The Bird and the Wizard

Written by Adrian Downey

PART I - In which we meet a giant bird and a man with dark skin who likes to wear purple.

The bird-who-lived-forever spiralled downward and landed hard on the ground, sending a cluster of shimmering black feathers into the air. Before the mammoth ruler of the sky could collect her strength to move, the Wizard-who-had-read-too-much threw himself at her chest, shoulder first, and seized her throat with his strong ringed hand.

The Bird’s vision began to dim.  She knew the end was near. Forty-seven lifetimes had passed in the blink of an eye, but the Bird still remembered the day she had hatched. On that day she had been given the name Kanya, which meant beauty, and indeed she was beautiful: a veritable paragon of wisdom and grace. When she died the first time she was not afraid even though she did not suspect she would rise again. It was only afterwards, at the beginning of her second life, that Kanya began to search for answers.
 

Just before her vision faded to black, Kanya dug deep into her reserves for the energy to shake the tiny Wizard-man from her body. Her enormous beak issued a low guttural howl: a challenge to her purple-robed adversary.

It hadn’t always been like this: in the beginning the two had been allies, for the Wizard was like Kanya. When first they met, each had already gone through three lifetimes, and for many years afterward they protected the world together. But nothing lasts forever; forty-seven incarnations had led to this moment. For the first time since they had discovered the secret of their destiny – and one another in the process – neither was entirely sure what would happen next.

The Bird abruptly clamped her beak shut.  The silence was like a counterpoint to the harsh, biting tones of enchantment that spewed from the parched lips of the Wizard, echoing through the barren desert in which they fought. Kanya’s eyes darted around the empty space in a frantic search for the spell-weaver. The chanting grew louder and less comprehensible; she felt her pulse quicken. Suddenly dying seemed very frightening.

Even though death was no stranger to her, Kanya felt certain that this time would be unlike any other and she wasn’t sure that she could come back. The afterlife is not something to which the seemingly-immortal give much thought.  After so many years of seeing death as only another arbitrary milestone with which to measure the passage of time, one begins to think of oneself as beyond such things.

The Bird’s train of thought was broken as the Wizard burst through the ground in front of her, sending jets of golden sand toward the sky. The Bird’s reflexes were keen and although her body was massive, she moved with a grace and speed unmatched by even the smallest and nimblest of creatures.  She launched herself at the Wizard, attempting to snap the tiny, human-shaped thing up in a single bite, but this was exactly what the swarthy spell-caster had been expecting. The second her giant beak touched the Wizard’s dusty robes, Kanya burst into flames.

In that instant each combatant recognized the fundamental difference between them. Kanya was a creature of strong action: of doing and creating, of existing in the moment. The Wizard, on the other hand, was one of deep thought, of planning and learning. He existed in his mind, and in the end it was his patience and the Bird’s impulsiveness which caused the ancient avian to be destroyed.
Kanya’s death was painful to watch. All the grace and beauty the creature had shown in life were misplaced in death.  She flailed about helplessly, issuing periodic yelps similar to that of a peahen who, having failed to protect the nest, must watch as a scavenger takes off with her eggs. The scent of scorched feathers wafted on the air as the once-immortal giant, crashed to the ground. The atmosphere seemed to constrict at the moment of her passing, as though the sky protested the death of its one and only master.

Epilogue (Origins)

In every ending there exists also limitless potential. It is the only thing which can ever be perfect, and the pursuit of such perfection burns the young from the vibrant beautiful people they are into the charred, desolate souls they become when they realize they will never live out their dreams. Those who survive this are as logs of ebony; their outside is soft and ordinary by all account of what a log ought to look like. Their hearts, however, are black as coal and strong as adamant.

Two things occurred to Kanya when she found her spirit trapped in a male, human-shaped body made mostly of water, in a strange land which she had never before seen. First, that she still existed, which was always a pleasant surprise, though she would have to sever any connection to her former existence to embrace her new life. Second, that she would have to harden her once beautiful heart to the world if she wished to survive in the harsh reality before her.