A small songbird sat within the empty heart. It preened its feathers and observed the destruction from its perch on metal wiring. The landscape surrounding it had an alien, sick look to it, as if a fire had started on the inside, burnt out the meat and left the shell.
Shaking itself, the songbird stepped delicately down the wires of the heart, to the bottom corner where a small patch of dirt lay. It scratched at the dirt until it found a seed, black and rough to the touch, but the songbird knew that it tasted sweet as honey in the mouth and the stomach of one who believed in it. The songbird grasped the seed with one claw and stared at the wreckage around it for a moment, searching for one more, simple ingredient. There, locked in a cage of iron and hate, lay the shrivelled body of imagination. Quickly, the songbird hopped to the cage and held out the seed in front of the imagination's face.
"Breathe," it commanded, and out the imagination's mouth came its last stronghold of air. The seed soaked it all up, looking for a moment as if it became still blacker, but then it brightened, turned into a star.
As the imagination collapsed into death, the songbird flew away.
Upon the greatest battlefield of all time, a man lay beside the corpse of his brother. He wept and held the body close, scarcely noticing as a small songbird fluttered down and onto a nearby rock. All he knew was that his brother had been killed, and that he knew the killer. He fixed the face of the scarred one in his mind, memorizing its details.
"Do you wish," asked the songbird, startling the man, "to have the power to do justice for your brother?"
"What can you do to help me?" asked the man. Instead of replying, the songbird placed a small star onto the rock. The man stared at it in wonder.
"What is it?"
"It is your reason for revenge, and the silence of all opposing voices. If you will eat it, you will find what you search for."
The man picked up the star with both hands. "Will it hurt?"
"No. It is as sweet as honey." The man swallowed the star whole, letting it burn down his throat. It sat in his belly, smouldering, and he rose to his feet.
"Brother," he said to the corpse, "I will avenge you." As the fire within him compelled the man to run, the songbird left the rock, whistling.
The man travelled across the world and back, searching for the scared man whose face the flames had imprinted behind his eyes. When he came to a place, he searched every home, every road, every sanctuary, and paused for not a moment if his quarry did not show itself. The star had moved from his stomach to his heart, and he could not stay still for long, lest he burn.
He focussed all the faculties of his mind on the chase, save his imagination. When he asked it to search ahead for the scarred man, it would instead tell him to find water with which to douse the star inside his heart, for all fire ever did was consume its bearer. It spoke softly, persuasively, but its words served only to infuriate the man. He locked it away, forcing it to draw him portraits of the scene of the scarred man's death.
"The star gives me power," said the man. "Do you not see how it drives me onwards? Without it, my life's strength would flow away, like water from a leaky cup." So, his imagination drew with sticks of charcoal, formed from the walls of veins, and refused to eat.
For a time, the man thought he would have to begin tearing apart the cities of the world, brick by brick, and search among their ruined foundation, but he first returned to the battlefield, to the marker where his brother had lain. By the marker, a simple white cross, stood a giant of a man, half of his face marred with silvery white, leaning heavily on a cane that could barely support his weight.
The star burned bright, wrapping tendrils about the mind and limbs until the man whose brother had died faced the scarred man, his brother's killer. The two men stared at each other, one flaming with the passion of a sun, the other haggard and worn with exhaustion.
"Do you wish to kill me, then?" asked the scarred man. "I have fled you for longer than I care to think of. I will run no longer. See? I have spat it out." In one hand, the scarred man held a small, black, twisted seed, cracked open and bearing the dead remains of its offspring. He held it out to the man. "Take it if you wish." The man spat at the giant's feet, and fire followed his contempt. Seeing this, the scarred man dropped the seed onto the grave before him. "As you wish."
The man drew a gun and pressed it against his enemy's chest. His imagination pounded against the bars of its cage and shrieked. With one, small painting of the man's brother's honesty, it broke the lock and rushed into the man's vine-covered mind.
"What will you gain by killing your brother's killer?"
"Justice," said the fire in the man's mouth. His imagination bashed with the painting against the vines in the man's mind, dissolving them.
"What will you gain by the murder of your brother's killer?"
"Peace," said the embers of the man's tongue. The imagination fled down to the man's heart, wielding its painting like a machete until it stood before the inferno of the parasite that the seed had created. It shouted into the blaze and threw the painting into it.
"What will you gain by murdering this man?" But the seed pulled at the man's tongue until he could not speak, for it could feel itself weakening. The man returned from morality and stared at the scarred man before him, the light in his eyes a little cooler than before.
"But tell me," said the scarred man, as if not a moment had passed, "what will you gain by murder?"
The seed within the man screamed, its growth screaming with it, carrying the echo of birdsong, and the man's imagination opened the floodgates of the mind, drowning the bird in a deluge. The man collapsed to the ground, weeping. Gently, the scarred man bent, picked up the gun, and threw it in no particular direction. Then he squatted in the fresh spring grass that covered the grave.
"What would murder have given you, my friend?" he asked when the man finally lay silent before him.
"Pain," the man sighed. "Only pain."
"Not even pain," said the scarred man. He looked to the side. The man followed his gaze, finding the small corpse of a songbird lying beneath a tree. "Only death."
