. Lost. Alone. The weight of his sins heavy on his shoulders.

He set the fresh cigarette between his lips, bringing the flame of his lighter to life beneath his fingers. One more. Then he'd go.

It is a known fact that any teacher, being seen on the street, will always be met with alarm from their poor, unsuspecting pupils. Removed from the context of their lairs, reality does not ruin the teacher’s mystique, but rather, an uncomfortable chill is brought with them into the real world.
To be reminded that these creatures are but people, who go shopping, who live in houses, is a theory easy to accept, but bizarre to see.

In a few special cases, the unimaginative youth is entirely correct.
Some members of faculty are removed with no less than a bulldozer. Enid Ó Glacáin would have required an atomic bomb.

Leroy, (Headmaster Scott, to most people), presently up to his chins in administrative work, had kindly given Enid her annual reminder that she could take time off, if she liked. She gave him her annual reply. She thanked him, and in a voice that pinched his middle-aged cheeks and told him he was a good boy, announced she was off to put the kettle on.

Enid more than lived in Ravenwood, she was a piece of it. The white blood cells, perhaps, or maybe the liver. From the yellowed lace curtains over church-like arch windows, to the creaky 1950s furniture and equipment, to the excessive posies and pot plants, Enid's little palace bloomed with Ravenwood's patent blend of refreshing savage quaintness.
Speaking of refreshing savagery, on this night she was reading the Penguin Classics collection of Hippocratic texts, to have mildly painful giggles over how far the profession had come. Jesus Lord in Heaven, there was a reason that naught of Hippocrates survived but the oath. And even that had undergone some edits.

The four humours theory, miasma theory, bloodletting, the obsession over the position of Saturn, so much had gone to waste. It hurt to remember, but at the same time, it was the funniest thing since finding out the earth was round. As she had tried to tell Leroy. He seemed to be too young for this sort of humour. His father had been, too.

How long had it been, Enid wondered as she returned the book to its drawer, since someone had understood her phlegm jokes?

This thought met no conclusion. Instead, it met a Batman issue from 1993, tucked into a stack of yellowing reports. It stuck out like a carefully hidden bullet bra in a row of tasteful knitwear.

She looked down at it in wonder. She was still finding these things a decade later, but it was strange to find one in such a simple place for once.
Someone very insolent had stuffed these things into nooks and crannies, atop the cabinets, in the floorboards, anywhere he could fit them. Someone who really needed a caped hero in the night. Someone who really needed her.

Colin was it? Caelan? No.

Enid flipped through the pictures from cover to cover under the gaslight, trying to recall that boy's name.

Orphan to criminal to king to fugitive. That was the path his life had taken him, broken only by a few years here and with the girl who'd saved his life, and then he'd been stupid again and life had gone to shit and it all was washed away into distant memory, only to be replaced with ink borne in blood and gunpowder and winter's cruel kiss.

This place was a snapshot of what could've been. Of what almost was. When, for a fleeting moment, people had faith in him and he'd simply been too blinded by his lack of faith in himself to bother trying. Where, for a short while, some people had given him a place. A chance. And he was just some fucked-up kid who didn't know which way was up and let it slip away in his fingers because he'd no recognition of what he had because of fear and naïveté and missing pieces that he still reached for, only to find emptiness in their place.

That was the heart of it. That was the heart of everything. Reaching for that thing that would fill the void, the lack of something that he wasn't sure existed or why it wasn't there. Reaching for it and coming up empty-handed, destroying everything around him in search of it. From the rose tattooed on his wrist to the crown that was now forfeit to the blood staining his pale-skinned hands, all he'd ever wanted was peace, and all he'd achieved was crushing what little he had.

That was why he didn't plan on going in. Because, if he did see her, he didn't want her to know what he'd become. Let her remember him as the kid who might've had a chance instead of the man who'd done the unspeakable.

But she was the only one left who saw him and didn't hate him and, God forgive him, all he wanted was to feel something other than this dreadful cold and the searing smoke, because if that was everything he had now, what was the point in seeing tomorrow?

Could it hurt to just step inside and see what it was to remember?

He shifted his weight off of the tree, wingtip shoes crunching against the twigs and fallen pine needles. He crushed the butt of his cigarette beneath his toe before evening his stride, tucking his hands into his pockets, moving at a slow and almost sentimental place, as though unwilling to let this fade as quickly as his memories had. Mind drifting through the hours he'd spent on the corner of the yard with a book in his fingers and crows scattered around him awaiting his lunch scraps. They'd known his face. The birds and Aunt Enid, perhaps the only ones who still persisted in this life and who cared to see his face.

