They seemed to be in the middle of an important discussion. One of the soldiers said, "Sir, our current rations will last for about three more weeks."
The commander, resting his wing thoughtfully under his chin, replied, "Then we must seize the silo quickly. That way, we’ve already took his ammunition as well."
Lola cleared her throat to draw attention. The crows turned to look at her. One of the soldiers began folding the map.
"I'm Lola. I'm a doll. Barnabas took my first and only friend away from me. He was your comrade. I want to fight alongside you and take revenge."
A moment of silence followed. The crow commander smirked and said, "You want to fight? You're not a crow. You don't understand what this war means. Long ago, these lands were our paradise until Barnabas appeared. He drove our ancestors from these fields — fields destined to be reclaimed by us. Our promised land. And you're just a doll, with no part in this matter."
"How can you reject a force that genuinely wants to help you?"
The commander thought for a moment and said, "You might have a point..."
For the next three days, Lola served at the crow command center but never once joined the battles. The commander assigned her to Company B, where wounded crows who could no longer fly served behind the frontlines. She assisted the injured, delivered letters to and from the messenger crows, and helped prepare meals.
The command center had a staircase leading to a basement storage room where supplies were kept. The provisions were stored in a spherical chamber directly beneath the commander’s office. Every day, Lola carried buckets of corn from the storage to the cook, who boiled them and served the corn broth to the hungry soldiers lined up at the pot.
Lola was dissatisfied with this routine but waited patiently for an opportunity to prove herself worthy of joining the battle.
During this time, she became somewhat familiar with the war situation. She even managed to see Barnabas. He had a humanoid body, standing at about one and a half meters tall. His burlap skin was rough, and he wore a patched, oversized coat with a worn straw hat. He lived in a large barn, where he kept his pesticide-spraying airplane. During the day, he fought the crows from the skies, and at night, he repaired and maintained his aircraft.
The crows had tried numerous times to launch night raids on the barn, but Barnabas seemed to have a device to detect their presence. Each time, he took his position at the mounted corn machine-gun by the window, firing at the crows with corn bullets.
When he needed to replenish his ammunition, he slung a farming pitchfork over his shoulder, carried a sack, and headed to the silo. When the crows attacked him, he swung the pitchfork to fend them off, sometimes killing them. After filling his sack with corn, he returned to the barn.
Barnabas always had the upper hand, anticipating the crows’ moves.
That was until Lola tried to read the classified "Black Day" file — a document delivered by a messenger crow from an unknown general. Before she could uncover its contents, the commander caught her and threatened to tear out her button eye if she didn't leave immediately.
And then came the explosion that destroyed Barnabas's barn, turning Lola into a hero among the crows. She had directed a leaking tractor toward the barn, igniting the blaze.
At that moment, Lola believed she had avenged her crow friend, defeating a devil. She had no idea that Barnabas was merely protecting the farm he served as a scarecrow.
Lola began to read:
They called to me from behind the closed window today—the same people who made sure it was locked in the first place. It’s been a week. A whole week trapped in this room with nothing but my thoughts, my regrets, and the reflection staring back at me.
I looked at myself in the glass and saw a single crimson tear rolling down my chin. It almost fell onto my clothes, but I caught it just in time, tipping it into the tiny glass vial around my neck. The blood inside swirled as I sealed it shut. Another drop added to the collection. Another piece of me, locked away.
Few pages later:
The ring light above me was too bright. It made my eyes sting. Or maybe that was just the blood—there were specks of it, even on the light itself.
"You're not afraid, are you?" Zamira asked. Her voice cut through the dimly lit room. The harsh glow distorted her face, making her look stretched and unfamiliar.
"You can handle it," she added, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. They stretched over her plump fingers, and her body wobbled slightly as she pulled each one into place.
"I know, Zamira. It's not my first time."
The double doors groaned as they swung open, and the gurney rolled in, its wheels screeching against the floor.
"Well," Zamira said, "here's the lady whose heart you'll be taking. Maybe you should thank her."
