Born of Aether

The moans of the wounded and the dying filled the narrow valley. The full moon, big and bright and already high in the sky, cast its cold blue light over the battle scene. Long thin shadows from arrows and spears embedded in the earth and in flesh slanted across grass, mud, and pools of blood. Crows gathered in the branches of nearby trees, their throaty screams alerting scavengers from miles around. The dark shape of a small black fox darted from the trees to skirt the perimeter of the battlefield. Sniffing the air and stopping to listen, she salivated at the smell of blood still pumping from the veins of the dying. A dying warrior lay face up to the ghostly moon. Shallow breaths lifted his armored chest with the quiet creak of leather and clink of chainmail. A dark pool gathered as his life poured from his body and soaked into the earth.
The fox approached on silent paws, head low and ears forward. As a long and final sigh escaped the samurai, she tasted the vitamin-rich liquid, the death of one passing on life to another in a cycle as old as the earth itself.
When the fox had raised eight litters, and seen the snows go and the rains come a dozen times, she crawled into a hollow beneath a juniper. The memory of that battlefield faded from her fox mind, a nearly insignificant event in her short life. There was room only for the present moment, for the death stealing into her bones and making her shiver. 
She curled her thick tail over her paws and in front of her nose. She watched the light of another full moon through the thick needles of the bush as her breathing grew shallow and short. She knew what was coming, and she faced it alone, unafraid, and without self-pity. She was tired. She let out a long sigh and her ribs sank as she surrendered. 
On any normal day with any normal fox, those ribs would not rise again. But life gives way to life, and as the earthly fox dies, the spirit of the samurai warrior awakens, and the ribs do rise again.