The silence was deafening.

   It reminded him of the woodland he had once called his own; of the great and open valley that he had first seen upon coming into the world – his damp body encased in a thin sheath; afterbirth clutching to the underside of his belly as his dark skin lay breathing heavily along the soft and supple vegetation beneath him. It reminded him of the mother that had doted upon him, of the father that had breathed his gentle words of encouragement (laced with danger; Eight was a force to be reckoned with and he revered him so). Alas, what he had once known no longer was, and he had drifted quietly through the forest for many more years than he cared to admit, longing for the days long gone and buried at the bottom of the sea.

   Ah – there was a change! A subtle one, but one that brought him from the darkest recesses of the woodland, his gaze dark and searching the unseen boundary line of what he had come to know as the Taiga. He did not care much for politics, not after the kingdoms of old had fallen – he might have ruled one day, a dark Prince made into a darker King, with a fierceness burning inside of his churning, beating heart, but it had been taken from him, and so he chose instead to simply be.

  But the change, it has called to him, beckoned him from the shadows, and he cannot suppress the simper tugging at the corner of his mouth. His hefty stride carries him deliberately over the border so that he may take in the thick bramble surrounding the territory, admiring the sharp thorns and wayward leaves. He can feel the magic emanating from it, and it stirs a roiling excitement he had not felt in so long. Something has changed, and he longs to know it for what it is.

   Loudly, his voice echoes through the dense forest, echoing off of the vegetation, calling to the one that called Taiga his own.

Underwood