The Fall of the Black Bird

They say the rain washes everything away. It’s a lie we invented so we could fall asleep at night hoping the morning would be clean. As if blood could just wash down the drain, and sins could dissolve into transparency. But I know the truth. Rain only sets the dirt. It beats it into the cracks of the asphalt and the pores of the walls. I’ve seen idols crumble under this leaden sky. I’ve seen a legend born from a roadside ditch and watched it fade in a ray of light that felt like a cruel joke of fate. Many called him Raven. Some worshipped him as a savior, others cursed him as a beast. But to me, he was always the beginning and the end of a question I never dared to ask out loud: How much of yourself can you give to others before there is nothing left of you? Before he became the shadow haunting the ministry's nightmares, before the armor, the cold tactics, and that ironic smile that froze on his lips in the face of death... he was just him. I remember him as clearly as if it were yesterday, even though between that night and today lies a mountain of corpses. I was cornered in an alley reeking of dampness and rusted iron. Three shadows smelling of cheap tobacco and stale booze blocked my path. I could feel the cold concrete against my back and that sticky terror rising to my throat, choking off my air. And then, out of the wall of water falling from the sky, he appeared. He didn’t look like a savior. He had none of the heroic pathos from old movies. Just a guy. Soaked to the bone, in a yellow jacket that seemed too big for him, with a hood pulled down so low that I could only see his flashing eyes from beneath the edge. God, those eyes... Wild, like a wolf caught in a trap, yet simultaneously filled with a weariness that seemed to weigh more than this entire ruined city. In his hand, he clutched only a steel collapsible baton—black, scratched, and cold. He froze a few steps away from us. He didn’t shout. He gave no warnings. He just stood there, letting the rain run off him, while his hand trembled almost imperceptibly on the grip. Not from fear, as I understood later. But from the adrenaline burning in his veins, trying to suppress the instinct to flee. "Leave her alone," he said. His voice was quiet, almost swallowed by a c***k of thunder, but it carried a weight that made those creatures hesitate. That was the first time I saw the "shadow" in motion. It wasn’t a graceful fight. It was a desperate assault, a flash of pure, unpolished fury from a man who had nothing to lose. Back then, I didn’t know that this filthy boy throwing himself into the line of fire for a stranger would become Raven. And I didn’t know that one day I would have to watch another try to follow in his footsteps, donning his name like a crown of thorns. They didn’t take him seriously. To them, he was just another drifter deciding to play hero. They were drunk, their movements steeped in the overconfidence of predators accustomed to their prey freezing in fear. It was their first and last mistake. They didn't expect resistance. And he... he wasn't going to resist. He was going to destroy. The first blow landed on the jaw of the tallest one. The sound of the expandable baton biting into bone was dry and short, like a gunshot. The brute didn’t even have time to scream—he simply collapsed into the sludge, choking on his own blood. There was no thrill in the eyes of the guy in the yellow jacket. Only cold, calculating fury. The second one managed to reach for his holster, but the darkness was on the guy's side. He moved like a fractured shadow. A strike to the wrist—I heard the bones crunch, and the gun slapped uselessly into the mud. That was followed by a blow to the knee. The man howled, his leg bending at an unnatural angle, and he crashed onto the stones. It didn’t look like a fair fight. It was a s*******r in an enclosed space. The guy used their drunken sluggishness against them. He wasn't fencing; he was swinging wildly, breaking arms and smashing heads against the brick walls. At one point, one of them tried to grab him by the throat, and they both rolled on the ground. I only saw a tangle of bodies in the mud, heard heavy breathing and muffled blows. In the light of a flickering streetlamp, I saw his face. His hood had fallen back. He beat them methodically, almost mechanically, until they stopped moving. He broke their limbs not out of sadism—he did it so they definitively wouldn't be able to get up. So they couldn't come after us. When it was all over, he froze over them, leaning heavily against the wall. The rain washed the blood from his face but couldn't wash away the wildness in his eyes. He looked like a man who had just crossed a line from which there is no return.