The Birth of the Crow (I)
At two twenty-three in the morning, Elias once again woke up from his dream.
His eyes were wide open, like a drowning man who had just struggled out of the deep sea. His breathing was rapid, his throat was dry, and his chest was as heavy as if it was filled with something. He stared at the ceiling and didn't move for a long time, until a drop of cold sweat ran down the corner of his forehead and slid into his pillow, making him realize again that he was - still - in this world.
He sat up from the bed, the room silent, with only the trailing sound of an occasional cab whizzing by outside the window. He looked down at his palms, the feathery lines that had appeared at some point, still lying quietly in his palms, blending into his skin like an imprint, occasionally glowing with a faint gray light.
Elias tried to rub it, like when he was a child facing the water pencil marks drawn on by mischief. But instead of fading, the mark glowed slightly under the friction of his fingers, as if responding to his touch.
"It's not a dream." He whispered.
Elias dreamed that he had turned into a rave, his wings cutting through the sky as he flew over a forest shrouded in gray mist; that a fox with silver pupils waited for him in the bushes; that there were pillars of light shattering high in the sky, that the earth was cracking like glass, and that a burning panther was pouncing on him... ...He remembered it so clearly that he could even feel the temperature of the fox's breath as it whispered in his ear in the dream.
But that was clearly just a dream.
*
The sunlight of the next day was not bright, but rather gloomy like an impermeable quilt.
Elias sat in the last row of the classroom, the books spread out in front of him to form a barrier that obscured his vision. He didn't intend to listen carefully to the class, at least not today. His gaze quietly swept over every face in the classroom before falling back to the acacia tree outside the window that was sprouting buds.
"You're not right today." Alex, his deskmate, whispered, "Did you just stay up late playing videos games again?"
"No." Elias shook his head, wanting to say something.
Alex cocked his head and pointed his chin towards the classroom door, "Then how did you know that the vice principal was coming to check on the class just now?"
"... I guessed." Elias replied in a small voice.
Actually, he didn't guess. He "heard" this class teacher's inner voice a minute in advance - "This class must be quiet, the vice-principal will be finished when he comes. The voice seemed to drift through the air, faint, but real.
This was not the first time.
He could read people's mind. Not words, but a kind of perception; he "smell" of thoughts, the "texture" of emotions; like the wind in his head. If he concentrated, he could accurately anticipate someone's next words; if he focused, he could even feel the faint currents of a person's body.