His fingers closed around the door's cool handle, the faintest lines of frost tracing its metallic surface. It turned smoothly in his hand, jerking only slightly when he pushed it open, and the floorboards creaked with his weight and their age. Gaze running over the bricks that had housed notes or cigarettes or folded comics. The thresholds to classrooms where he'd read literature underneath the desk and ignored the teacher, where he'd turned in essays beautifully written but entirely in wingdings, where he'd been sat down and told in an almost imploring tone that he could do so much better than this.

But he couldn't. He hadn't known how. Too afraid of his own shadow to try or to advocate or do anything but flounder and fail and raise his voice until he was thrown out. Other times, it'd merely gotten too loud. Too busy. Too many people all at once. Those times, he'd just left, either disappearing outside where he wouldn't be found or Aunt Enid's office where he'd give her some bullshit reason for not being able to attend class and then grab a Batman comic.

She deserved so much better than a juvenile delinquent like him.

That was what the teachers hadn't understood. It wasn't his intelligence that was the problem, as much as he'd questioned that fact in his youth. It was just that he didn't know how to cope and no one could help him because he wouldn't or couldn't just tell them. So they'd tried, and he'd tried, and neither one had gotten anywhere until the day when the headmaster had called him into his office and that was that.

Did Headmaster Scott even have hair anymore, he wondered?

The place was quieter than a ghost town this time of year. Someone had to be around, given that the door was unlocked, but he doubted many were. Aunt Enid's office truly wasn't far. It would take all of two minutes to see if she was there. He glanced back towards the door where he'd entered, then down the hall, standing half in the doorway of a vacant classroom as he tried to make up his conflicted mind.

Chortles sounded softly from behind the door. Old, Irish chortles.

After a minute or so, Enid burst from the door, Batman comic in hand. "Leroy, you have to see this-!" she began.

She stopped dead in front of the tall youth before her. A second into polite eye contact, she thrust the comic behind her back.

"Lord preserve us, he has a brother." muttered Enid.

"No. Unless... too young for the father..." she wondered aloud. She shook her head, and began to stroke her chin with one hand, while the other remained hidden.

"Unless you're your son. -Are we still in the milennium?"
She paused, the mathematics zigzagging across her brow.

"No. You're yourself." She proclaimed, with a proud nod.

"Yes, I know exactly who you are. Hello, Colin."

Oh, no. From the look in his eye she could tell he was certainly not a Colin. Her smile wilted.

"No, I do know you," Enid insisted, a little snappily. "I just know too many names."

Aunt Enid.

Standing in front of him. With a Batman comic. "Knightfall," issue 500, 1993, something that he was surprised he remembered, but as quickly as he'd seen it it was hidden behind her back and she was speaking and he was standing there, somewhat dumbstruck, processing the words at about half the speed she was speaking them.

Brother. Father. Colin?

The last time he'd seen her, it was in her office with his ratty suitcase in her doorway and his backpack slung over one shoulder, a comic strip inked on thin copy paper in his hands, glasses perched atop his hooked nose. He'd wanted to say goodbye to her. He still wasn't quite sure what it'd been about her that had drawn him so close. Maybe it was just that he needed someone, and she happened to be the person that patched him up when he needed it most.

Right. Names.

He blinked, opening and closing his mouth a couple times before words came out, tripping over them just like he had twenty-odd years ago. Jesus, some things really never did change.

"C-C-Cor-C--" he cut himself off, that all-too-familiar grimace of slight frustration twitching at his lips. Lord. He already knew her and he couldn't speak. He was the dethroned dictator of Hell for crying out loud and now he was caught tongue-tied before a school nurse. As though no years had passed at all. "Cornyx. Er. Cain. C-Cain then, Cornyx now. Cain T-t-tanner."

"Uhm..." He paused, eyes falling to the ground, as dodgy about truly meeting her gaze as ever. He'd forgotten something. Something important. What was it she'd said? Hello, Colin. Oh. That was it.

