The humidity of the Mississippi Delta is a physical weight, a wet blanket that smells of river silt and dying magnolias. Blackwood Manor sat at the end of a road that the world had forgotten, a skeletal ruin of white columns and rotting porches, sinking slowly into the black mud of the swamp.

I was Silas Blackwood, the last of a line of men who believed that blood was the only thing that mattered. I had spent my life accumulating power, land, and a collection of forbidden texts that whispered of the transcendence of the soul. In my final hour, as the cancer turned my lungs to stone, I performed the Rite of the Unbroken Thread. I did not seek a young man's vigor or a scholar's mind. I sought only to survive.

I woke up in the dark, damp heat of the cellar. I tried to scream, but all that emerged was a guttural, wet cluck. I looked down and saw the horror: I was a bird. A stunted, featherless thing with a twisted beak and eyes that saw the world in a distorted, yellow haze. I was a creature of the dirt, a scavenger of the scraps.

From my perch in the shadows, I watched my children—the survivors of my cruelty. I saw my son, Julian, as he paced the drawing room, his face a mask of the same arrogance I had carved into him. I watched him sign away the last of the estate to pay for his gambling debts, laughing as he tore down the portraits of his ancestors.

The irony was a bitter pill. I had spent decades building a dynasty, only to become the very thing I despised: a parasite, a hidden thing, a joke of nature. I remember the way I used to look at the livestock, the casualness with which I ordered the slaughter. Now, I feel the instinctive terror when a hawk circles above the manor, a primal fear that transcends my human intellect.

One evening, Julian came down to the cellar to fetch a bottle of wine. He stepped on a small, fragile thing—a hatchling that had wandered too far from the nest. He didn't even look down; he just kept walking, leaving a smudge of blood on the concrete.

In that moment, I felt a surge of hatred so pure it almost burned through my avian heart. I realized that the bloodline I had fought so hard to preserve was a river of poison. I am the Carrion Heir, the king of the scraps, and as I watch the manor crumble around me, I find a perverse satisfaction in the decay. We are all just meat in the end, and the swamp always claims its own.

*** OTMES_v2_Code: [M1:9.0, M3:8.0, N1:0.2, N2:0.8, K1:0.6, K2:0.4, TI:62.8, theta:75.9]