swan song// come read! <3

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swan song.
it's described as a myth or legend,
one that sparks beauty.
what if it's not a myth?
because it's not.
the swans have started singing,
and they're coming for you.

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don't steal my stuff!


and I mean that. if you so much as think about taking my idea, you shall die.
at first i didn't want to post at all, afraid of plagiarism from 'fellow writers'.
but i wanted criticism and i know some people aren't evil. so here it is.
DON'T STEAL IT. if you do, be aware that the kitty above will kill you.

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word count: 5058
what is the meaning?

It’s strange, isn’t it? How weak, how fluttering the butterflies are, so easily crushed under one’s foot. They are such pathetic little creatures, without a fail safe and their minds only a jumble of nectar and flowers. In a way, they are among the world’s most pathetic little creatures. But then, you take into account their endurance through the hardest times, their determination even through migrations and through the muddled mess of their instincts that guide them and lead them to their deaths at the same time. Butterflies can be, perhaps, confused with humans. Both have a spirit, although the human specimen is admittedly touched by a bit more intelligence, both love, both have playful souls that wear themselves out in the first few years for the human, the first few days for the pitiful butterfly. And the most connecting point is their weakness. Humans, albeit armed with guns and swords, defending themselves, are weak little things. They could not do a thing but stare if a polar bear came charging at them. And that strange trance of a spell they have when something goes deliciously wrong, when the happiest day of one’s life turns into a maddened disaster. Humans freeze in shock, repeating to themselves the last words they will ever think. They do not think to run, to hide, only to watch as their life blood seeps away.

A human life can be taken by anything. It could be just a single pull of the trigger, of a guilty conscience that knew no right or wrong. It could even be a fishing line, used to strangle another. It could be a mad mind, unable to take being lonely and sad any longer. Humans cannot fight these inevitable dangers. There are shootings and there are massacres. Both are not uncommon, and it is only sooner or later that one close to someone will be caught in the crossfire. It happens all the time. Nature is not cruel, it is fair, and to be fair, it distributes pain equally. There is no right or wrong in nature’s point of view, so perhaps there should be none in the humans point of view. But in doing that, all would be reduced to mere animals, and yet the prospect is not so painful. Once you are an animal, there is only survival. That is the Game of Life, not technology and mad crazes, no more murders that go unaccounted for. There is always a reason in the animal’s mind. There is always a reason, however biased it may be. And if it is biased, no one else cares. There is only the animal and its kin in this strange, openly horrible world. This horrible, murdering, cannibalistic world.

Humans seem to obsess with death and blood. Red is a favorite color of many and blood is what links sisters and brothers in this world. Blood is donated to ones in need and blood is transferred, and blood is lost in a fight. In other words, blood and the symbolic color of red are dark and light at the same time. Blood can save a person in form of sustenance when they have lost it, but blood can also betray a human, their host, at the last minute, running away and flowing like a river. There is no saving a human when the flow starts, there is only the pain and loss. Even the doctor will only come back with tears and empty promises of a life saved, though at that moment the man’s life my have already slipped away to join the angels in heaven. And then the spirit of that very man will look down from a fake haven, watching his relatives mourn over empty promises that never were fulfilled in the end of his life. Why would those doctors lie, one may ask. The doctors are human, and they have emotions. But there is no saving a human once the flow starts.

And humans believe in that golden doorway at the edge of life and death, the glorious passageway into a new world they call Heaven. But the smart ones know what’s really waiting for them: a swath of darkness, wrapped over their faces and blinding them and muddling them until they don’t remember anything and their spirits are diminished to ashes. There is nothing waiting for them after death but darkness, while the Cygnus Swans will live on forever. The Cygnus Swans cannot die unless they are killed in battle, and even then they live for a few good months until death finally arrives with its razors of pain and agony, ready to reap the lives of a thousand but only taking one out of courtesy, perhaps, perhaps out of revenge and sharp retaliation of showing the human race how easily it could kill every single living species on the planet. But it cannot do that to the Swans. The Swans are immune, in a sense. However, living forever is a curse that is worse than pain or even the deaths of everyone around you. It is loneliness, because these Swans are required to take a human companion, as they call it. A companion that they will guard until the companion’s death, and that is when the swan ‘dies’. Actually, the swan has only been reincarnated. This happens with common swans, as they are not able to sustain the magic form they live in for long. The Royale Swans, in a sense a kind of super-swan, do not have this type of outburst. Therefore their human companions die when they are too old, but most Royale Swans are driven mad by constant loss of their companions as a human life is so short to a Swan, and so all of them end up illegally enchanting a human sooner or later and turning it into a common Swan so it can live forever. It happens, and there is only one Royale Swan left who has not committed the act, and she is the oldest and wisest of them all. She believes it is best not to interfere in, as she herself words it, ‘delicate lives and their own pathetic little structures’. As anyone can tell, she is not fond of humans.

