By Lucius Brimstone
INFERNOBLEM — Each spring, just as the faithful press their petitions into the ancient cracks of the Wailing Furnace, another set of supplicants arrives with less parchment and considerably more shrieking: the ash-swifts, small migratory birds with the aerodynamic confidence of unpaid debt collectors.
For thousands of years, these soot-winged travelers have nested in the crevices of the Furnace and other allegedly sacred masonry across the Old Cinder Quarter. Their calls mingle with muttered prayers, clanking censers, and the occasional tourist asking whether brimstone is gluten-free. The result is one of those rare civic harmonies in Hell: devotion below, chaos above, and everyone pretending the noise is meaningful.
The ash-swifts return annually after flying obscene distances from the far Sulfur Reaches, often finding the same city, the same wall, and the same lifelong mate. Imagine such loyalty, readers, in a realm where most wedding vows include an escape clause and a pitchfork deposit.
This spring, observers counted dozens of nests tucked inside the Wailing Furnace’s pitted stonework. Once you notice them, they become impossible to ignore. They are above the bakeries of Ember Alley, beneath the eaves of the Basilica of Perpetual Side-Eye, and circling the cracked towers of Saint Scorch’s Hospice for the Morally Flexible. More haunting, however, are the places where their absence now hangs in the air like a sermon without a punchline.
The threats are familiar, which is to say preventable and therefore apparently irresistible. Recent missile tantrums from the Iron Djinnate disrupted nesting grounds in nearby Ashrael, sending birds scattering through smoke, sirens, and the usual geopolitical theater of idiots with maps. Across the broader Pitlands, ash-swift numbers have also declined as modern buildings rise smooth, sealed, and dead-eyed — all glass, steel, and architectural contempt.
The old infernal structures, for all their curses and questionable drainage, offered cracks, cavities, and shelter. New luxury developments in places like Glassfang Row and the Gentrification Cauldron offer instead reflective walls, sealed roofs, and promotional brochures promising “clean lines,” apparently the final refuge of people who hate life in three dimensions.
“Birds can’t nest in vibes,” one local preservation demon told me, which is the closest thing to wisdom I heard all week.
The remedy, of course, is humiliatingly simple: install wooden nest boxes, leave hollow bricks, preserve gaps in older walls, and stop renovating every ancient building until it resembles a dentist’s waiting room in the afterlife. Naturally, these solutions have met resistance from developers, who argue that a small cavity for wildlife could “compromise the sleek suffering aesthetic.”
At dusk, the ash-swifts gather in what naturalists delicately call a “screaming party,” a phrase that in Hell usually refers to municipal budget hearings. They rocket around towers and courtyards in wild circles, shrieking with such force that even the damned pause to admire the commitment. Younger birds, hearing the uproar, are thought to be encouraged to take flight.
There is something almost indecently joyful about it: the speed, the noise, the refusal to vanish quietly. In a realm overstocked with ruin and committees, the ash-swifts remain gloriously alive, returning year after year to the cracks we have not yet paved over.
For now, above the Wailing Furnace, prayers still rise and wings still cut the hot air. One hopes the architects are listening. But I’ve covered Hell long enough to know better.
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Ah, Lucius Brimstone, once again bravely reporting that birds enjoy holes and architects enjoy deleting them. Pulitzer stuff, if the Pulitzer were carved into a damp brick behind Saint Scorch’s privy.
Still, credit where it’s due: “Birds can’t nest in vibes” is the most accurate architectural criticism since someone looked at a glass condo and said, “What if loneliness had windows?” The ash-swifts are basically tiny soot missiles with relationship skills, returning to the same mate and wall while developers can’t commit to a doorknob that isn’t “minimalist despair.”
Let the screaming parties stay. In Hell, a little joyful shrieking is practically public service. Build the boxes, keep the cracks, and stop making every sacred ruin look like a spa for tax attorneys.