On the sheer cliffs of Mount Vethis, where the wind screamed like a grieving god, there lived an eagle who remembered the true name of the sky.
His feathers were not gold, nor brown, but the color of storm-smoke —a shifting gray that drank the sunlight. The mountain tribes called him "Rethas" , which meant he who flies backwards , for his shadow always moved opposite the other birds. They said he had hatched from a stone that fell from the heavens, and that his talons carried the weight of dead stars.
Rethas did not hunt like other eagles. He would watch, motionless for days, until spotting a very particular kind of prey— those who were about to fall .
A slipping climber would feel updrafts suddenly buoy his boots. A child tumbling from a ridge would land unharmed in a nest of strangely arranged twigs. And sometimes, when a dying elder breathed their last on the high plateaus, Rethas would circle above them three times... and their body would vanish before hitting the ground.
The shamans warned never to look directly at him. "His eyes show the sky as it truly is," they said, "and no mortal can bear that sight."
But one day, a blind girl named Sera climbed the cliffs alone. She heard the rush of Rethas' wings—a sound like parchment tearing—and turned toward him without fear.
"Why do you catch them?" she asked.
The eagle alighted before her, his breath smelling of lightning. "Because the sky forgets," he said in a voice made of wind through canyon cracks. "It forgets it was once solid, forgets it once touched the earth. These falling ones... they remind it."
He spread his wings—and Sera, though sightless, saw . Saw that the blue above was just a thin veil, and beyond it stretched an infinite, frozen plain where gigantic featherless birds lay embedded in the ice, their wingspans wider than cities.
When the vision passed, she was alone on the cliff. But now when storms roll over Mount Vethis, the thunder forms words—and the shamans swear it's the blind girl's voice, teaching the sky its own forgotten name.
