Hunched in a corner, bedraggled and drenched in the sorrow of his own misery. The world passes him by, but he doesn’t realise as he sits. Every heartbeat, another wasted moment. Though his eyes are closed, in defence against the pain of the thousand splinters that once used to be his heart, he sees everything in perfect clarity. He sees people, not as people, but as what lies beneath the skin. He sees everything in a way that causes every second to inflict more pain on his already battered frame. His corner, dark, unwelcoming, and yet there is a pool of light, so brilliant in its radiance, just beyond his reach. No matter how he reaches out, trying to grab it, it slides through his fingers time and again. It is happiness, perfection, beauty, wholeness. He does not have to see to know. To know that beyond this mortal realm there is a bird. A raven, with its tongue in its cheek, and a smirk in its eye. This raven, while dark in appearance, exudes this brilliant light of beauty, one that cannot ever be dulled. The raven is free, yet held captive, bound in this pitiful earthly realm by a force far greater than most can hope to overcome. Yet in those places, beyond mere comprehension, the raven wheels and whirls. Held by nothing, contained in nowhere. Nothing can stop it as it lives. Though it more than lives. It exists. And that existence sheds that pool of light into the beggar’s world. That unreachable, evading every attempt to capture it, pool of brilliance dims with every passing moment. It actively resists all attempts to brighten it, every enhancing technique meets an end in its glare. For though it is beautiful in its radiance, it is blinding in its intensity. Through the beggar’s eyelids it burns its image into his brain. Its image of perfection, flawed only because of its perfection. The beggar slumps, forlorn. From the depths of his tortured soul comes a sigh of despair. The sigh of a person eternally buffeted from all directions by a thousand incomprehensible winds of twisted fate.