11-15-2016, 02:38 AM
One day, Bruise will listen with eager ears.
He well bend a knee before his father, the gift giver and Father of Fear; he will quiet his mind and slow his pulse and dip his thoughts to darker, deeper things. He will steer his ship toward the silent pools of his father’s nightmares where the Fear had been born, released, given. He will sit in awe at that which his father had accomplished, what he had created.
(He would burn at the revelation of his mother—at the power she wielded over them, the prison she represented. She would need to die, eventually.)
But today was not that day. He knew it as well as Pollock. He did not ask for such tales.
Instead he just dipped his slender, coltish head, ever the dutiful son. He was pleased to have given this back to his father, he was pleased to witness the transformation before him. The same curved horns that adorned his own skull set upon his father’s head like a crown. The same split in the hooves. But there were other gifts—there was more. Invisibility that cloaked his father from sight for one breath and then another. A singular wing that draped from his shoulder, broken and magnificent in its weight.
When his father turned to look toward the barren wasteland, grey and empty, for the first time, Bruise did not see it as a graveyard. He did not despise it for its open, yawning chasm; he did not loathe the whistle of wind as it made its way through the canyons. Instead, he saw it for the possibility. He saw it as a blank canvas and his father as the ultimate artist. They would paint their reality over it, would spread the Fear from their vantage point until it was splashed upon the landscape like the constellations themselves.
He stepped forward to his father’s side and nodded.
“We should begin.”
Bruise
head like a hole; as black as your soul.