Cultivation of a Phoenix

I was falling, the strength leaving my body. I was familiar with falling, though I usually controlled how I fell. My wings were seizing up, tightening close around my body. The wounds on my body were small, but bleeding heavily. I could feel the projectiles that hit me lodge in my muscles or against my bones. And so after falling for an eternity, but what I knew to be only moments I crashed into the ground... I, who was a proclaimed king of the sky, was felled to the ground by man for my breed was rare and dying out of this world. There on the ground I died. I followed my body in the after-life for some time to see my body stuffed and put in a majestic pose upon a mantle in some old man\'s hall. Seeing what had been done to my body I left it and passed on into the darkness of the void.