## The Weight of Wings
Dust motes danced in the single shaft of sunlight slicing through the warped planks of Old Man Tiber’s cabin. Silas traced the lines on the worn map with a calloused thumb, the parchment smelling of woodsmoke and regret. He hadn’t smelled rain in weeks. Just the dry rasp of prairie grass and the phantom scent of his grandmother’s sage.
The map wasn’t about places, not exactly. It was about *when*. When the monarchs flew – not just *if*, but how they angled, how tightly they clustered, where they dipped and swerved. His grandmother, the last Abinidi storyteller, called it reading the bones of the sky.
“Find the pattern,” she’d rasped on her deathbed, a skeletal hand gripping his. “El Brule holds the answer. The earth remembers.”
Silas had scoffed then, dismissing it as fever-dream rambling. But the migrations…they were changing. Erratic. Like a heartbeat stuttering before stopping.
He ran a hand over the faded ink, pinpointing clusters from the last ten years. The lines converged – not on El Brule itself, but a stretch of burial mounds just east of town. Sacred ground the settlers had mostly ignored. Mostly.
Outside, a wagon rattled along the rutted track. Silas didn’t need to look up to know who it was. Astronomia Iruquite. The Saint Lawrence woman with eyes like chipped obsidian and a reputation for unsettling accuracy.
She parked near the cabin, the horses’ breath steaming in the cool air. He braced himself. Collaboration meant acknowledging her knowledge, and everything within him resisted that. The Abinidi didn’t share secrets easily.
She entered without knocking, her leather coat smelling of star anise and something metallic. Tall and wiry, she carried a brass telescope slung over her shoulder. Her gaze swept the cabin, lingering on the maps spread across the table.
“Abinidi charts,” she stated, not a question.
Silas didn’t offer acknowledgement. He continued tracing the migration patterns. “Observation.”
“More than that. You seek a convergence. El Brule’s eastern field.” She walked closer, her boots silent on the dirt floor. “The old places.”
“You’ve seen it too?”
She nodded, setting down a small, leather-bound notebook. “Decades of ship manifests. European vessels consistently charting anomalies near livestock routes. Behavioral shifts. Unexplained agitation.”
Silas frowned. “Livestock?”
“Cattle, sheep, even horses. Erratic movement. Sudden stampedes. The reports dismissed as weather-related, disease, even simple fright.” She opened the notebook, revealing meticulously drawn charts. “But the patterns…they correlate with specific ship locations.”
He studied her diagrams, intricate webs of lines mirroring his own. Her focus wasn’t the sky; it was what *disrupted* it.
“What kind of disruption?” Silas asked, a tightness in his chest.
“Dark spots. Consistent readings during transit. Below the waterline. Something…altering magnetic fields.” She paused, her eyes meeting his. “The kind of alteration that would resonate with terrestrial pathways.”
Silas stared at her. The Abinidi believed in the interconnectedness of all things, the spirit world woven into the physical. His grandmother had spoken of “stone songs” – vibrational frequencies that connected burial sites, animal migration routes, even the stars themselves.
“The old routes,” he murmured. “The cattle trails follow the deer runs. The deer run along the ancient trade paths. And those paths…”
“Intersect with buried stones,” Astronomia finished, her voice low. “Places that remember.”
“The settlers didn’t just build on the land,” Silas said, a sickening realization dawning. “They *interrupted* it.”
“More than interrupted,” Astronomia corrected, her gaze fixed on the map. “They severed connections.”
The smell of woodsmoke suddenly felt acrid, suffocating. Silas pushed away from the table, pacing restlessly. “What kind of alterations? What are they *doing*?”
“That’s what I hoped your charts would reveal. The monarchs are sensitive creatures,” she explained, her voice calm but insistent. “Their migratory patterns reflect the health of the land. If something is disrupting the stone songs…”
“It would affect everything.” Silas stopped, staring out the cabin window. The prairie stretched endlessly before him, a tapestry of gold and brown under a pale sky. He could almost feel the tremor in the earth, a subtle dissonance that had been growing for years.
