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Fiyero was becoming quite the snack for bugs.
He had been tethered to this pole for almost 20 minutes, and bugs had begun to crawl on him. It was cruel irony, that his rotting was bringing life to him. He would’ve laughed, if he could laugh. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t even move his jaw to mimic the sound, to gesture into the wind what his intentions were.
His jaw was broken. So was his left arm. And his right shoulder, right left, a good number of ribs, and his pelvis. It was a curse he was still alive, it was a wicked and cruel joke how slowly he was bleeding out. The guards who had hung him here stuffed his wounds with straw to stifle the bleeding, prolonging his torturous consciousness.
Blood had pooled down the straw he could see stuffed into an exposed fracture in his arm, and was dripping every few seconds from the end of the down tilted strands. He couldn’t see the ground, but he could imagine it staining the grass below him, corrupting it with his influence.
He craned his neck up the best he could to look at the sun, just barely passing the middle of the sky and leaning towards the west, being pulled to it like some magnetic attraction. It hurt his eyes to stare at the sun, but not as much as it usually would. In fact, it was less bright than it usually was. Less bright than it was a minute ago, ten minutes ago. It was gradually getting darker, too.
So this is how he died. It was pathetic. He stared at the sun as he felt his arms go numb, joining his already numb legs which had died out from hanging so long minutes ago. A small beam in the sun flickered a bit green in his vision as he began to look down, causing him to look back up a little. It was a small shock of awareness again, as he realized there was in fact not a green glare - but a small, steadily growing green shape in front of the sun.
No, not growing. Approaching. It was flying, like a small drop from the radiant star itself mutated and come to spear right through him. He squirmed his shoulders and winced in pain, his instinct to dodge screaming at his inability to move and the pain of even shifting. The green orb was audible as it met with his jacket, the sound like a whoosh of wind and the crackle of electricity.
But… it didn’t burn him. How anticlimactic. It just sat on his jacket, flickering like he himself was resistant to its heat. It crawled around his battered and bloody coat up to his chest, then across his shoulder, doing no damage. It was slowly shrinking down too, only the size of a nickel as it reached his elbow. He almost wanted to laugh. Maybe it was just delirium from blood loss, but this was just silly to him.
As it got smaller, it reached the size of barely a nail before crawling from his sleeve to the bloody straw sticking from his arm. It finally disappeared, flickered out to nothing as it crept to the end of the wet straw, and for a few seconds there was silence.
Then, there was wildfire.
His insides suddenly began burning, burning so bad it felt as if he was being forced to swallow an entire campfire. He tried to scream, begged his body to let him scream, his head jerking forward as he twitched and writhed against the searing pain.
Green flame began to melt straight through his body, melting through his stomach and out of small holes in his jacket. He felt as through he would vomit, and despite the intense adrenaline the fire had brought, his life was ending. He twitched and made a noise he knew wasn’t possible for a human, a sound like wind in grass, sad and lonely. Death in a cornfield.
His head jerked and slowly fell, pressing to his chest as his eyes closed. They felt unable to open, not as if too heavy, but as if merged, becoming one singular piece the second they touched. And in his last moments the fire stopped hurting. In fact, it stopped feeling like fire, cooling in the air of the sunset and solidifying into spikes of paralyzed frame, thin and sparked, in clusters.
Fiyero stopped existing right as the sun fell in the western sky.
Scarecrow was born at 8pm, and his blue button eyes came to life just in time to witness the sun leave the sky from the west. What a beautiful sight to be born to. He wished he was the sun.