"Hi. Good evening. Aunt Enid." The man nodded shortly, as though concluding his sentence, and shifted his weight to the side a bit uneasily. As it was, he was still standing partially in the doorway. Two decades ago and that would've been irrelevant. Now, the side of his head smacked the frame with a solid thump, causing him to wince and jerk back, pressing his palm to his skull and then drop his eyes to the floor again.

Thirty seconds in and he'd achieved stuttering, almost forgetting to greet her, and ramming his head straight into the wall. What an excellent start to a reunion he hadn't intended on having.

"Heavens, boy- you'd better sit down- good gracious, you got tall."

Barely taller than his elbow, the old woman fussed him past her door and into a chair. When he returned to his senses, he found a cup of herbal tea had been carefully shoved into his hands.

It smelled strongly of.... several things. Predominantly, peppermint. It was bitter, maybe even a little bark-ish, but it had the sort of curious aftertaste that compelled one to take another sip, to confirm that it still tasted the same as the last sip, and before you knew it you'd been tricked into drinking something healthy. A dastardly tactic.

Of course Enid inhaled the stuff in almost one go.

"Cornelius, was it now? I like that much better. Cain." Her eyes wrinkled in distaste. "Did your father name you that? He was asking for trouble."

Enid didn't remember, but this was the very thing she had said the first time she learned his name, too.

"No, I've got it wrong again. Cornyx. That was what you said." She smiled. "Yes, I like that. You always did have a crowish sort of... curiousity."

(Several other crowish adjectives had come to mind, but Enid settled on one of the kinder ones.)

He'd been taller than Aunt Enid for as long as he could remember; even when he'd first come here at twelve years old he'd had a few inches on the woman. Now those few inches had increased to well over a foot with the passing of the years. He remembered to duck through the second door, if only barely, ushered in regardless of his will by the small Irish woman. The man, in spite of his adulthood, didn't even try to resist her, sitting down in the chair she pressed him towards and taking the cup of tea into his hands. The ceramic was warm against his fingers, a chill he'd forgotten he had until it was warded off from Enid's offering.

His gaze traced over the place. The desk that hadn't changed in two decades, with copious amounts of plants in the windowsill and on the shelves, some ancient desktop from the 90's in the corner, probably having never been touched but for one or two grimy students' fingers who were getting into trouble. The almost bitter scent of the peppermint-ish tea in his lap, wafting up in faint, smoke-like clouds.

So little had changed here, so much was the same, yet he himself was far beyond the child he'd been when he'd first come here. Strangely innocent, even in his mischief, praying on the starlit nights for salvation and forgiveness even before he'd truly done something wrong. Now he held the weight of mortal sins upon his shoulders and he still couldn't spare a moment for the god that had then been so significant.

There was some comfort in the familiarity and the simplicity, though. The fact that, when he came back, some things were the same. His world was shattered, his reflection cracked, his heart and his mind so distant from one another, but the woods were as solid as ever. Aunt Enid, still there. The gently-wafting curtains that shone in the silvery moonlight as though illuminated by faefolk.

Would she still be sitting him down and handing him tea if she'd known the things he'd done?

The faintest of smiles crept over his sharp countenance as her voice went on. Repeating the same line she had so long ago. Catching the reference of his chosen name, finding one of the kinder words to describe him when he, himself, could think of so many reasons he identified with the crows beyond things like curiosity or wit. He was cruel for one, deceitful for another. Arrogant, sometimes. Self-centered. Ruthless.

He didn't deserve her kindness but there was solace in the fact she still offered it. He'd the facade for so long that he'd almost forgotten that he wasn't the mask; that, beneath the apathy and ambition and avarice, he had more than a heart of snow.

He raised the tea to his lips, taking a long sip of it, feeling coming back into his mouth. Gazed down into its brown-green depths rather than making eye contact, which was nothing uncommon for him. Especially in his youth, meeting the look of another was something of a rarity, so long as it could be avoided.

"Thank you," he said softly, though it was unclear whether the gratitude was for the tea or the approval of his new name or something else entirely. "M-most people don't catch the bird bit."

He fell silent for a moment, a heavy sort of silence, as though he intended on continuing but merely needed a few seconds to find the appropriate words. Then, slowly, he resumed his speech, careful and deliberate.

"How have you been, aun-auntie?" he asked, glancing up from his drink for a fleeting second. "It's been a...long time."

Enid placed her emptied cup on the desk. It clacked.

