Braincase

Not the claws. The claws are on loan from cousins in Argentina: ten to twenty centimetres, might have been. Not the feathers. Likely. Not the chase, though we'd have been the right size for it, a third its weight.

What they have is the back of the head, a small lump of bone a man named Hooley picked up at the foot of a cliff and never lived to hand in. Then a drawer, near enough a hundred years, one among thirty million kept things.

In 2020 somebody opened it and knew the shape. The oval hole where the cord came in. A crest pinched like an hourglass. Enough to say no one else had this. So, a name: Unconquered, for a thing a drawer held quiet for a century, known only by the room it thought in.