A black bird emerges in my dream.

A black bird emerges over the city.

It circles the ruins.

Could it be a black crow? Or an unknown species? 

They long for meals, for the cruel, but for them, it's a beautiful corpse. And my Lord especially likes to feed them.

What is death to war? I ask myself.
It is the inevitable result, the shadow that follows. Those who survive may suffer even more, facing every day and night the flashing images that rise from dreams like ghosts.

I am one of the few who survived the battle of the Mountain City.

This city has a long night. Even during the day, blatant evil is like a ghost in the night, exposed here.

In my hands I still hold my paintings. They are records of hell, and they contain everything I have witnessed.

The lord of the Mountain City, cruel and violent, took pleasure in destruction. He set fires day and night, watching the flames fill the sky and the people run screaming from the blaze. During the day, he filled the fields with blades and threw the innocent into them. From a perverse sense of beauty, he was drunk on this evil and saw himself as the supreme ruler who had restored Sodom. Everything against the Bible was, in his eyes, beautiful.

I was only a painter and could not change anything.

I mixed my blood into the paint, my tears into the strokes, recording the map of hell. Soon the people rose up, and another city-state attacked. I was trapped in the mud of war. At that time, I felt that no matter what war was, it would at least destroy the cruel paradise of the lord. For the first time, I came close to death. Compared with watching so many tortured without reason, that kind of death seemed almost merciful. 

Now half of my face has been burned into the shape of a hill under fire. 

I still hold the map of hell. On the side of death—amid the ruins where I survived — I think: if I turn from the side to the front, that is death itself. Sudden fear, absolute nothingness. 

The side, trembling in memory, becomes the image of hell.
Everyone is being pierced by the lord. 

From the side, only the blood-stained thorn was visible; the face turned away into the dim moonlight, dissolving its sin in death, leaving only an image behind.

And the concrete manifestation of death is those nameless deceased, being devoured bit by bit. 

The Lord eventually became the aesthetic enjoyment of the black bird.

Yucheng Tao is a Chinese poet based in Los Angeles, currently pursuing a B.A. in Songwriting at the Musicians Institute. His work has appeared in over 30 journals internationally, including Wild Court (King’s College London), NonBinary Review, Apocalypse Confidential, The Arcanist, Red Ogre Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, SHINE: International Poetry, In Parentheses, and more. He was a semifinalist for the Winds of Asia Award. His debut chapbook, titled April No Longer Comes, was published by Alien Buddha Press in August 2025