Of everything that stands, the end - any

[Pollock]

<font style="font-size:14px;">He returns like a man on pilgrimage. Tight-chested, froth slicking his golden coat under the heat of the sun and climb – each step is a mile long and heavy. Somewhere along the way he sheds those great, shining wings. A long time ago, they were all he would have needed to feel <i>complete</i>. But these? Her paltry offerings are only weighty vestiges of that repealed magic (magic She had <i>no</i> right to take from his chest – but like a thief, She plundered and ruined); unfit replacements for all that he has lost – a poor gift, indeed. 

When She had made him, She had made him broken. Now She makes him bear the knowledge of that brokenness heavy on his shoulders, like unwanted, clinging visitors.

(They are so beautiful and so clean. He unfurls them and examines the primaries and secondaries – cream coloured and glossy – and they remind him of… no, that must be killed dead, too. Twice over, it would seem.) 

He misses his crown and robe, slung from his left shoulder. Once, it had been Shame to him… not a vestment of dirt and broken bones, but a boulder fastened by thick chains. Until the heft of his own self-contempt was eaten – feasted on, really, like sweet meat and wine – by the godliness that took root. It had been none of her handiwork. (He had fallen and fought in the polar universe. <i>He</i> had reached for it, shaky but sure... no. No, She had no right, at all.) He had been everything – engineer, architect and artist. He had made something fearsome and mighty, a great gothic cathedral, from the nothing but muck and misgivings and a whore’s unloving hips.

Then, the air cools and it becomes easier, he searches for the meridian hungrily...

—he breaches the surfaces and gulps greedy breaths.

—his feet split, nimble and flexible, and his muscles tauten and expand.

—his horns unwind from his head, curling backwards.

(He can hear the faint jingle of bells in the distance, crossing the spires of repurposed Beqanna, coming from within and outside and far-far-away – Her magic is not the only one that lives here, it seems.) The day is paling to dusk when he finds the high-most place he can reach – thin air and craggy, but clear and from all sides, he can see the broken and reset land, stretching on forever in one direction, and in the other, until shore meets uncertain sea.

He breaths in magic and lost things, and grows still and sober.

(That beast anger, muzzled but rumbling from it's cave.)</font>

ooc note - Pollock has wings for now!