I turned my head and looked at her. She was beautiful. Golden hair, pale freckled skin. Dark circles under her eyes, as if she had been exhausted even before she died.
I whispered, "Thank you. Now that your heart’s useless to you, you’re giving it to me."
Zamira snorted. "That came out colder than I expected."
I didn’t know what she wanted me to say. She was dead. But before that… before that, she had been alive.
"How is this corpse’s heart supposed to work for me?" I asked.
Zamira flicked a syringe, watching the tiny air bubbles rise. "Electric shock. It’s healthier than yours, anyway."
She wasn’t wrong. My heart is a disaster. It races when it shouldn’t. It slows when it should beat strong. Sometimes, it stops altogether, and the world just vanishes, like someone flipped a switch.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
The needle slid into my arm. The surgical tools beside Zamira glinted under the sickly light, their edges stained red. The hospital smelled of disinfectant and something much worse beneath it.
The double doors opened again. I heard voices, low and distant. Then nothing.
Darkness.
Lola flipped through a few more pages:
...In the recovery room, seventy-five percent of Astiariki patients never open their eyes again. And yet, after all these surgeries, death was a friend I had never met up close...
ELIORA'S Dairy
She found it fascinating to learn about the previous inhabitants of this world. From what the crows had told her, the former residents of this land had mysteriously vanished years ago, yet their creations were still usable by the new speakers of the land. She wondered—was the tractor just three meters away from her still functional?
Its body was rusted, and she had seen its steering wheel lying in a pile of discarded junk a short distance away.
Lola threw the diary into the fire—the same fire that was consuming her crow friend, who had been killed four days ago by a corn-bullet from Barnabas’s aircraft. She reached out and picked up the crow’s clothes—dust-covered military garments. She brushed the dust off with her hands. These clothes had been given to her by the crow’s comrades, and she had intended to burn them alongside his body. But suddenly, she changed her mind.
She walked toward the tractor. The firelight made her shadow dance across its rusted surface. Standing in front of it, she stripped off her own clothes and tossed them aside. Then, she donned the crow’s battle uniform and placed the war helmet on her head. Climbing onto the tractor, Lola felt resolute. She didn’t need an army to avenge her friend. She could do it alone.
She had been cast out of that army on charges of espionage—just because she had wanted to take part in the real war, the war that the crow commander kept their kind away from.
Lola pressed various buttons on the tractor until, finally, she managed to start it.
An hour later, as the sun was setting, Lola rummaged through the junk pile, searching through discarded scraps. She found a sharp nail, an intact box of matches, and a rubber tire. She placed the matches and nail inside the tire and rolled it toward the tractor, ready to execute her plan.
One day, when the courier crow called for her, he handed her a package marked "Confidential." Lola entered the storage room to deliver it to the commander, but he wasn’t in his office. She decided to leave the file on his desk, but something about that felt irresponsible. So she waited. And waited. But the commander never arrived.
Strange thoughts crept into Lola’s mind—thoughts that maybe, inside that confidential file, there was information that could lead her to a way to destroy Barnabas.
Temptation won. She peeked inside the file and caught a glimpse of the phrase "Project Black Day" and messages from a general who had never once set foot in their military base.
That was right before the commander caught her red-handed.
Lola waited until an hour later when the sky was completely dark. She dragged the metal sheet from the trash heap to a pile of hay in Barnabas' field and placed it on top.
In the thicket beyond the fence, only the sound of crickets could be heard—until suddenly, the roar of a tractor engine drowned them out. The tractor’s headlights illuminated the metal sheet from thirty meters away. Lola pressed the gas pedal, and the tractor surged forward, accelerating toward the metal sheet.
As the tractor hit the sheet, it lifted slightly, causing the vehicle to veer off course by forty-five degrees—toward the barn. With Lola still on the pedal, the tractor sped toward the barn’s glowing lights, where Barnabas lived.
