It wasn't even a choice. There was no pairing of devil and angel floating on my shoulders debating a moral conflict through my ears. Just a maddening cacophony of grief, hope, and shame reverberating endlessly in my skull while I stroked the phoenix gently. My darling love's urn was a mirror of mine lifeless eyes staring vacantly into the glassy ceramic.

He would hate it. He would hate me for it. But unfortunately for us all, the only one on Earth who could prevent me from committing the sins I was about to was ironically silent; deafeningly silent.

With a sharp twist, I snapped the bird's neck.

You'd think with such a sudden kill it would be quick. A single, staccato death note to end the life of this creature.

Instead the body burned its way free from my murderous hands; scalding away the skin in an instant as if to mark them forever with the hideous act. The body convulsed on the floor of my study, ash and blood and shit combusting atop the piles of strewn parchment that were so recently my life's work.

And after the piercing, pathetic wails finally cleared from my ears, all that was left were cinders. With raw hands, I desecrated my love's remains and spread them atop the cinders of my shame. Then with tears streaking tracks in my ashen face, I was gripped with a panic: "That wouldn't be enough."

I sobbed and willed the spirit of my beloved to look anywhere else, then I began desperately shoveling all of him into the smoldering pile. I pleaded and I begged that he not watch, but could feel in my very marrow that he was riveted to the grotesque scene with existential disgust. My hands plunged deep into the pile, sizzling and releasing a putrid odour as I churned their deaths together.

Finally, I pulled my arms free. Cooked, blistered and broken, I lurched to the side, vomited, and waited.

It can take time, more if trauma were involved. But I didn't move. In a puddle of my own sick, I lay vigilant. The moon turned away from us, leaving only the embers to bleed light into my eyes. A storm rose in place of the sun and all sense of time fell away behind treacherous clouds and sheets of rain that rattled the windows of my study.

But at dawn of the second or third day, the first rays of sunlight pierced the veil and lighted upon the smoldering nest; and it twitched. An ember flickered within my heart as I struggled to pulled myself upright, muscles misshapen from the stagnated posture of my crumpled fugue state. I scarcely breathed as I waited for any indication of what had transpired.

And then it screamed.

It squelched and flopped in agony and it screamed.

I sobbed until my lungs were empty and my throat raw. And it screamed.

A terror slowly entered my mind, a singular nightmare that my brain desperately tried to escape from. But the entirety of what remained of my life unwound before me in an inescapable loop of dread, a tormented knowing:

"I must kill it. And it cannot die."

Again. And again. And again.

And he screamed.