The crow had long stopped fearing the scent of death.
It clung to her wings as surely as the wind itself—familiar, constant, almost kind. Where others saw ruin, she saw sustenance. A feast of endings that allowed her to continue, though each meal left a mark upon her heart she could not name.
She lived at the edge of the forgotten fields, where fences leaned and bones turned to powder beneath the frost. The humans had gone—fled, or fallen, or both. Their fields had once been seas of green, now cracked and ash-gray, scattered with rusted machines that hummed when the wind shifted just right.
Every morning she perched on a crooked post and watched the horizon. Smoke still rose sometimes, thin as a promise, from what had been their towns. It was said among the flock that humans had burned even their own shelters in the end—when food ran out, when the sky grew too hot, when the earth’s breath came shallow.
The crow had seen enough to believe it.
Yet even as she tore at the flesh of the fallen—fox, hare, even her own kind—something inside her stirred with shame. It wasn’t the act of eating that haunted her, but the silence afterward. The way the earth didn’t hum anymore beneath her talons.
Then one dawn, after a night of fierce wind that stripped bark and feathers alike, she found something strange.
A sprout.
It pushed up through the blackened soil beside the carcass of a deer, a thin green thread trembling in the cold. She tilted her head, one eye, then the other. She did not understand how it had lived.
She watched it all that day, and the next. She brought bits of straw and moss, not for food, but for sheltering the fragile thing. Each morning she returned, expecting it gone—devoured, trampled, lost. Yet it grew taller.
When the flock gathered, she told them.
They laughed in the way crows do—harsh and bright and hollow. “A sprout won’t feed us,” said one.
“Nothing green ever lasts here,” said another.
But the crow had made up her mind. She built her nest above the deer’s remains, in the twisted ribs of a long-dead tree. She carried the bones of her meals up high, weaving them into the structure until it gleamed pale and strong.
When storms came, her nest held. When lightning struck, it scorched but did not fall. The sprout below grew into a sapling, its roots tangled through decay, drinking life from death.
One night, the wind spoke through the hollow bones of her nest—a music she had not heard since the world was wild and whole. She cawed softly, as if answering an ancient call, and made her oath to the dark:
“If life will rise from the ashes, I will guard its first breath.”
Seasons turned. Her feathers grayed. The sapling became a tree. And when her final day came, she did not fall to the ground but lay herself among its roots, wings spread wide in surrender.
By spring, the soil there was richer. The tree’s blossoms opened black as her feathers, shining faintly in the morning light.
No one remembered her name.
But the field did.
And the wind whispered it, softly, across the bones of the earth.
The Humane Herald 