Cultivation of a Phoenix

I was falling, the strength leaving my body.  I was familiar with falling, though I usually controlled how I fell.  My wings were seizing up, tightening close around my body.  The wounds on my body were small, but bleeding heavily.  I could feel the projectiles that hit me lodge in my muscles or against my bones.  And so after falling for an eternity, but what I knew to be only moments I crashed into the ground...  I, who was a proclaimed king of the sky, was felled to the ground by man for my breed was rare and dying out of this world.  There on the ground I died.  I followed my body in the after-life for some time to see my body stuffed and put in a majestic pose upon a mantle in some old man's hall.  Seeing what had been done to my body I left it and passed on into the darkness of the void.