In the fog-choked village of Hollow's End, where the church bells had rusted silent and the gravedigger's spade struck hollow echoes from the earth, there perched a dove that carried death notices in its beak.
The villagers called it Shroud-Wing , though its feathers were not white, but the pallid gray of old bandages left too long on a wound. Its eyes were black pits, depthless and still, like pooled ink in a dead man's writing desk.
Shroud-Wing's arrival always followed the same ritual:
— Three days before a passing, it would appear on the lintel of the doomed soul's home
— At midnight, it would begin cooing—not the gentle murmur of common doves, but a sound like a coffin nail being drawn slowly from wood
— By dawn, the chosen one would find a single feather on their pillow, its tip dipped in something dark and cloying
Old Widow Cress claimed the dove wasn't a bird at all, but the village's first suicide—a young bride who had swallowed lye rather than face her wedding night. She swore its feathers smelled of bitter almonds when burned.
The mayor tried to shoot it down with his hunting rifle, but the bullets passed through as if through smoke, lodging instead in the oak behind his house—an oak that bled sap thick as tar for weeks after.
When the plague came, Shroud-Wing perched atop the empty gallows, its breast swelling with each death rattle from the quarantined homes. The villagers noticed something terrible— with each soul it claimed, the dove grew more solid, more real .
On the night of the last death, the surviving few gathered in the churchyard to find the dove waiting. As they watched in horror, it spread wings that now gleamed pearl-white and pure— while the flesh sloughed from their own arms in gray, feathery patches .
Now when travelers pass the abandoned village, they sometimes see a flash of white in the dead trees. If they listen closely, they'll hear not cooing, but something worse—
— the sound of a hundred silenced voices struggling to remember the shape of their own names.