Day 1,215

When you were little you worried that the crows would come for your eyes because you were human. Now you are old enough to know better, old enough to keep your mouth shut but young enough to feel the guilt of killing the last person you told as fresh as if it was yesterday.

Everyone in the area pretended to be something else, anything but human. Since a neighbouring dimension merged with Earth, the crows developed a craving for human flesh. Nothing else would sate them and every migration ended in a funeral.Such was the new order of things.

You were part of the first generation to be born since the Conjunction, the first to be raised believing they weren't human and the first to realise what being a "human" now meant. There were thousands of ways to trick the crows from masks to prosthetics to implants but someone was always discovered.

In the back of your mind you wondered if the crows knew that everyone was lying and they all voted on who to kill each year while laughing at everyone else in their costumes and false mannerisms. There was always the fear that you would be next, that the crows would break from their tradition and come for you because you looked like a human pretending to be a creature or worse - that the humans around you would realise you weren't human, dress you as one and leave you to a slow death by crows.

The last person you told tried to do just that, though you'd been friends for as long as you could remember. They didn't think you could be trusted around actual humans, no matter how you'd been raised or how many trials you'd been through together.

You did what any human would do.

You protected yourself.

You gave them to the crows.