It is no crime to be at the wrong place in the wrong time
To stumble upon a sight no mortal should witness
Bound by cruel fate to death and sorrow peerless

Such tragedy befell a young man in his twenties
Born neither rich nor poor, and full of wishes plenty
As he got lost in the hall of the one god that remains
In the modern world where all others to it where fed

Within lay a temple to humanity's every achievement
Where dark wishes come true and comforting lies die
He found the abandoned embers of another's ambition
A sight that for his mortal eyes was not meant

Yet the man often dabbled in similar mysteries
For he was a scientist allured by life's chemistry
So the man known by his mother by the name Icarus
Did justice to the irony set upon him in his birth
And spent his time investigating what before him laid abandoned

The hardened wax of a hope that another mortal had once melted
An experiment into the nature of humanity's mortal shell
In the hopes of getting more from what little is there
Reaching for an ideal born from a false sense of superiority

Before Icarus in the damp halls of this abandoned laboratory
Lay an array of test tubes and needles, unlabeled and threatening
His curiosity grew as he reached for the artifice of his downfall
A syringe, one of many, abandoned full of its purpose

As he grasped it and took it from its soft resting place
An alarm cried out in agony, resenting visitors in its quite abode
The once quiet halls filled with harrowing crimson light
And a voice called out from the depths, arising from slumber
Who goes there, it questioned as it slowly approached

Panicked and frightened, Icarus did not reply
For he worried how the owner of the voice would react
His worry was soon answered with the sound of a gun
As the scientist readied its lead to draw blood

Hastily Icarus grabbed the full syringe
As even in a time of crisis, curiosity got the best of him
As he turned heel and ran, hidden doors began to close
And a single shot rang out in the flickering light

Pain unfamiliar to him shot through his body
As he fell past the doors fatally wounded
He laid for a moment, as the doors closed behind
Questioning what he had done to deserve fate's cruel visage
The moment of his final breath lying now close at hand

In a moment that stretched as long as ancient history
He tried to accept death as a long awaited reprieve
But in his heart he could not, for he wanted to live
So he grasped the syringe in a hope slowly fading
And filled his veins with the glowing mystery liquid

For an instant his heart stopped and death took him
Then pain, worse than when he was struck by hot lead
Blossomed from his spine as if it was trying to escape

The pain spread across Icarus shuddering back
Remorseless and hungry eating all in its path
His skin felt like ice as it shrunk and contracted
And his bones where ceramic as they cracked and retracted

Soon he was as small as he was as a baby
His bones now hollow and his skin covered in feathers
His teeth turned to dust and his lips became a beak
His arms became wings and his feet turned to talons

Where Icarus once had lain writhing in pain
An horned owl now lay bewildered and afraid
Its wide eyes held intelligence betraying its origin
And its beak opened wide in a terrified screech
For cruel fate had made its final plan now apparent