I stared at the feather.
It stared back. Or at least, that was the illusion my mind had conjured, because no reasonable person ever expects an inanimate object to hold the kind of silent menace usually reserved for knife-wielding maniacs in alleyways.
Yet there it sat, perched on the rough wooden table of the library's makeshift room, black as the midnight of my worst regrets, gleaming faintly as if mocking me with its smug sheen. If feathers could smirk, this one was practically reciting poetry about my inadequacy.
I had tried, saints know I had tried, to dismiss it as just a feather. A thing birds made when they got tired of their plumage or decided the world needed more soft quills clogging up gutters.
But no. This was not some ordinary pigeon's leavings. This was a statement. It had been left in the grass after the Man in White's collapse, sharp as ink against the pale morning, as though some unseen hand had decided to brand the moment with a souvenir.
