{AN: It's not perfect, but I wanted to get this out there :) }
The wind screamed louder at the cliff's edge than it did down in the flats. Up here, everything was sharp. The sky. The rocks. The silence.
Fourteen Rooks stood lined up outside the Vultures' base—thin armor, thinner nerves. They'd been dropped off without ceremony, just the dull thunk of the carrier hatch slamming shut behind them.
They hadn't been greeted. They'd been watched.
Six soldiers stood on the ridge above—grizzled, silent, still. One leaned on the railing with a thermos. One knelt to tie a boot like he wasn't surrounded by rookies. One just stared, eyes narrowed like he was scanning for weaknesses.
The Rooks didn't know their names. No one had informed them.
But the Vets knew them.
They knew what fourteen replacements looked like. They'd seen the last fourteen burn.
The base was carved into the cliff itself. A mess of gunmetal, glass, and reinforced walkways stitched into the stone like scars. No posters. No slogans. Just weight and wind.
After a full hour of standing at attention, the steel door behind the Rooks hissed open.
Gravy stepped out. Short, scarred, eyes like burnt-out lightbulbs.
"You can relax, Rooks." He sipped from his thermos. "There's no welcome party coming."
One of the Rooks—too young, too clean—tried to speak.
"Save it, Rook," Gravy cut in. "You don't have a name here. None of you do. There's no point in learning them when you're just gonna die in your first drop."
He let that sink in for a moment before he pointed to the path leading uphill. "March."
They stopped at the monolith.
Ten feet tall. Black stone, half-glassed by heat. It sat like a gravestone behind the base, a scar in the cliff's spine.
Burned into it: a feather. Nearly forty of them. Charred into the rock by twenty lines—one for each soldier in a full Vulture squad.
One feather, still glowing with fresh heat the Rooks recognised as Ember, had six. The rest were still just empty stone.
"You're replacements," Gravy took a deep swig of the bottle in his hands, not caring about the dirty looks some of them were giving him. "Each of you is standing in a dead man's space. The bunks you sleep in are theirs. The lockers you use are theirs. And until you can prove that you're more than dead men walking, a Rook is all you'll ever be."
No one breathed.
Then, Preacher stepped forward. Whispered a prayer no one understood, and walked away.
Mom was there in the space he left. "I suggest you all breathe in this fine air you're breathing, it's about to get...humid."
Training began the second they got back to base.
First was the glyph. The standard one for a Vulture.
Military issue—placed dead center on the chest. Function over form. Designed by committee, etched by machine.
Each Rook was strapped down while a metal arm burned the glyph into their flesh. The air was full of the smell of burnt flesh and the evaporated sweat of the Rooks as they thrashed from the pain.
Bricks held down the twitchers, Lint monitored the ones who passed out, and Roach watched from the corner, griping his crossed arms harder with each scream.
One Rook tried to fight, screamed, begged, even managed to break Brick's nose, to which the rest all nearly died laughing to, even as the Rook was still thrashing from the fresh glyph.
Mom barked out a laugh while Bricks nursed his swollen face. "Seems we might have our first graduate after the drop- Might even call her Hops for that nasty kick of hers!"
The last one was calm, only looking curiously at the glyphs that ran down Gravy's arm.
Gravy leaned over, real calm. "This glyph keeps you from frying in a drop. Disperses heat. Blunts force. You'll still die if you're stupid, but it'll take a little longer."
Then he showed them his arm.
Dagger glyphs—small, simple. Eight of them, carved from shoulder to wrist.
"You don't get these from training," he said. "You get 'em from surviving a mission. Each one's for a drop. I only got eight."
He looked down the line.
"You got none. That makes you liabilities." He smirked. "Don't worry, if you make it past three, you usually got enough smarts to collect more."
Then his eyes flicked over to Roach. "One of the guys before said Roach had been part of the first squad. The original Vultures. Might've even survived the first drop. No one could confirm it, but he never took that shirt off. Not even in the medbay. Makes you wonder if his whole damn torso's inked in."
That night, the Rooks were given beds that creaked, food that steamed like it hated being eaten, and no answers.
They sat in their mess hall, exhausted, skin still stinging, staring at one another like prisoners on day one.
Outside, the wind howled.
And up on the ledge behind the base, the six surviving Vultures stood in the dark—sharing a bottle, eyes on the monolith.
Six lines.
Fourteen dead men and women.
Fourteen Rooks.
And who knows how many after them.