The other Royale Swans used to think that way. But loneliness and loss is a horrible pain and losing one that one has known for a long time leaves an empty feeling in one’s heart, as if one is void of its whole existence as it is sucked into a mindless black hole of anguish and misery over the mourning. Life is cruel, but fair. Each creature gets the same conditions, and each is allowed to thrive. But like a turtle’s hatchlings, who are often swept away by the waves’ pounding and the screaming of roaring water in their ears, only a few from each species can survive. Only a few hatchlings dare to surge out into the ocean and take the daunting risk of never coming back. Such a small percentage that take the task, and an even smaller percentage to survive. Rarest among the turtles is not a species, not a life span, nor a preferred food type, but that ambition to thrive, the ambition to cling onto life by a single, dangling thread that is itself dwindling. Again, each is allowed to thrive, but only once in a while does there arise that brilliant miracle, that one hatchling that rises above the rest and demands dominance, the one kitten that rules the alleyway with an iron fist. Even the smallest kitten, the weakest hatchling, has a chance to rule his litter, to strike fear into the very heart of his sisters and brothers. Often, the strongest leader is the one few fear and few know, for few have gotten close to the height of his or her power. Only the ones with the will to survive can live. The Royale Swans all choose companions with the willpower to survive, and in their thoughts they justify their wrongdoing by assuring themselves that had the humans been born Swans, they would have thrived, and that enchanting them is simply putting them where they belong. But, the humans were not born as swans. So what is right and wrong, what is truth and what is lie, and what is darkness and what is light?

Can there be a right essence in this world of shattered dreams and false illusions that always betray one’s heart at the last minute? Could there possibly be a single right person, who has always been good, who has never lied, whose dreams come true? Why the last part, ‘whose dreams come true’? Is luck truly needed to be happy and perfect? In one way, a lie is always the truth. The details are just a little twisted. If one says they threw the ball and then another rammed it into their nose to create a wrong illusion and they are lying, then they are twisting the details. They threw the ball, sure enough, and the other collided into it somehow. So is a liar a liar, or is a liar a person of truth? If one speaks this way, everyone is perfect. Perhaps, though they have plenty of time and they just don’t want to do the the ball, they really do have something to do, whether it’s actually working on proper things or watching TV and slouching for the entire weekend. So maybe they do have things to do, they’re just not necessarily the things one would rather have another do. Those things may seem unimportant, but perhaps to that person they are a way of life. Perhaps they fascinate that person, or perhaps they are only there so that they forget everything else. Maybe the person loves to do it so, and in that case, one should just let them be. There are some humans who were always meant, in all of time and space, in all of fate and destiny, to live in a shabby home, to eat chips and watch television, to marry and then regret, to work in an underpaying job, and to have not one child. Those humans are not worth counseling nor talking to. Those humans are worthless. Those humans will never have a single hope, because they themselves believe they are stuck in their own little positions. Should they be struck by lightning and forget their entire previous life, however, they’d be good to go.

Humans procrastinate. They claim they are busy, forgetting the virtues of hard work, and fall deeply into debt and pain when they are too lazy to work. The humans never rest until their job is done, or so they say. But so many projects go unfinished, forgotten and faded, until they are simply erased from the history of that human because it was never finished. That is why humans are always claiming a finished product is the best. The smart ones realized the finished products looked so much better than the tattered remains of the broken and faded ones, and perhaps they decided they would change everything. But no human can change everything. There are too many humans, and the only result of that is that one human just doesn’t matter anymore. What is worth listening to a rambling fool, a broken tribesman without his tribe, when you could be finishing a project, or at least pretending to do so? The answer is that it’s not worth anything, and that is the reason humans will again fall into pockets of space and anguish, unable to grasp the idea of where they are in those feeble mind of theirs. Their weak little brains cannot comprehend it.

