Sheena: Spirit of Jungle by Jade Gretz

https://www.deviantart.com/jadegretzai/art/Sheena-Spirit-of-Jungle-1293609241?file=1

Sheena: Spirit of Jungle ANIMATION

The Sky Aches With Beaks

High above the humid rot of the jungle floor, where the emerald canopy bled into a bruised and fading sky, silence was an apex predator’s greatest trick. Up here, two hundred feet in the air, the world was a perilous architecture of suspended vines, ancient ironwood branches thick as palace columns, and suffocating banks of pale mist. Gravity was a constant, yawning grave beneath them, but the true terror came from above.

Sheena crouched motionless on the moss-draped limb of a gargantuan strangler fig. Her golden hair was plastered to her neck with the cold sweat of deep altitude, her breathing so shallow it barely shifted the leopard skin clinging to her frame. In her right hand, she gripped a blade of forged steel, its edge glinting with a dull, matte menace. She did not look down. Down was a myth. There was only the wood, the mist, and the sky.

"The air tastes like copper," Jura whispered. The young hunter pressed his back against the rough bark beside her, his knuckles bone-white around his blowpipe. He was shivering, though the humid air was stifling.

"That is fear," Boro grunted from the neighboring branch. The massive warrior sat with his thick legs dangling over the abyss, resting a heavy, stone-studded club across his knees. "Your own blood preparing to spill."

"It is not fear, and it is not his blood," Sheena said, her voice a low, melodic thrum that commanded instant stillness from the men. "It is the dust from their wings. It coats the leaves. It precedes them."

Kaelen, the eldest of the hunting party, knelt slightly above them on a lattice of aerial roots. His face was a map of old scars, but right now, his eyes were wide with a fresh, unfamiliar terror. "Three generations my family walked the lower ferns," he murmured, his gaze sweeping the gray fog. "We never looked up. The canopy was for the monkeys and the orchids. Now the sky is growing teeth."

"Quiet," Sheena commanded softly. "They are listening."

A strange sound echoed through the mist. It was not the shriek of a bird of prey. It was the distinct, rhythmic sobbing of a small child, drifting through the canopy like a ghost.

Jura gasped, leaning forward. "There is a child out there. Someone from the river village?"

Sheena shot out a hand, gripping the boy’s shoulder with a strength that made him wince. "Do not move. There is no child. It is a lure."

"A bird that cries like a human?" Boro scoffed, though he shifted his weight uneasily, the wood groaning beneath him. "That is an old wives' tale, Queen. A story to keep children from wandering into the high brush."

"They do not just cry like us, Boro," Sheena replied, her eyes tracking a shadow that moved behind the veil of fog. "They steal the voices of what they eat. The crying you hear is the echo of their last meal. They use it to see who will be foolish enough to come to the rescue."

As if to punctuate her warning, something dropped from the gray expanse above. It hit the branch between Jura and Boro with a wet, heavy thud. Jura recoiled, stifling a scream.

It was the severed arm of a howler monkey. But it had not been torn or ripped by talons. The cut at the shoulder was perfectly smooth, severing hide, muscle, and bone with surgical precision.

"By the deep roots," Kaelen hissed, leaning down to inspect the macabre debris. "What kind of beak makes a cut like a freshly honed machete?"

"The razor-beaks," Sheena said, rising slowly to a fighting stance. "The Vultur-Khanda. They do not tear their prey, Kaelen. They amputate. They dissect. And they wait for you to fall apart."

The sobbing stopped. The silence that replaced it was heavy, suffocating, and absolute. The mist began to swirl, agitated by the displacement of massive wings.

"They have found us," Sheena warned, raising her blade. "Backs to the trunk! Form a crescent!"

A massive silhouette materialized from the fog directly above Boro. It dropped with zero sound—no rustle of feathers, no displacement of wind. It was simply suddenly there. The creature boasted a wingspan of nearly twelve feet, its feathers the color of bruised ash. Its head was devoid of plumage, displaying pale, wrinkled skin drawn tight over a skull that looked far too human. But its beak was the stuff of nightmares: a long, curved scythe of obsidian-black bone, serrated along the inner edge and polished to a deadly gleam.

It swept past Boro in a graceful, horrifying arc.

Boro swung his club with a mighty roar, but the bird banked effor
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