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Description
"Everything looks more beautiful when it dies," he told me, his darkness weaving itself around us between the echoing realms of the trees and the ocean, and I shook as I beheld the end of the world right there between my palms.  "When it finally stops moving, we can see it for what it was, and the hollow space left behind by the life.  It's the world's most violent and uncontrollable form of art.  Only nature can do it, and no two pieces are exactly identical."

I closed my hands on the tiny body between them, feeling cold, rough feathers and outstretched wings reaching for heaven, little claws poking at my skin with stiff, unintentional poise.  My master watched me without smiling, and I could see that he was waiting for me to let it go.

"You'll never know what it meant until it's gone."

I tried to look him in the eyes, but they were more than I could handle at the time.  I walked slowly to the cliff's edge and listened to the hungry seas below me, daring me to extract myself from the world and regain the lost meaning of my youth.  It wanted me to be desperate, and I was.  But I had work to do, words to write on the subject of my master's fame, stories to chronicle of his pursuit of hollow fame, jokes to tell, to convey his laughter at the world's folly.  I was afraid, caught in the hands of the universe, my whole self strangling itself, but I held the small, fragile corpse of the blackbird out to my master.

"So you want me to be the only agent of death and change in your world?" he asked me, annoyed.  "You didn't mean to kill the bird, but you still did."

He sighed, and placed his cold leather grip on my bare shoulder.

"I will take it, and you will see it fading away," he acquiesced, finally, and I could barely hold myself up as he took the bird.  "You will watch everything fade away one day, just like this."

He held the silent body to the sky, holding it easily in just one hand, his right hand, death's gentler right hand.  My hands themselves already felt empty, fingertips searching for the scratch of talons or the brush of feathers, my eyes transfixed on the blackbird again, held away from the man who ruled the forest and seas, dreaming hard in hopes of flight again.  My master let go of my shoulder and the body between his hands, shrouding it more in his separate shadows, and my heart began pumping, desperate eyes fighting the gloves for the right to hold the image.  Then I held the cross of plume and beak in my mind as he let it go, and it sailed into the abyss with blissful, purposeful abandon, like the end of all things I would ever know, the things I would see and spend my whole life trying not to forget.

My master nodded for me to follow him back to the manor, and, silent among a thousand screams of the gods and devils that are nature's sons, I did.

Description
"Everything looks more beautiful when it dies," he told me, his darkness weaving itself around us between the echoing realms of the trees and the ocean, and I shook as I beheld the end of the world right there between my palms.  "When it finally stops moving, we can see it for what it was, and the hollow space left behind by the life.  It's the world's most violent and uncontrollable form of art.  Only nature can do it, and no two pieces are exactly identical."

I closed my hands on the tiny body between them, feeling cold, rough feathers and outstretched wings reaching for heaven, little claws poking at my skin with stiff, unintentional poise.  My master watched me without smiling, and I could see that he was waiting for me to let it go.

"You'll never know what it meant until it's gone."

I tried to look him in the eyes, but they were more than I could handle at the time.  I walked slowly to the cliff's edge and listened to the hungry seas below me, daring me to extract myself from the world and regain the lost meaning of my youth.  It wanted me to be desperate, and I was.  But I had work to do, words to write on the subject of my master's fame, stories to chronicle of his pursuit of hollow fame, jokes to tell, to convey his laughter at the world's folly.  I was afraid, caught in the hands of the universe, my whole self strangling itself, but I held the small, fragile corpse of the blackbird out to my master.

"So you want me to be the only agent of death and change in your world?" he asked me, annoyed.  "You didn't mean to kill the bird, but you still did."

He sighed, and placed his cold leather grip on my bare shoulder.

"I will take it, and you will see it fading away," he acquiesced, finally, and I could barely hold myself up as he took the bird.  "You will watch everything fade away one day, just like this."

He held the silent body to the sky, holding it easily in just one hand, his right hand, death's gentler right hand.  My hands themselves already felt empty, fingertips searching for the scratch of talons or the brush of feathers, my eyes transfixed on the blackbird again, held away from the man who ruled the forest and seas, dreaming hard in hopes of flight again.  My master let go of my shoulder and the body between his hands, shrouding it more in his separate shadows, and my heart began pumping, desperate eyes fighting the gloves for the right to hold the image.  Then I held the cross of plume and beak in my mind as he let it go, and it sailed into the abyss with blissful, purposeful abandon, like the end of all things I would ever know, the things I would see and spend my whole life trying not to forget.

My master nodded for me to follow him back to the manor, and, silent among a thousand screams of the gods and devils that are nature's sons, I did.