Grotesque. Terrifying. This is your lot. You are a living repellent. A warning with wings. Large and looming, teeth like daggers, claws that cut steel, empty black eyes lit with glowing red hunger. Your strength eclipses any human’s, but you deal in fear more than force. You might have known beauty once, but you never will now. Beauty draws to itself; you must drive away. So horror is the gift you’ve been given; your gnarled visage serves as alarm’s shorthand.

Your great wings could almost be called majestic, if they weren’t pronounced with talons at their edges and held together by leathery, veined membrane. But the flight they afford you is worth what they cost you. Launch yourself through space with fearsome speed to deliver urgent news, fierce deterrent, and baleful prophecy.

The world thinks you sleep when you turn to stone. The world is wrong. When dawn slides over the horizon and makes a statue out of you, the sun does not banish you to the realm of slumber. It claims you. Petrification transports you to your home star’s front door. Until the night returns, you hover at excruciating proximity to the sun, a forced witness to the vital chorus of creation. A trillion voices spiking through your mind as you struggle to make sense of what you hear. When at last you return to Earth, erupting from your stony cocoon, you are determined to see that whatever secrets you’ve gleaned from the cosmic fire are not wasted.