We held your funeral in a church. Forgive us. We took you away from your holy place.
We pulled you from trees tall and wide and sturdy enough to bear your skybound weight, the rough-grip blunt brute force of your talon, the place where you laid your feathered head upon your big-cat paw in sleep.
In your bed of bear fur and cougar bones and taut green-braided branches, curled up all cold feathers and stiffening pelt, we understood that Life brought its lover death to pay a final respect. You were beautiful there, in surrender, and in love we would have left you there, in the trees, in the sky.
But then the church elders decided to baptize you in the church of the god.
We of the trees did not fight. We did not want to. We did not say aloud that your journey through the pews of the church of the god would only sanctify the pews.
The funeral took three days to prepare. We rendered the wax of the candles from the fat of your sibling, the cockatrice, made the pies for our funeral meal from its meat. The flames were borrowed from the warning pyres of dragon caves, where the serpents watch with reptilian mistrust from heaps of treasure we leave untouched.
Why would we need their hoards? For the people of the trees, the dragons are more precious than the hoard.
Your nest was a heavy, reeking thing, but it was so grand in its branches and pelts that it was not difficult for us to convince the church elders to use it as your humbling resting place. The church elders dislike the grandness of wild things, most of the time. They said it would make a magnificent pyre, the branches woven into that perfect circle of a bowl, studded with bleached jawbones bearing vicious broken teeth.
In brotherhood we will burn this nest, the elders of the church of the god said to us when we offered it to them. It is a symbol of the passing of time, the passing of life into death. The god of our church does not burn away.
When they speak to us of their god, their eyes become hard on us. They know about the offerings we left at the foot of your tree. They have tried to burn the tree down. When they could not, they carved the symbols of the church into the trunk of it, and claimed the offerings as their own.
In death, your holy defeat speaks to the might of gods who do not die. But we who laid our offerings at the foot of your tree, we know the truth of your wings — those wings might have carried you anywhere, might carry you back, might burn you cleverly in the lying fires of the phoenix.
What is death to a gryphon? What is darkness to a dragon? What is humility to the elders?
We took your nest down to burn so that we could show our willingness. We did not tell the elders what we’d found inside it when we lifted your body up and out.
What we found that was round and hot, alive and inert, imperious in expectation of our action. We took them, your unhatched hearts, we hid them, and we prepared the nest to burn away the proof.
We scrubbed your nest branches clean on the steps of the church of the god. We washed and dried the lining pelts and rubbed them down with quick-burning cockatrice fat, sharpened the jawbone teeth woven into your nest to vicious points. We laid your body in the mighty, oily nest, you a compliant lump of tarnished gold feathers and lionskin, black talons and eyes glazed over like soft blue skies. We brought you into the church.
We sat orderly in the pews and we did not cry, and the church elders praised us for our attention to the mercies of the god.
We sang the hymn printed for us on paper made from the pulped offerings of the branches of our trees. Then we lit your humbling fire with flames borrowed from the dragon-lair torches — bestowed upon us, the church elders said, to serve in the disposal of the ungodly beasts.
We are all ungodly beasts, the elders say, making their eyes hard at us. But we lie down in the light of purifying fire, and look to the god of the church always, every day, for permission to eat, to sleep, to sing.
We wondered if the trees ask permission.
Your body burns quickly in a riot of colors and the smell of sustenance fills our noses and waters our eyes. The crackling of the flames is the clicking of your beak into the bones of your proud prey; to our ears, it is just more life. The church elders sigh at the beauty of the light infusing the church. The feathers smoke black, but the flame is green and blue and brilliant violet.
We pass sweet cloudy white liquor along to one another in tiny cups; speak well of the dead; thank the god of the church for the trees and the things he allows to stand; pray that we keep standing.
In the quiet sneaking night, after the god of the church had been glutted on smoke and words, we climb up the mountain carrying unlit torches, carrying cold cockatrice pies, carrying your hot, rough shelled, heart-beating legacy to the dragons in their caves, to be gathered and hoarded with a slow-blinking reptilian acceptance.
We left our cockatrice pies with the dragons, that wild may feed wilderness. Plumes of hot cinnamon smoke-breath washed across our faces without leaving so much as a spark-burn scar, sealing a pact we will never speak aloud.
We left wild things to tend wild things in the name of whatever god makes and takes wild things, and we went home in the sneaking red-cinnamon darkness, home to where we kneel when necessary, and pretend to turn our eyes away from the tall of the trees, pretend there is nothing alive and wild and imperious hatching forever in our hearts, forever, forever. A forever as tall as the trees, big as a dragon heart, wild as an echoing scream, strong as a gryphon wing.
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