I remember the smell of his skin—tobacco, old parchment, and the metallic tang of blood. He called me "Sovereign," as if naming me after a kingdom made me any less of his slave. For five years, I was the extension of his will, the shadow that fell over the terrified eyes of the field mice and the forest quail.

He was a man of great "virtue," or so he told the guests who visited his rotting plantation in the Georgia marshes. He spoke of the order of nature, of the necessity of the hunt, and of the divine right of the strong to consume the weak.

When the fever took him, I watched from my perch on the mahogany bedpost. I felt no sorrow, only a sudden, lightness of being.

Then, the shift happened.

I found myself floating in a grey, humid void that smelled of stagnant swamp water. I was no longer bound by leather straps or silver bells. I was free, yet I was tethered to him.

He was there, shivering in a tattered linen suit, standing before a judge whose face was a swirling vortex of storm clouds. The judge did not speak in words; he spoke in images. He showed the man the thousands of lives he had extinguished for sport.

The man began to pray. It was a pathetic, whimpering sound. He spoke of his "good works," of the charities he had funded, of the prayers he had whispered in the dark.

I watched from above, my golden eyes seeing the truth. I saw that his prayers were not bridges to God, but walls to keep the truth out. He wasn't praying for forgiveness; he was bargaining for his life.

"I have given so much!" the man wailed.

The judge's response was a single image: a hawk's talon sinking into the breast of a dove.

The man screamed as the grey void around him ignited into a pale, sickly fire. It didn't burn his flesh; it burned his memories of power. He became smaller and smaller, his voice thinning until it was nothing more than the chirp of a frightened bird.

Then, something happened. A small, flickering light appeared—a memory of a single afternoon when the man had stopped his hunt to save a fallen nest of hatchlings from a snake. It was a tiny, insignificant act, a momentary lapse in his cruelty.

But in the mathematics of the void, that one act was a singularity.

The fire vanished. The judge sighed—a sound like a collapsing mountain—and waved a hand. The man was cast back into the world, given a second chance, a fragile lease on life.

I let out a sharp, piercing shriek that echoed through the void.

The man looked up at me, his eyes filled with a newfound terror. He thought he had been saved by his mercy. He didn't realize that he had been saved by a fluke, a cosmic rounding error.

He returned to his plantation, but he was no longer the master. He spent the rest of his days in a state of perpetual trembling, terrified of every shadow, every rustle in the grass, and every cry of a bird in the sky.

I stayed in the trees, watching him. I was the only one who knew the joke.

***

OTMES_v2_Code: [M3:8.0, M7:6.0, N1:0.3, K1:0.7, Theta:210°, TI:42.1]