11-14-2015, 06:57 PM
KINGSLAY
They break around him in different ways.
Some he breaks quickly – they combust, all smoke and flames, burn alive with bubbling veins from the inside out until everything that remains is ash and debris that the wind wipes cleanly away. They are the lucky ones. They are the ones that feel a little less. They are the ones that don’t realize what he is until they are alight. They hear the sounds of screaming but are ended before they realize that the sounds are from their own mouths.
Some he breaks slowly – he bleeds them out, breaks the bones in fragments only a little at a time. Some he will follow as they stagger on fractured limbs, sometimes for miles, close enough that they can feel his presence in their shadows and far enough that there is this sliver of hope that he can hold in the palm of his hands until he grows bored and snuffs the light in their eyes.
And some he breaks without realizing.
Some he breaks while he stands next to them, flesh to flesh, leaving them living, leaving them suffering in ways he cannot comprehend. If he were made for this it would be different. If he were made for this then the hurt in her eyes would be palpable, and maybe he would recoil, maybe his throat would ring with the same choking breaths, maybe he would stutter, maybe he would struggle to find the words that mean what he needs them to mean. If he were made for this it would be different, maybe.
“I love you, Kingslay,” she says, and he likes the words even if he doesn’t feel the gravity behind them.
If he were made for this he would stop her there, but he is alive in a foreign world that has a separate language and separate formalities without translation. “But you can’t tell me no,” he hears, and he remembers the sand in his eyes and all of the ways that he and Yael turned that sand and heat and made it glass. They left an explosion in the deserts that could not be erased that would remind them both until the end of time about the thing that they had both lost.
If he were made for this he would tell her: “Yes.”
But he isn’t.
Instead, a rustle near the shrouded, tangled roots of a nearby hazel tree leaves his head slanting away from her and toward the sound. And he isn’t looking because some small part of him recognizes a distant parallel that lingers intertwined in the roots of that old tree. He doesn’t watch because fragments in his cells gravitate towards the place that he was made, of magic, of lies. He looks because what she loves does not exist. He looks because he is made of tendon and sinew, of mass and muscle, hardwired by an instinct he should not possess – an instinct that even here, even now, even with the palpable hurt mingling in the constellations in her eyes, is bigger than she is.
Some he breaks quickly – they combust, all smoke and flames, burn alive with bubbling veins from the inside out until everything that remains is ash and debris that the wind wipes cleanly away. They are the lucky ones. They are the ones that feel a little less. They are the ones that don’t realize what he is until they are alight. They hear the sounds of screaming but are ended before they realize that the sounds are from their own mouths.
Some he breaks slowly – he bleeds them out, breaks the bones in fragments only a little at a time. Some he will follow as they stagger on fractured limbs, sometimes for miles, close enough that they can feel his presence in their shadows and far enough that there is this sliver of hope that he can hold in the palm of his hands until he grows bored and snuffs the light in their eyes.
And some he breaks without realizing.
Some he breaks while he stands next to them, flesh to flesh, leaving them living, leaving them suffering in ways he cannot comprehend. If he were made for this it would be different. If he were made for this then the hurt in her eyes would be palpable, and maybe he would recoil, maybe his throat would ring with the same choking breaths, maybe he would stutter, maybe he would struggle to find the words that mean what he needs them to mean. If he were made for this it would be different, maybe.
“I love you, Kingslay,” she says, and he likes the words even if he doesn’t feel the gravity behind them.
If he were made for this he would stop her there, but he is alive in a foreign world that has a separate language and separate formalities without translation. “But you can’t tell me no,” he hears, and he remembers the sand in his eyes and all of the ways that he and Yael turned that sand and heat and made it glass. They left an explosion in the deserts that could not be erased that would remind them both until the end of time about the thing that they had both lost.
If he were made for this he would tell her: “Yes.”
But he isn’t.
Instead, a rustle near the shrouded, tangled roots of a nearby hazel tree leaves his head slanting away from her and toward the sound. And he isn’t looking because some small part of him recognizes a distant parallel that lingers intertwined in the roots of that old tree. He doesn’t watch because fragments in his cells gravitate towards the place that he was made, of magic, of lies. He looks because what she loves does not exist. He looks because he is made of tendon and sinew, of mass and muscle, hardwired by an instinct he should not possess – an instinct that even here, even now, even with the palpable hurt mingling in the constellations in her eyes, is bigger than she is.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.