Swans don’t have to worry. Whether they are common Swans, the lowest of the lowest, or Royale Swans, distinguished and adored, they will live forever and sing forever and have one human companion always. They will never experience starvation, because they do not need to eat, and they will never feel overworked or stressed unless they lose their companion. In fact, losing a companion is about the only thing that can go wrong, and after all, common Swans and Royale Swans forget all but their current companion completely after a little while. They may not even remember that they had previous companions, only for the short slot of time in which a Swan is prepped for its next companion and it goes into a state of great mourning, forgetting its regular cries of joy and happiness. And that short slot of time will eventually pass like a human life, retiring to the skies if that is where it believes it belongs. Perhaps up there, there is an archive of human lives, recorded by the Sky Swans. They have lived up there for so long, and it would not surprise any Swan if they decided to just start keeping track of human deaths. They were the ones that most easily accessed the human world, so it couldn’t be too much of a burden to take up a record and devote one’s life to it. Sky Swans were commonly interpreted as bored and tired of flying in the skies. After all, even if one could fly forever, it does get boring and one tires of life and its paces. One retires, one exhausts, one dies and withers. But Swans cannot simply starve themselves nor cut at themselves, for only an honorable death could ever suit a Swan. It is like a galactic law that is always obeyed, because no Swan wants to die a coward among heroes.

As if the other Swans would ever give up an opportunity to become a Sky Swan! A Sky Swan could fly about, while even the best of the Royale Swans cannot lift themselves up off the ground. It is almost impossible for even the oldest Royale Swan to flap her wings and get herself off the ground. It requires months of extensive work to get that elusively magical Swan two inches off the ground! But such is the meaning of life, and the darkness always presumes. In the midst of their dazzling alchemy, their wondrous spells and their ways of twisting others’ fates, they have lost their wings’ most treasured power: to fly. To fly is to soar in the clouds. To fly is to join the Sky Swans and their smug ways. To fly is to weave among the air pockets and to hold one’s breath. To fly is the dream of all Swans and humans alike. To fly, to fly, to fly in the sky like a winter breeze upon midnight’s breast. Poetry is a common virtue among Swans. Their years on Earth along Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson and James Shirley have improved them for the better. No mortal human—not that there are any immortals—can match their beautiful poems, woven with magic and skill. The Sick Rose was written by a human companion, as was most of Shakespeare’s talented plays. The Swans are attracted to these skillful persons, to the ones with power to rise above their fellows and their equals, to mold a destiny for themselves and not to sit idly by while the world progresses.

O lovely crimson petals upon the world’s favorite flow’r,
Your youthful fate is set
The final knot is cut
For the winter cold
Has sunk your ship
And down you shall go with it

Swans have always thought of this as a very amateur but famous poem. At first it was an uproar. This was art! A beautiful poem, so simple, so meaningful, and all Common Swans thought it was the most promising artist’s work ever made until the Royale Swans came in like critics, snorting at the poem, such a weak, feeble attempt at the glory of ‘The Sick Rose’. Indeed the young author, clutching the ink dipped quill in one webbed foot, had sought only to replicate the beautiful symmetrical and rhythmic beatings of ‘The Sick Rose’. He had sought fame and fortune and in return, got more than what he bargained for. Royale Swans and Common Swans alike, laughing at him, snorting their noses and throwing back their elegant heads in laughter at what the poor Common Swan had thought of as his great masterpiece, albeit the many similarities to ‘The Sick Rose’. Not even his mother still respected him; when he came gliding into the kitchen she laughed and snorted like any other swan. His father! He preferred not to mention him. His father had waddled out on his mother, horrified that she could have such an undignified cygnet. The poor soul wandered about for a few more years, in a drunken rage on the world that hated him, and fell from a cliff and died.

The beast that roams in the woods
The tiger of fable
A whisker, a paw,
A dash here and there,
He is here! fear him, fear the tiger
His claws like hooked scythes shall pierce
Your deepest fears and memories
His eyes like a basilisk’s shall seek
The pearls of life you hold so dear
His tail like grass
Whispering on the night
Fear him, fear the tiger.

The poem has always been suitable. Swans fear any cats, for their integrity is great and they fear not the Swans, when they look at them, they see only a meal. There is no fear in their eyes like there is in the eyes of other creatures, and a tiger is the strongest and most feared of them all. Should that striped beast hook his claw into a Swan’s wing, they’d much rather die than be eaten by a tiger. The Royale Swans hated to admit it, but they, too, were afraid of tigers, and quietly awarded the author the best poem of the year award. Then they wiped it from all records, forcing all but the author to forget the cryptic words, because should a human come across those words, they could find the one secret they had been missing all this time. Swans have sought to ‘die’ near the vicious beasts, but since the tigers do not believe, they are shielded against the madness of their entrancing songs. They stalk with pride in their fazes of amber, blue, and green, and their arrogance that they are better than Swans is unmatched in any other creature. The Royale Swans have tried to convince young Swans that the tiger is nothing more than a mild nuisance, but there is no covering up the two hundred or so deaths a week from tigers. Deep in a Swan’s heart, deeper than true sweetness of nature, embedded at the very center of the heart, is an instinctual fear of the tiger and his claws. No Swan would walk with a tiger, and no Swan can. For death is imminent in those situations, and the only thing they can do is die.

