A Raven Within

I tell them that my spirit is a raven. I slept within a silver wolf once, then an owl glaring silently from the oaks, then a serpent green as the sickly spring leaf...But the raven follows me now, and I hear her call in my mind’s roaring winds. She stares at me with the black shine of promise in her eyes from the dead landscape, as I pace in maddening circles around her, sometimes near enough to hear her whisper and other times so far as to only view her shadow against the red, falling sun. She paces silently and urgently with her eyes on my eyes, then disappears. I dreamt of oily black wings upon my back and the death call at my tongue. I tried to flee, but the singing wings were my own, and it was I who screamed into the moon’s pale face. They say, in ancient lore, that the raven’s eyes hold a prophecy...to be forever dismissed to the Great Unknown or to fall into the gentle hands of Magic as she dips my human flesh into the wild lands where I am from. What omen faces my sorrow thoughts and creaking heart in this life? Perhaps I am called to dance again upon the chaos ink. Perhaps she has come to warn me that, though my shell thrives, I do not live...I do not create...I do not love. Perhaps, I am dead already.