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Hello, listeners, be advised that this show is an immersive audio experience.

It may seem like sounds are coming from the sides or behind you.

Listener discretion is advised, as this content is intended for adult audiences only. Kewkud presents Birds of Empire

Season 2, created by Jason Liu. The Ram who was a bird.

Rasin was a small boy when he knew that he was not a ram.

The people around him felt strange and unfamiliar for as long as he could remember remembering anything.

Like finding himself forever in a forest full of trees

he did not recognize. One day, as his mother hunched over the heart, he said what he had always felt.

Mother, I am a bird. She tilted her head slowly in a way that made Racine think she was twisting it off her neck.

Then she smiled. Then she laughed. Racine felt suddenly hot. His chest flushed with an explosion of

imagined feathers.

When she saw his rage, Racine's mother softened her face and told him to,

Come here.

He wouldn't.

Instead, he ran to the edge of the nearest cliff and wept.

As he did, he tore at his skin. Why? Why was I cursed to live upon the land, breathe the dust of the earth,

walk when I should fly? There came no answer, but the howling wind as it snuck through the pass.

He decided in that moment that his life would not be of consequence until he had become one of them,

the people of the empire of the sky.

He was a bird.

...