The hermit curled his head into his folded feathers. It had a been a long day. Heck, who was he kidding? It had been a long century. He was getting old, too old to be doing this work. And, he was tired. The kind of tired that sets into your bones long before they are supposed to return to the soil. He blamed the humans. The hermit discovered the plague of their greed soon after they started pumping darkness into the veins of Earth five thousand years ago.

He didn’t want to feel like such a curmudgeon. In many ways he’d rather be flying blissfully unaware with the starlings. All they did was gossip and cackle about the other birds as they picked through the dirt for worms. The hermit wasn’t much for idle chatter, though. He never had been. Life would have been easier, he thought, if he had been born into a state of blissful ignorance, but life had chosen him to be a hermit.

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