The once bird now thoroughly bird-man was dying. He knew it. He felt it in his bones, and his feathers, and fingers, and his aged brittle beak, and parched dry mouth.
For some reason this didn't bother him much, as he felt he had lived a long enough life, longer than many ravens, and after all it was the nature of all life for everything living to eventually die. Even the trees followed this golden rule. So why should he be any different? He wasn't, it was the natural state of things to live and die, and in this he took a great deal of comfort knowing he was simply following a plan that was laid out for him long before he was even hatched.
What did bother him, ever so slightly, though was the fact that he would die without knowing certain things.
He would die without knowing what lay beyond the lands he'd called home for so many years. The moorlands were beautiful and impressive, but there had to be so much more out there.
He would die without knowing what ever became of his family - the family to which he was born to. The feathered, beaked kind.
He would die with the guilty knowledge that after so long as a human that his bird family seemed almost inconsequential.
He would die never knowing if Aurora and Phillip's son would indeed grow up to be as caring as his mother and/or as simpleminded, but well meaning as his father.
He would die without ever having reared hatchlings of his own. Admittedly, this one stung his failing heart more than the others.
He would die without ever hearing the words "I love you," from the one person he wanted to hear them from the most in the entire world. This pain was almost suffocating, but he chased it from his mind as best he could.
He would die feeling a shell of a bird and of a man in that way, knowing he was never graced by the heavens to be loved by another in the same way which consumed him from the inside out. But no, he would not think about this during his last flight.
He would die without the knowledge that Aurora felt for him what he longed for her to feel, but could never vocalize, and perhaps that was for the best. She was a queen after all, and he just a simple raven.
He would die without the slightest inkling that inside Aurora grew a child, a product of a night when the king was off in some foreign land and wine flowed too freely into the queen and his goblets. And not knowing the existence of that to be born child was for the best.
He would never see his daughter grow and blossom into a powerful lady. He would never even know she had been conceived.
He would not know Aurora would spend months by his graveside or that she'd wept into her godmother's comforting arms over the loss of him.
And again, all of this was probably for the best. When you are dying you want to be at peace, you don't want to know just how much you have yet to see and to live for. It's best to die thinking your best years are in the past, and that now it was time for a nice and long, well deserved rest.
With his weary body, black feathers dull from age, he flies himself far from the moors but not quite to the human kingdom, and nests in a tree that stinks heavily of owl. By the time the tree's residence comes back he knows his time will be up. He cares little what they do with this body. Shove it out of the tree, for all he cares. He has long felt a sort of disconnect from this form.
It's funny, really, he thinks as his breath slows and eventually shallows. For awhile there he felt truly human - with proper human emotions at all. But at the age of twenty-five, very old for a raven he knew, he would die as what he really was. A raven. A common, insignificant little raven.
Closing his eyes he has no wisp of an idea that he will be remembered not as a raven, but as a man as protective as a hound, as fierce as a dragon, and as devoted as a raven. That he'll be remembered as so much more than he ever gave himself credit for despite his bravado.
He doesn't know his onyx shade eyes will see the world again through his daughter's obsidian like gaze. Or that his sleek black hair will be passed on to a dark haired little beauty fit to rule the sun and the moon and the stars.
But as he passes on, as his eyes close for a final time the only image he can see in his mind's eye was that of a gentle woman with soft yellow hair and even softer cornflower blue eyes with a graceful smile on her face. Her pale pink lips quirked in a content smile as she gazes down from her balcony looking out onto her kingdom.
And if he could have smiled he would have.
Though he would die a raven, a raven not knowing many a things, he would die knowing for a time there, he had at least been her friend.