Like a raven on silent wings
He approaches with a rustle
Frightening eyes of malicious blue
Lumbering claws, like knives on skin
A flap of his wings and he is gone
Soaring into the night
A scream is heard.

The Royale Swan Windergreen wrote this poem. Young cygnets wonder why there are only eleven Royale Swans on the Council when there are twelve chairs, and this poem is why. Windergreen was the greatest augur of her time, and she died at age 26. Barely born, a mere infant still in her egg, and she was sent up in flames. Windergreen conveyed her prophecies through her poems, and fear had struck the minds of every Royale Swan, including Windergreen herself. Desperate, she turned into her human form and pretended to be a human for a year, but their mundane lifestyles bored her, and she soon returned to the Cygnus Swans, her ever forgetful mind forgetting her ominous prophecy. But the others had not. They had waited, carefully, and she had been watched. They’d noticed her every quirk, her every habit. They were ready to set fire to this Swan who had dared to arise with a prophecy predicting dark times ahead. When they invited her over to tea in her human form, as it was so much easier to grasp the tea handles in human hands, they said, she was easily convinced it was an innocent action, not minding that they could have just lifted it with magic. Not a spark of suspicion was lit in her eyes, and it was with a melody in her mouth and a smile that she greeted the other Swans. They were all still in Swan form. She was confused. “I thought you said human form,” she said, laughing. “But no worries. I’ll change into Swan form.”
“Oh, we did say human form.” Now Windergreen was even more confused. If they did say human form, why weren’t they in their human forms? Were they embarrassed of something? But no, they couldn’t all be having hair problems or skin problems, could they? She opened her mouth to answer, but before she could utter a single word, she was blasted out of the palace. Even Royale Swans in their human form couldn’t take that kind of thing. She was killed by her betraying fellows.

When you want to erase something
And start all over again
But oh no, no,
You have to keep on going
Because life and nature tells you that you can
And you tough it out for them
Oh, oh, eet, eet, eet,
Regret it and start again.
Delete that day and redo it again

A human companion’s thoughtless poem, the Swans were intrigued by human emotions and though the poem was amateur, they framed it and hung it up next to the most meaningful poems of the century, for Swans don’t have true emotions. At least, not the emotions one thinks of. Anger is not necessary for a Swan, they have never lost in battles. Sadness is initiated only when a fellow Swan truly dies or when a Swan loses a companion. They don’t need sadness, it only weakens one’s spirit, and weakness is not allowed. Frustration was never used for Swans and rotted away, forgotten. Depression only makes a Swan smile, for one that sobs will be making a Swan laugh. Swans have never understood human emotions. Swans have never understood why they all have such complicated emotions. Couldn’t they be happy with the basic gears of fear, happiness, sadness, and excitement? It was simpler and easier to just go by those building blocks. No, but no, humans had to be intricate and hardworking and without a fear on the battlefield and wonderfully trained and happy and have a perfect life. Swans had all of those things from birth, so they didn’t care about humans all that much, they who had to actually work to get to those easy lifestyles. Swans laugh at the mere mention. Who really cares about humans in their beautifully dangerous world? Swans were happy, had young cygnets, loved their ‘jobs’, if you had to call them something, didn’t fear a thing other than cats, were trained to slash and blast, and had a wondrous life in which they never had to walk. They could just speak a commandment and voila! Instant perfect life.

Tonight the river’s midnight whispers are answered
For the ocean surges forth
And swallows up troubles
Hath you laid them down?
For no boat which is tethered can set sail
No matter how twisted, dwindling the rope may be,
Hath you laid your troubles upon the floor
And let the winds wrap you in their embrace
While the fierce waves lap at your troubles?
Thou art a fool
Thou art an idiot
But thou shall not find yourself with troubles.