Barnabas, whistling to himself, was tending to his airplane when the growing sound of the approaching engine sent a warning chill through his body. Instinctively, he pulled out his radar from his pocket, but it showed no sign of crows.
Just as he was about to sigh in relief, the wooden wall of the barn shattered. The tractor burst through. Barnabas barely jumped out of its path as it crashed straight into his airplane. Dust and debris filled the barn. Through the thickening cloud, Barnabas saw—just before losing sight of it—the wing of his airplane snap.
Quickly, he climbed onto a walkway along the barn wall, made of metal grates, to get a better vantage point over the chaos. Pulling a small pistol from inside his coat, he narrowed his eyes, trying to detect any movement within the settling dust. Without looking, he loaded his gun with a magazine full of corn kernels.
As the dust cleared, he saw his crop-dusting airplane crushed beneath the tractor. A rubber wheel popped off and rolled toward the half-open barn door, stopping just at the entrance.
From within the tractor, a doll peeked out.
Barnabas’ fury erupted as a gunshot. Lola immediately ducked back into the wheel and pushed it outside, rolling with it. Barnabas ran across the metal walkway toward a window above the barn door, continuing to fire at her.
Lola ran inside the rolling wheel, guiding it toward the fields away from the barn. She could hear the corn kernels pelting the rubber, shielding her from the bullets.
As Barnabas reloaded his pistol for the third time, he realized the rubber wheel had stopped exactly where the tractor had been. There was still one part of the attack plan yet to be revealed.
Lola, thinking about how flawless her plan had been, pulled out a matchbox she had strapped to her back like a backpack. Sitting inside the wheel, she took a deep breath, struck a match, and tossed it outside.
The moment the match hit the ground, flames ignited and quickly spread in a line. The fire traveled toward the metal sheet and then redirected toward the barn, following the exact path the tractor had taken.
Barnabas’ eyes widened in horror as he watched the fire advancing toward him.
“Damn you, doll!” he shouted.
The flames crept forward and reached the tractor—the same tractor whose fuel tank Lola had punctured before setting it in motion. Gasoline had leaked along the entire path.
The fire engulfed the underside of the tractor.
A second later— BOOM.
Lola, hearing the explosion, watched as flames burst out of the barn’s doors, windows, and the hole in the wall. Then, from within the inferno, something metallic was ejected.
She ran toward it.
It was Barnabas’ pistol, lying on the ground. She picked it up and aimed it. It felt good.
With her combat outfit and a gun in her hand, she looked like a real soldier.
Suddenly, another explosion rocked the area—this time, the entire barn collapsed.
Lola smirked.
“Well… that takes care of the airplane that took so many crows’ lives.”
The fire spread across the fenced land, devouring the thicket. It continued to advance.
The crow commander, hearing the explosion, emerged from the bunker. He stared, stunned, at the burning barn.
The crow soldiers flew toward the trees near the barn to get a better view, but none felt safe enough to cross the perimeter fence.
They hesitated.
Who had done this?
Could it all be a trap?
Had Barnabas accidentally blown up his own barn?
Through the flames of the burning thicket, a doll emerged—pistol slung over her shoulder, clad in combat gear.
Vengeance had been taken.
She stood before the trees where the crows were perched and raised Barnabas’s pistol. The crows cried out in unison and began chanting its name:
"Lola... Lola... Lola..."
Lola lifted its head and a smile spread across its face.
Behind the abandoned house nearby, the headlights of an old car flickered on, and it sputtered to life.
Inside the car, Barnabas heard the crows’ chants and Lola’s name echoing in the night. He wept. The tattered clothes he wore bore the marks of burns. Hatred and fury toward that doll had taken root in his heart, but now was not the time for revenge. He had lost everything. He had failed in his mission, and the crows had taken the land.
He had no choice but to leave, to escape until the time was right to return. With this thought, he pressed his foot harder on the gas pedal. Ahead of him, the ruins of a vast city stretched across the road—his temporary refuge: the city of Visiopolis.