The swan has long carried the soul’s own myth the bird that sings only once, at the moment of death, its ugliness resolved into beauty right as it ends. Here that body is scaled instead of feathered from throat to breast, marked in the pattern of a fish and the fish is not a neutral choice. Ichthys, the fish, was the secret sign of the earliest Christians, a body hidden in plain sight, carrying faith the way scales carry water without absorbing it. Wings lift the creature upward ascension, the soul’s proper direction while the scales keep it tethered to something older and more hidden, the way faith is carried quietly inside a body built for flight.