if the heavens ever did speak; saedis

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife A long time ago, Sleaze was taught to pray. The prayers were a jumble of things, an amalgam of what his father recalled from his mythos, but this was all Sleaze knew, and so he never questioned it. He lived in the meadow with his father, repeating the prayers. He knelt until his knees were worn bare. And sometimes his father would lay his head across Sleaze’s back and sigh, and he never questioned this. For a long time, he knew no one other than his father. He knew nothing but what he was told. Sleaze was, truth be told, a very stupid boy. But then his father had left, quite unexpectedly, and with no reason given; and Sleaze, alone, had had to set off. He’d come to Beqanna, a throng of other horses and worlds, met creatures much more powerful than he. He met terrible creatures, and, at times, became a terrible thing himself. Eventually, he stopped praying. The things he saw stripped belief from him. Sleaze is long-grown now, and a much different boy than the one who had knelt in the meadow. He even looks different – no longer black, like his father, but instead a dark purple (though he looks black in the dark, it’s only when light hits that such color is revealed). He bears scars, some physical, some mental. He bears and ability, one he has mostly quieted, to creep into others minds. (He hates this. He has mostly smothered it. He has too many terrible thoughts of his own to want to know anyone else in that awful, intimate way.) He is still a rather stupid boy. He walks alone. He is uneasy, as he often is, because unease is his natural state (too many has he been ambushed, captured, drug into terrible quests). In the shadowy dusk, he looks black. He sees the woman, an ethereal white, glowing, and he tenses. He wonders if she is some mythic creature come to steal him to another quest. But she looks at him with only mild curiosity, and says nothing, and his anxiety quells for a moment. She is just a regular horse. Like him. Ships passing in the night. But he slows. He looks at her again. How she glows! “Good evening,” he says. He speaks soft enough that she could pretend to ignore it. He wonders if he’s been a fool to even speak at all. sleaze cancer x garbage