Swans were made a fool when this poem was composed. A young, mischievous human companion, a teenager, had come up with this poem as a way to put them off their high horses. He showed it to the Swans and said, “I am going to lay down my troubles today, because it is Ocean Flood Day, and it washes away all our troubles.” He then held up a garbage disposal chart, showing the Swans which days were ‘Ocean Flood Day’ and how much he liked Ocean Flood Day. “Bye!” he called out before leaving their world to take out the garbage. Swans went into a panic. They wondered if humans had finally mastered magic, or if the Gods were starting to favor humans, and headlines everywhere flashed of apocalypses in which humans lead the Swans, used them as slaves. Swans began to bow down before humans and let themselves into zoos so that they might be favored when the apocalypse came. Swans created shell potions, hiding themselves away for a million years so the humans wouldn’t find them. The Swans had never seen garbage cans before, as they had never really cared about human life, and naturally assumed the trash cans to be full of human troubles. They avoided the cans and flew back to their own worlds, advising the Royale Swans to hurry and create a barrier spell, locking them away for a few millennium at least. Then the human companion came back and told them about his elaborate hoax. He did not notice the thousands of little shells littering the ground, all stuffed with Swans, or the Royale Swans shaking with fury. That fifteen year old boy was reported missing and was never seen again.

Listen carefully now,
Listen thoughtfully now,
To the cries of the children
To the cries of the mother
When a death note falls through the door
Listen carefully now,
Listen thoughtfully now,
To the cannons,
To the pains,
To the agony of war,
And tell me, tell me,
Is it all worth it?
What kind of bloodlust
Could fuel such endless revenge?
Listen carefully now,
Listen thoughtfully now,
To the smoke that sifts through the air,
Listen carefully, and thoughtfully,
And tell me darling,
Where do the bullets come from?
Why do they pile against villages?
Why have they taken the young boys?
To fight, when their only care is marbles
How innocent, how young, how dead.
For the second their clumsy feet step among the battlefield
Not armed, without a single confidence,
The bang of gunshot will rang out,
And another body will fall to the ground.
Again the death note falls through the door
And the mother,
And the daughters,
Sob on the floor.
For their fathers, their brothers,
Went to war.

Darkness is hidden in the very throes of this poem. The Swans had been at war with the Tigers for a long time, and everywhere the tension between the two powerful species was heard. The dumb animals that the Swans couldn’t connect themselves with somehow found themselves pitted against the Tigers, on the Swan side. Meanwhile, Sky Swans, considering themselves different from the rest of the Swans, took their places beside the Tigers, and for a long time, slain corpses lay about the ground, never of Tigers, never of Sky Swans or Swans, only of the dumb animals who had chosen the Swans and not the Tigers. Humans even began to notice that animals everywhere were dying at an alarming pace, with scars thrown about their bodies and small scratch marks all over them. There was confusion and panic, the seers predicting the end of the world, the militia preparing to battle to the death, the priests preaching of God’s ways and his protection against Satan and his unearthly thoughts. Meanwhile a peace treaty was signed, and the Tigers retreated into their bushy homes while Swans were left to clean up the messes. Sky Swans flew up into the skies again and there was peace until a single Tiger’s corpse was found with talon marks of a Swan gouging in at his throat. The war began again, but this time it was secretive, and no Tiger or Swan other than the Councils and the Royale Swans knew about the secret skirmishes between the two competitive races.

A young girl who grows up in peace,
Is happy and innocent
And live the life of a rich one
She’s happy and dandy
With the brain of a butterfly
But in the end
She’ll be well off and fed
She’ll be happy
She’ll get married
She’ll have two children
A boy and a girl
Her life shall be wonderful,
And happiness follows her path.
A girl who grows up in peace.
A young girl who grows up in war
Hears the sounds of gunfire everywhere
She’s dark and cannot take happiness
She’s unhappy, she’s alone, she’s sad,
Survival instincts run into her head
Dodge a grenade, fire a gun,
Stay away from land mines,
Make sure your water is clean
But in the end
The war will end
And you’ll find a broken girl
She’ll be sad still
For her loved ones are dead
She’ll be lonely
She’ll grow old
Her life will be sad
She’ll have opportunities
But she’ll be unhappy
A girl who grows up in war.

From a human point of view, wars are horrible death machines that kill thousands every day and murder good people that don’t deserve to die. It’s not close to that with the Swans. They are happy at war, albeit somewhat pressured to actually win, but they are still happy. Any chance to test out their new battle tactics. They are like blood hungry machines with claws and teeth and great big eyes that paralyze others. The humans do not see it as such an opportunity, and it was with a stroke of artistic genius that Windergreen composed this poem. Once finished she had to admit she didn’t believe it to be her best, but she was still considerably proud that a poem on such primitive subjects could be so lengthy and deep. After all, humans had a mess of emotions, and she had to study them for a great amount of time until she could figure out what she wanted to write about and what kind of strange emotions they had, and why they were so sad when people other than themselves die. Why would they be sad about that? They were alive, weren’t they? Why did they care about others, and that fickle emotion they called…love?

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