A long time ago, a crow wishes for a name. It lives on an island bisected by a river, one side Life, the other side Death. The island has a copy where the first crow lives. All across the island, the first crow’s children live. Worried about its name and whether it’ll aspire to something beyond its averageness, the crow begins to agitate her mother, who tells her to go on an adventure. She flies out into the sky and sees a white glimmer in the ocean.

The crow dives into the ocean, pursuing the white glimmer to the very bottom. As it goes down, she passes all sorts of fish and sea creatures, until it reaches the darkness below. There, she sees a white road made up of bones. She picks one up in her beak, and it speaks to her, asking her if she’s Death. She says that she’s just a crow, though as a crow, she has some ancestral lineage to Death’s queen. The bone explains that it and the others are lost souls. It tells the story of how, one day, they went to the beach to collect shells but was taken captive by men with guns who took them onto a ship; on the ship, they were beaten and tortured, and their name was forcibly taken from them by a wizard; afterward, they jumped into the ocean. Since then, the road of bones consists of all those who have jumped overboard.

The crow figures that the bones cannot be truly taken by Death without a name, leaving them trapped and divorced from creation. She pledges to give all of the bones a name somehow, and they all entrust themselves to the crow. Thinking about how the first crow once stole the sun, the crow now devises a plan. Slowly but surely, she resurfaces and dives again and again until all the bones are brought into the sky where they shine. With thanks, the crow departs for the island.

At the island, the crow catches her mother arguing with the first crow about her whereabouts. Her mother then scolds her for running away and endangering herself, but the crow says she has a story to share, to which the first crow asks to hear it alone. She explains everything about the bones and enjoys being back at home, though she still worries a little about what the first crow may think. They decide that they must not only return the bones to the stars but also address those who stole them the first place.

Together, the crow and first crow, along with others, fly in formation to the lands where Death is. It is a misty land, with clothed people, and Death’s queen lives in a volcano’s caldera. There, they tell Death’s queen the story about stolen people and says they must go to war with the perpetrators. Although Death’s queen says her soldiers can’t cross the river into the land of Life, the crows pledge to fly them over there in order to fight.

Death’s queen raises her troops, and the crows fly. As they do, the people living below, in the land of Death, laugh and wave at the army heading for the land of Life. After some time, they descend upon the house of the wizard, which is a prosperous house raised from the spoils of wr and genocide. After a successful campaign, the first crow names the crow, giving her a name she has earned. Henceforth, the crows traverse the world as usual, and no one threatens to steal people ever again.