Anthropometry
an excerpt

He had lost track of the time.

Streaks of light shone through the hazy mist, coiling densely over the forest floor, blanketing the bottoms of blackened, skeletal trunks. Surely it was dawn, but, with the fog on the ground mirrored by the clouds in the sky, the day had already taken a timeless quality upon itself.

Not that it mattered. This place was forgotten, and, strangely even, unmonitored. It had been countless generations since it had last been publicized as one of the starkest manifestations of the effect of human toil upon Mother Nature’s creation. Its political purpose served, it was hastily covered up by other more pressing, more sensational things, but if anybody passing through had bothered to take a closer look, they would have seen those trees still bore the scars from the acid tears of the heavens.

Less subtle were the scores of jagged grooves that ran across those trees in altogether different patterns. Claw marks? In this enlightened age, could one believe that such things as, say, werewolves still roamed the wild? Most would have admitted that yes, such was a clear possibility, for this was a time far beyond the fearful speculations of ignorant minds, and even the hubristic posturing and dismissals of the arrogant minds that closely followed them.

The world had seen, finally, and some things they just couldn’t ignore.

Still these excoriations were not the product of mere claws- they were far too deep, as if the tree itself had been rent by some unworldly grip. They were, after all, the mark of talons. But what manner of talons would be so large as to appear on the side of tree trunks?

As the light increased, the trees cast spidery shadows across the caked dirt and stone, and across each other in a silent pantomime. Slowly, they parted, revealing another silhouette, slumped against the slope of one of the trunks. It was strangely organic for such a deathly landscape. Even more strangely still, it was moving, if only with an almost imperceptible oscillation.

Then the light shone directly on the silhouette, and it stirred. A beady eye fluttered open, roved around, shut, and then opened fully, so that the yellow bordering the opaque, reflective pupil was visible. Then the silhouette rose, shrugging the shadows off, shaking its beak rapidly and clicking in displeasure.

He could feel the wet of the fog: it was seeping into his plumage, water logging it, making it heavy and chilling him to the core. He tried puffing himself up, unfolding his wings and flapping, ran his beak through as much as he could reach, but to no avail. Struggling upright, he scraped his talons along the ground experimentally. Bright and gaudy as they were, he could barely see their movement.

For him, these kind of godforsaken mornings were not to be enjoyed, so much as endured. Then again, he was so used to it that, such were the nature of habits, there was a certain enjoyment to enduring. One that stoked his fires, inflamed his spirits, gave him an edge to his routines and his movements that he lacked even as his talons would slip hopelessly on the slick, mushy bark and his muscles would seize up, his body and his limbs dull and unresponsive to his instincts.

As much as he could manage it, there was no denying damp was the true weakness of peregrines.

For one obsessed so long and so hard with such a thing as perfection, this bothered him greatly. All the while he could reassure himself that he was still a living being, inherently imperfect, for he was still attached to the laws of life, or, failing that, even the greater natural laws. He could claim that he was something greater than human, or other than human, for it was humanity in all its metaphysical queries that locked itself in its own state of forever questing. And he was not human, well, not entirely. Feathers, talons, his beak, eyes, tail and his wings for arms would tell anybody that, despite his body.

Still, here he was. Living, shivering in the damp cold, alone, and, come to think of it, rather hungry.