Your mouth is large enough to swallow men whole. Spreading your wings summons gale force winds. Your piercing cry cracks stone and shatters glass. But only if you choose to. You haven’t made that choice since the first time.

You thought fear would do the brunt of it. Thought you’d send them all screaming, fleeing the sight of some enormous monstrous thing. You did frighten them, but you didn’t stop them. One of them put an arrow in you, and when the others saw that you did indeed feel pain, they emptied their quivers into your body.

So many lives ago that was. They still haven’t learned: your doom is their doom.

Pain is fire. Every cut, every scrape, every stab stokes the flame. Wound is a blazing portal to the deadly inferno your body imprisons. When the bonds fail, all will burn.

Hope is a knife. You have learned to welcome the blade. When the flesh rips, when the blood pours, and you feel no bitter sting: despair. Numbness is not escape. It is the end.

You don’t feel it when you burn. But they do. Oh, that first time. The screams. You will never be free of that horror. The world turned to hell as your insides poured out, and you never knowing you were dying.

Death isn’t painful.

Coming back is excruciating.

Return, return, return. Endurance is victory’s other name. And for you: grief’s.