Long ago, before it was known by any name, it was just a common crow. A clever scavenger, it circled high above blood-soaked cliffs and war-torn roads where soldiers marched to die. But it was in the Execution Fields—where prisoners were left to rot in rusted cages and lashed to racks until their screams turned to silence—that the crow found its feast.

It learned to follow the sound of suffering.

The snap of bone.

The wet gurgle of final breaths.

There, it pecked out eyes before death took them.

There, it pulled strips of meat from those too weak to scream.

And there, it stayed… too long.

Like many foul things born from the rot of cruelty, the land twisted in subtle ways. Not with magic, but with resentment.

The echoing hatred of the forgotten.

The hunger of the betrayed.

The despair of those abandoned to die.

Animals that feasted too long on this soil grew wrong. The crows were first to change—small, cruel things whose beaks became sharper, who began to linger in unnatural silence, watching. But this one crow stood apart. As others fled or perished, it stayed, alone atop the cages, pecking, gnawing, gorging itself on rot.

Then… the dead stopped coming.

The wars ended. The executions ceased. The fields went quiet.

Starving, it turned to its own kind.

One by one, it fed—ripping feathers from its kin, bones cracking in its beak. With each crow consumed, its body grew, misshapen and bloated with stolen mass. But more than meat passed into it—screams, souls, and malice. The birds it devoured didn’t pass on; they clung, trapped in its flesh, still alive in some grotesque way.

As its wings grew like torn sails and its voice deepened with unnatural tones, the villagers called it "the corpse that flies." Later, the name became simpler:

Corpse Crow.

Now, the beast watches from crumbling gallows or dead trees, feasting only when its winged thralls bring it prey. It no longer bothers to hunt; its flock does that for it. If threatened, it disgorges them in droves—swarms of half-living crows clawing to be free from the thing that ate them.

It does not forget those who threaten it. It does not forgive. And somewhere deep inside its warped body, countless eyes still blink—some human, some avian, all screaming.