The Songbird watched and listened, a silent flower on the rocks. There were so many things she wished to do, wished to say, but she remained strung on hushed listlessness, languid and composed, jostled between the nestled thorns of foreshadowing and passing glances between her fellow healers. They asked questions and stared at trinkets, they emboldened themselves to the core of their being, and she witnessed as the great, grand tiger slowly whittled away, whisper by whisper, breath by breath (it wasn’t right and couldn’t they do more? or how much longer did she have – how much longer could they press and fold and give?). Her head bowed against the beast’s words, laden with Lena’s inadequacies and her miscalculated measurements (all things needed something, anything, to make them whole, to make them stagger, to make them feel and love and cherish, to anoint them with purpose, to fulfill their hearts), and it broke against the surface of her skull with a shimmer of regrets and rue. The tigress, and even themselves, were destined for quietude, and sometimes all they could do was slow the process, mend and assuage and soothe the aches, the pains, the numbing torrents and the abysmal wounds for another day. The notion, the sentiments, were a grand, roaring decibel of agony striking against her, and she stole a few deep breaths from the chilling, wild wind and hoped, prayed, in fervent adoration for lives lost, for powers that be, for the echo of the future the predator promised. When the abyss shuddered, when the clock ceased, her eyes were cast back towards the fallen creature, on the final whittle of her lungs, on the widening chasm between hallowed life and hollowed death. She pressed a sonnet between her lips and stoked it into the snow, polished stanzas and hymns past the fluttering wake, pondered over the state of dreams and which one the tiger prospered now, at her last hour, at her concluding story. “May you find endless comfort at your journey's end.” The song sprung another, and she loosened her decibels to a brighter murmur, a glowing wisp of conviction, a murmuring, blinding glimpse beyond the trials of abhorrence or the static glimpse of their failure (because maybe they’d been too late, or no matter what they’d done, it wouldn’t have ever been enough). “To new beginnings.”