"Nobody's out but the ducks." said Enid. "Flycatchers, chickadees, they're out, all out but the ducks. But the residents are settling- I hear the owls a-courting-"

"-and I saw Timothy out the other day! His antlers have grown so tall! Ah, he was a babe but one spring ago-"

If Cornyx had forgotten a single piece of Ravenwood's ecology; the owls, the bees, the deer or the pondflies, if he had forgot where each one of them nested, how they spent the season, from Enid's primer alone he could have written the book.

She'd spent not a word on herself, and she hadn't needed to. Her face carried a treasury of creases, and all of them were smiling.

Her smile made him smile. Small, sad even, a fleeting portrayal of all this place's bittersweetness. The bittersweetness of the memory of a boy that had been replaced by this unhealthily gaunt visage and all of winter's white winds, a boy and the little Irish nurse who'd been a mother to a lost soul, even if she never knew it.

The man--demon--drew up the tea again. He enjoyed her voice, its gentle undulations and familiar timbre, uttering words of wildlife and wilderness that he, too, had once sought solace in. Had once? Still did. Still did, for when he closed his eyes, he could feel the winter on the horizon--the horrible, holy, heimal mistress he was blessed and cursed to forever serve.

He might've answered. If he thought about it, he might've recognized that he should have, but he didn't. Pensive silence was commonplace for him and it always had been. He never saw a reason to speak unless he had something important to say, for the quiet said many things if one dared to listen: listen to the rumbling rrrks of ravens, rustle of papers in a frigid draft tickling his skin like a lover's caress, the happiness welling in Aunt Enid's conclusion that permeated the air with every passing, imagined tick of his broken watch.

His dark irises glittered from his tea's reflected light, gazing down into the murky depths, disappearing into his mind as he so often did. He lived as much in mind's make-believe as he did actuality--this, too, would be familiar to the school nurse, because whether it was Batman or planning a coup'd'état, he'd always disappeared into his thoughts so easily and left the real world behind, forgotten, if still cared for. Maybe that was one reason for his failure here: one couldn't study if their head was an eternity away.

"- and if she thinks she's at all been subtle, she's in for another- but that's enough of bird politics." Enid shook her head, and looked expectantly at the grown man before her.

It wasn't often that her chicks fluttered back in. Her old eyes glinted with the giddy light of youth as she prepared to ask that question.

"How do you do nowadays, my son?"

"It's been a long course of years, auntie," he admitted quietly, not daring to meet her eyes. An aversion to eye contact had always been the norm for him, even as a boy, but now the avoidance held the same quality it had when he got sent to her after getting into a spiff with another one of the boys and he'd been the one to start it. "I think I made some mistakes I can't really fix.

"My friend, uh, Evie? She died, a..a few years after I left. Same week I got outta prison, that's...that's where I pretty much went after...after this. Then I j-joined a g-gang. Got pr-pretty good at, at it, really, I...I didn't know I...had it in me. To do the things I have. I don't think anyone did." One finger traced the edge of the cup cradled in his hands, brow furrowing slightly.

"But I...I lost everything I built, recently. Someone I...I trusted, he betrayed me. But...it was...it was justified, I think. So...I left. It...it's not really worth it without...him, so..." his bony shoulders rose and fell in a small shrug. "But I didn't really have anywhere to go. Never liked home. Been clean too long for the streets. So I was wandering, a little, and I...ended up here, I suppose. I thought...I might at least come see if you were here, since...y-you were...Well. You were always pretty good to me. B-better than you had to be, y-you know?"

Enid listened quietly. A sad frown crossed her face, as the young man wrought out his confessions. He really did have nobody else to bring them to. People didn’t typically go back to their old school nurses for these things when they had.

"Better than what?" she said, a little irritably. She shook her head.

"I don't write a child off just for being bothersome. Too many people say they're good for nothing, they start to believe it.

Whatever you might be, you came. That means, if you'll pardon my language, a hell of a lot.”

She softened her posture. Her frown relaxed, leaving a simple sadness.

It did hurt to hear him say these things. The gang, and the crime was a shame, of course. But it was far more painful to hear in his voice that he still seemed to believe that he deserved this isolation. He still believed every sordid thing he'd been told he would amount to, only now on a more adult scale. If left alone, he might forget that he still had time.

Enid looked up to meet Cornyx's eyes, inviting him. She spoke gently.

"I'm sorry that Evie is gone. I remember, she meant a great deal to you."