In the end, I think the birds will watch over us.
This work contains CWs for: animal death.
and when the magic died, there was a house sparrow by xexnoncores
The sound of magic dying is the sound of planes flying.
A house sparrow watches from the top of a pipe as a group of golden ravens perish one by one. Their bodies plummet to the roar of jets soaring in the distance, to the thrust of takeoff smothering shimmering-hot exhaust. Their skulls crack open on old, sun-bleached pavement, their legs smashing at angles that would have been impossible had they been animate, had they been tender.
Now, they lie still.
There are buses getting ready to take a dozen suitcases to the airport.
The house sparrow can do nothing but watch as those feathered silhouettes grow cold and their features fade from a hue of sunshine to a dull, black baseline. As the auric yellow that once soaked them to the bone is peeled, piece by piece, by some cosmic undoing it possesses not the ability to understand except that there is death. A bird has died. There is a carcass.
There is change.
More ravens die now, each with a quiet nothingness that is neither acknowledged, nor ignored. It is simply seen, simply parsed. Simply sifted through the neurons of an organism which cannot walk, only hop and fly. Simply squinted at in the hot, still autumn day that has seen nothing of interest happen to the house sparrow yet. It hasn’t found food in this hour except for a small crumb of stale bread.
But it is not a scavenger, so it does not investigate the bodies. It only watches, waiting.
It watches, waiting, as three more glittering ravens fall in the distance like the one and only shooting star it ever witnessed in its life.
This time, they plunge to the monstrous bellow of a Boeing 737 landing. To the muttering of a gaggle of passengers quickly filing out, whose faces will never see those wings fade, nor the spell that animated them—in fact, it is likely that in their eyes, nothing will have changed at all. There used to be people who kept magic a secret, a plethora of people too numerous to count, all crammed into their little nests, their big buildings with food inside, that sometimes had other birds inside, but most of the time it was just noise.
It was just noise.
It was noise that magic was going to die to, marching on as always.
The house sparrow looks to the ravens.
A buzzard lands.
It investigates each and every rotting bone. Nothing is done, as it decides these are not worth its time.
It flies off. Towards the planes again, a relief to the house sparrow, because it does not need more heads vying for space here. Ever since the raccoons moved in, there have been more fights for scraps from the trash-cans, more dead birds coming from their claws. More dead birds around from all sorts of things it has no concept of, hitting their heads against reflective surfaces that should have been passable, but were actually made of glass.
More dead birds.
More dead birds.
There are more dead birds as fifteen golden ravens fall. Who put them into orbit will never be known now.
All the house sparrow can think with its beady little eyes darting over the bodies is that with them out of the way, there will be enough food for it to raise a family this year. With their territory freed, it is free now itself to move in somewhere new.
It was a miracle after all, that the planes, in all of their great noise, had not drowned out all of the birdsong or chased everyone off. That was about the most “magic” the house sparrow would ever know existed.