Element suppressed a snort when she said that she didn't like birds because they chirped and woke her up early. Element loved their beautiful songs, their notes of freedom and joy and beauty. He loved what they represented, he loved their carefree nature, and he loved that they sang of the wonders and the incredible things in the world while soaring on weightless wings. That Keychain had killed one simply because they 'chirped' and 'woke her up early' appalled him. Life...was a marvel. A beauty, a gift. To extinguish a life because it sang...it seemed criminal to Element. A holocaust of freedom.
He cast a sad look once more down at the small songbird. It lay there, wings splayed and eyes wide and glassy, portraying its last moments as fear and shock. The small, glossy shine of Keychain's spit rest on its crimson breast, where blood was spilling out. Element could see dark red marks where Keychain's fangs had met their mark, and the poor bird's life ended. Unable to see it there, spat on and killed for no reason, Element began to dig a small hole while Keychain seemed to draw something in the sand. He dug in the dirt until it was about two feet deep and one foot wide and tall in both directions. Carefully, gingerly, he dragged the small fowl into the hole and slowly covered the hole again. A proper burial.
Although Element hosted no ill will towards Keychain because of the incident, he did think back to Flower. Had her life been extinguished so easily? Had another coyote, harsher and more hostile than Keychain, killed her for fun and then spat on her beautiful fur? Element shuddered to think of such things as he looked down on the bird's grave. He tried to drive the mental image of Flower, glassy-eyed and stone cold, lying in the rain because a coyote didn't like that she had sung. But sung, in this sense, was a metaphor; Flower hadn't been restricted by the canine's ways. She hadn't been afraid of them, didn't heed their warnings, didn't abide by their rules. She was, in all senses, free - free like a bird. She never sang, but the way she was free, the way she was beautiful in that sense was like the sweetest serenade to Element. The most beautiful song. He hadn't liked the birds because they reminded him of Flower; he liked them because Flower reminded him of them. To have seen Keychain kill a bird so easily and carelessly reminded him of the nature of things; he didn't blame Keychain. But he still thought of Flower. Flower, his small songbird, extinguished because of her beautiful song.
After a long while, Element realized that he had been staring at the bird's grave for longer than several minutes. Finally, he looked back at Keychain and realized that she had been looking at him, expectantly, for a while now. He looked down to where her paw rested in the sand, next to what seemed like several boxes. One of them contained an X.
"I'm sorry," he said. "What was that?"
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