“They didn’t think that the fire they started would ever stop burning,” Charlie’s great uncle said sombrely as they sipped hot tea and listened the squawking of the birds. “They couldn’t have known. They couldn’t see the black, sooty sea that was coming. Perhaps if they had listened to him, they might have avoided their fate–our fate–but they didn’t want to hear anyone’s ideas but their own.”

Charlie took the book in his hands. It was not a large tome, by any means, and yet there was a weightiness to it that he couldn’t deny. The gilded title read, “The Life and Writings of Edgar Blee.”

“Some said he was a holy man, but they were merely fooled by his trappings. His poetry smelled of incense and the smoke of burnt offerings, but the angels he alluded to were of a world unimaginable to any saint, unimaginable, even, to those of us alive in these times, strange though they are.

“There were those who called him a prophet. I think that’s what bothered those fire starters. They were so sure of the world that they would raise out of the wreckage, they couldn’t stand to hear someone tell them that they were fated to fail. He offered them a choice, and they drove a knife through his heart.”

One of the parrots chittered nervously and he proceeded to coo to it and stroke its feathers. Charlie opened the book and began to flip through it, until he reached a page where a large crow feather practically sprung out at him. His great uncle reached over and took it between his fingers. His hand trembled slightly. Charlie looked at the page, a poem titled, “The Azure Canopy”.

“…The smoke rises, our spirits escape, fly! Fly to new heights!”

“Like so many visionaries, his vision was not quite of this world. It happens, sometimes, that a person can see so far that he fails to notice the things in his direct proximity. Edgar was different.” He ran the black, shining feather across the back of his hand. “Edgar Blee saw with perfect clarity the grey thing which sits inside us, that grey thing which, by the time the fires finally died, would be filled with ash.”

Charlie finished the tea that was in his cup. It had gone cold. He took up the pot and refilled it, topping his great uncle’s while he was at it, for the old man seemed lost in some sad thought.

He had survived the Melancholia which followed in the wake of the failed revolution, two whole generations prior. He was one of the last survivors of those dark days, and while most of the old men and women his age would talk endlessly about the glory of the revolution and the tragedy of its demise, he was different. Perhaps he was different the same way Edgar Blee was different. He saw things another way, which Charlie enjoyed.

A cockatoo fluttered, suddenly, and came to perch on Charlie’s shoulder. The room was spacious, and yet the birds all seemed to be drawn to the corner where he and his relative sat and spoke. They were clearly fond of the old man and regarded him with eyes that hinted at some alien comprehension.

Edgar Blee, Charlie knew, had written much about birds and their ways. His uncle had told him about a pamphlet which detailed the life of the vulture that had eaten the old dictator’s liver. Blee had described the way the world looked from the eye of the vulture, circling overhead, watching the carnage of mankind with a hungry heart, and the subsequent visions of wasted glory that it received upon dining on the once great leader’s innards.

“He saw things from above,” the old man said presently, “and he had the courage to look even higher yet, but one has the sense that he could feel the anchors which keep us all down. He called them, “those ancient chains which pull us forever backwards and downwards.” I suppose, at last, we all end up in the pit.” He smiled then. “Not Edgar though.”

He turned then and peered out of the large windows at the pale, bleeding sky, punctured by the twisted shapes of a new world–a world that probably even Edgar Blee had not foreseen–a heaven untouched by feathered wing.

Charlie knew too of the songbooks filled with the lyrics of songbirds singing about a world beyond the clouds, a starry firmament of colours unperceived by human eye.

“Put a large bird in a small cage and she will sing you a song of freedom,” his great uncle had once told him.

Lordly eagles; Knightly hawks; the virginal dove; vulture, the prophet; the priestly crow.

The crow, Blee’s messenger of choice, intelligent, an eater of carrion, though it didn’t seem to gorge itself the way the vulture did. It seemed more a participant in ritual, the way it partook of the flesh and the blood, the offerings of a world of violence which it accepted with cold detachment and watched with eyes filled with weird wisdom.

In the end, they offered Blee to the crows.

“How many soothsayers and madmen offered up their brands of nonsense to take the place of the dictator’s madness,” the old man said after a long pause. He was feeding seeds from his palm to one of his pigeons. “Blee himself said we mustn’t blame the revolutionaries. They sought to burn nonsense from the world, establish order in the light of those wrathful flames. They could not see what he saw. There was a necessity for some nonsense.

“A choice: Warm your fingers by the fire and let the flames die out, ushering in a grey, ashy era, or let oneself be consumed by the blaze and free the spirit that it might rise to heaven and above.

“Where they saw a means for illumination, he saw the churning seed of destruction at the core of the fire, and of what it was capable: annihilation or ascension.”

“Edgar Blee was a lunatic,” Charlie’s father had told him once, when he tried to talk to him about great uncle Thomas’ fascination with the poet and writer, “And a zealot too. Good riddance.”

“What about the man who shot the crow that ate Blee’s eyes?”

“He was probably a loon too,” his father said. “Those were different times.”

The air in the room reeked of musty feathers, but the warmth of the sun through the windows and the heat of the teacup in the palm of Charlie’s hand was pleasant as he listened to his great uncle recount the death of Edgar Blee.

“He had supported the revolutionaries, but they denounced him like they did so many others,” Thomas said. His eyes were clear. “They started more fires than they could keep track of.

“We tried to hide him. Under the dictatorship we had gotten good at hiding, but the revolutionaries knew the ways, they were as full of guile as the rest of us back then, and they snatched him up. He was made an example of. They would not tolerate nonsense, especially nonsense which denied their grand project.

“We recovered the body, and gave it to the crows, just as he had requested. We offered him up in hopes that they would bring him to the heavens he had only seen but never touched. His eyes, those eyes once so full of vision, were the first to go.”

“And that was when someone fired the shot?” Charlie interrupted.

“That’s right,” Thomas nodded. “We never found out who, or why, but the crow which ate his eyes was shot right out of the air.” He held the long black feather aloft. “We recovered it, but it was no use. Those of us who were closest to Blee were each given a single feather.”

“It’s too bad,” Charlie admitted, “his eyes never made it to the heavens they saw.”

“Yes,” his great uncle agreed. “But his tongue, that silver little muscle, now sings with the songbirds, and his fingertips may yet brush against the firmament. His heart too, though it went in several pieces, I believe, beats on within the larger heart of that far off world most likely never to be seen again.”