Some say she is a talisman, sent from beyond those boundaries by a being that embodies all our daydreams and our most fervid fantasies.
Some say she is a sorcerer, sent to fulfill those fantasies as she sweeps down the wind with scimitar wings, intent on the object of her immutable mission.
She is the perfect conflation of shadow and sky, wearing the perfect conjunction of feather and bone, and where her crystal vision intercepts an arc of avian imperfection, that mission will end in death.
Seldom seen and then only scantly realized, she is the feathered wraith that lurks always in our soul, ever relevant to the timeless journey through the primal world from whence we came.
Stealth and speed inform her journey, a handful of seconds, a heartbeat, then pewter lightning strikes from above, mostly unseen, a frisson of completion in her wild devolution from apex heights into our quotidian universe.
Shearing that universe in her endless search, she signs the fatal intersection with an explosion of blood stippled feathers that sends them wafting along the shards of wind she has scattered in her dance for survival.
Survival becomes her, every facet of her form designed with predatory purpose, the assassin’s hood, the bladed beak, the daggered talons, all inhabiting the nightmares of those below her on the fraught and feudal pyramid of life.
Silently she stalks two disparate realms, inhabiting at once the lofty eyries hidden among the secluded summits of our outer limits and the visceral wells cloistered deep within the darkest recesses of our souls.
Shape shifting, she stirs in us the suggestion of an inscrutable disparity, the fleeting glimpse of what we left long ago behind and our evanescent longings for the heights to which we know we should aspire.
Still she stays her pilgrimage, now a sacred symbol wandering the globe, incognizant of this disparity that enthralls us, sentient yet insouciant keepers of our destiny and hers.