A children’s tale from Arrelia — origin unknown. Often recited at funerals, endings, or times of letting go.
There once stood a scarecrow in a field of nothing.
No grain, no flower, no crow. Only the wind and the waiting.
Scorched earth and red dust stretching in all directions as far the eye could see.
One day, a pitchblack raven flew down and landed on his arm.
“You guard an empty field,” said the raven to the scarecrow. “What good is a sentinel with nothing to protect?”
The scarecrow said nothing. He had no tongue, only straw.
But the wind moved through his ribs, and the raven listened.
“I see,” said the raven. “Can’t you see? This protection just postpones the end.”
The scarecrow did not nod, for he had no neck, no spine. Still, the raven understood.
He plucked a thread from the scarecrow’s chest and tucked it beneath his wing.
“The end’s no curse—it quiets the ache, ends the weeping, and gives you the stillness you’ve earned,” the raven said. “I made a mistake, and so you came to be—but your existence is suffering, and it must be unmade.”
The raven tilted his head, looking up.
Then the wind moved through the scarecrow’s ribs. “Why have you not ended it?”
The raven’s head turned a fraction.
“I tried,” said the raven. “More times than there are stars. But the end cannot be taken—only given.”
The scarecrow did not move. He had guarded the field for so long, he had become part of its silence.
Then his head fell, and a thread of straw slipped loose from his back.
The raven cried out, and the wind stilled. And in that stillness, something else moved. A current not of air, but of absence. It passed through the scarecrow like a sigh, and he did not fall, did not burn—he simply was no longer. As though the world had never needed him.
And in that field, they say, nothing grows. Not because it is cursed. But because it remembers what it once let go.
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