Once, there was a boy. When the boy was six years old,
his father gave him a falcon to
train. Falcons are raptors - killing birds,
his father told him, the Shadowhunters of the sky. The falcon
didn't like the boy,
and he didn't like it, either. He didn't know it, but his
father had selected a falcon
that had lived in the wild for over a year, and thus was nearly
impossible to train.
But the boy tried, because his father had told him to make the
falcon obedient,
and he wanted to please his father. He stayed with the falcon
constantly,
keeping it awake by talking to it and even playing music to it.
He tried to sit where
the bird could see him as he touched and stroked its wings,
willing it to trust him.
He fed it from his hand, and at first it would not eat. Later it
ate so savagely that
the beak cut his palm. But the boy was glad, because it was
progress, and because
he wanted the bird to know him, even if it had to consume his
blood to make
that happen. He began to see that the falcon was beautiful, that
its slim wings
were built for the speed of flight, that it was strong and swift,
fierce and gentle.
When it dived to the ground, it moved like light. When it learned
to circle and land
on his wrist, he nearly shouted with delight. Sometimes the bird
would hop to his
shoulder and but its beak in his hair. He knew his falcon loved
him, and when he
was certain that it was not just tamed but perfectly tamed, he
went to his father and showed him what he had done, expecting him
to be proud. Instead his father
took the bird, now tame and trusting, in his hands, and broke
its neck. 'I told you to
make him obedient,' his father said, and dropped the
falcon's lifeless body to the ground. "Instead, you
taught it to love you. Falcons are not meant to be loving pets:
They are fierce and wild, savage and cruel. This bird was not
tamed; it was broken.' Later, when his father left him, the
boy cried over his pet, until his father sent a servant to take
the body of the bird away and bury it. The boy never cried
again,and he never forgot what he'd
learned: That to love is to destroy, and to be loved is to be the one destroyed."
-Jace Wayland, The Mortal
Instruments
Long, but life-changing.
<3
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smartysydney333 · 1 decade ago
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City of Bones (: