here it comes with no warning; any

[magnus]

When she asks him if he had always been kind, he laughs ruefully and shakes his heavy-jawed head, the tendrils of his sun-bleached mane slapping against both sides of his neck. “I wish history could remember me in such a way.” Heaven knows he vied for such things, but it always seemed just inches out of his reach; he could try and try with all of his might, but at the end of every day, he was always bitterly reminded of where he lacked. The rough edges of his personality, the darkness that ran beneath it all.

“It is kind of you to say such things though.”

He did not dive into it just yet though; perhaps he would one day be comfortable enough to pull all of the skeletons out of his closet and let them dry in the day, but for now, he could not bear to face them. He could not bear to think of those he had failed, of the way he had crumpled beneath Atlas’ task. There were so many times he had turned the wrong way—so many times he had let things slip between his fingers.

“I have had a long life.” His mouth quirked in the corner and he tilted his head to the side to regard her. “If I am being honest, I have had long lives.” Magnus didn’t often think about the multiple lifetimes that he had lived or the death that had once claimed him, but that was one thing he did not need to keep from her today. “I would be lying if I said that I had remained stagnant throughout the years. I am a product of my upbringing, the decisions that I have made, and the people that I have met. They’ve all molded me.”

Perhaps for the better. On some mornings, looking out at the way Tephra folded out around him, the sun dappling the land, he liked to think so. He liked to think that it had all been for something—that he had not been given so many second chances for naught. Still, he brought his attention back to her and lightened the mood with a roguish smile. “I like to think I’m still the irrepressible jungle child beneath it all.” The same one who raced his mother’s jaguar. The one who tumbled through the mud. The one who raced beneath sun and vine and shadow. The one who wasn’t afraid of anyone. Anything.

Maybe he was still that stallion. Maybe he still could be.

out of the blue out into the loneliest place that you'll ever know
I carried the world just as far as I could but the damage had taken its toll