No feeling was more insidious than dread. Drops of ice water, it dripped onto its unsuspecting victim’s back, soaking feathers with its chilly touch. It saturated and penetrated flesh. A parasitic worm, that cold slithered its way inside and wound around spine tightly enough to snap. Catch it early, and the problem could be shaken away. Catch it too late, and every muscle was frozen.

Confront it, kill it with a warm embrace, and the cold could never catch. This was the East method, and as far as he was concerned, it worked. Learning to grasp the issue between talons was a necessity and denial more damage than good. Under quartz light he trod, the dead beneath rubble a mere fact among others. Their internals were examined under a neutral gaze.

Canis laid its carnage bare, but despite the lack of dazzling obfuscation, the cave was not much different from Orion. Bones of many mingled together, some coated in the fine dust of age or stained by more recent oil smears. Their cracks spoke of injury, of killing blows and fractures healed. He didn’t know all causes but studied enough to have more than an empty skull about the matter. Those unrecognized were tools of reference, something to point to down the path.

The graveyard a common playground for him, the bird hopped the bones like stepping stones. Perched upon a hefty femur, he nudged aside skull fragments and gnarled teeth. His beak hooked what seemed a small jaw and withdrew two melded into one. A notable find among possibly more.

So went the usual routine: searching and discovering, prodding and understanding. Not a living encyclopedia on all things that crept the cave floor, scaled the cave walls, or flew close to the cave ceiling, there were many oddities amongst the scattered dead. Eye sockets where there shouldn’t be. Fangs embedded in ribs like second mouths. He sifted through these until the partial skeletons fell to empty space and his stare was left dangling upon carved wall.

It wasn’t the first time he’d seen these sort of drawings. They made their home in tunnel walls and ceilings too, a texture that often caught him during a stray thought. How long ago had the fingers that created these crumbled to rot?

A soft chuckle, unbidden, rose from him. Corpses owned the caverns more than the living; their scraps littered the place wherever he bothered to look, whether broken abodes or unintelligible scrawls.

“Guess you can’t take it with you.” His voice was drier than ash but carried like smoke. It meandered, uncaring of who might catch his mutter.