“The old ways,” he said quietly. “My grandmother warned me about the iron roads, the steel boats. She said they would ‘silence the whispers.’”
“They are not silencing them,” Astronomia corrected. “They’re distorting them.” She reached out, touching a specific point on his map – a convergence of migration patterns near the eastern field. “This location…it’s amplifying the distortion.”
“Why El Brule?” Silas asked. He knew the town held no particular historical significance, just a trading post established on relatively fertile land.
“The bedrock,” Astronomia said. “It’s rich in ferrous minerals. It resonates with magnetic fields, making it an ideal conductor. Something is buried there…something amplifying the disruption.”
A long silence settled between them, broken only by the creak of the cabin timbers. Silas knew he should trust her, but generations of mistrust ran deep within him. The Abinidi had learned the hard way that outsiders rarely had their best interests at heart.
“What do you want?” Silas asked, his voice flat.
Astronomia’s gaze didn’t waver. “To understand what is happening. And to find a way to restore the balance.”
“And why share that with me?” He pressed.
“Because your grandmother’s work is the key,” Astronomia said. “Her charts map not just *where* things are happening, but *when*. You understand the rhythms of this land. I need that understanding.”
Silas studied her face, searching for deception. He found only a quiet intensity.
“There’s an old burial mound in the eastern field,” Silas said, a decision forming within him. “Hidden among the willows. My grandmother warned me never to go near it.”
“Let’s go,” Astronomia said, her voice firm. “The monarchs are changing course. We don’t have much time.”
They left the cabin, the setting sun casting long shadows across the prairie. As they rode toward the eastern field, Silas could feel a growing unease within him. The air felt heavy, charged with an energy he hadn’t noticed before. The monarchs were already gathering in the distance, a dark cloud swirling against the pale sky – their movements erratic and unsettling.
As they approached the field, the scent of decay grew stronger. The willows stood silent and drooping, their branches trailing in the murky creek. Hidden among them was a mound of earth, overgrown with weeds and forgotten by time.
Silas dismounted, his heart pounding in his chest. He hadn’t been near this place since he was a boy, and even then, his grandmother had warned him to stay away. “This place…it’s been disturbed,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.
Astronomia nodded, her gaze sweeping the mound. “Recent activity,” she stated grimly. “Someone has been digging.”
They approached the mound cautiously, their horses nervously pawing at the ground. As they drew closer, they saw it: a gaping hole in the earth, revealing layers of disturbed soil and broken stone.
“What are they looking for?” Silas asked, his voice tight with apprehension.
Astronomis walked closer and knelt beside the hole and began to examine the disturbed earth. “Something buried deep,” she said, her voice low. “Something metallic.”
Silas knelt beside her and began to carefully sift through the soil, his fingers brushing against something cold and smooth. He pulled it out: a piece of rusted iron, shaped like part of a mechanism.
“Old technology,” Astronomia said grimly. “European make.”
“What kind of mechanism?” Silas asked, his voice rising in alarm.
Astronomis continued digging and pulled out a larger piece of metal – a section of a gear wheel, heavily corroded but still recognizable. “Something used to measure magnetic fields,” she said slowly. “A resonance amplifier.”
Silas stared at her, his mind reeling. “What does that mean?”
“They’re not just disrupting the connection,” Astronomis said. “They’re actively amplifying something.”
A sudden gust of wind swept across the field, carrying with it a chorus of agitated monarch wings. The butterflies were swirling above them now, their movements increasingly frantic and disorganized.
“They’re interfering with the stone songs,” Silas said, his voice tight with apprehension. “But why?”
Astronomis rose to her feet and stared out across the field, her gaze fixed on a faint trail of disturbed earth leading toward the distant town. She turned back to Silas, her eyes filled with a grim determination.
“I think,” she said slowly, “they’re trying to control something.”
