Of everything that stands, the end - any

[Pollock]

She breaks his peace.

His basking in dusk – mauve and orange and gold-on-gold.

His thoughts – whispering softer here than they do below. Fingering through the leather book of all, searching for the pages that tell of the realignment.

His solitude – and she is not indigo, or star-armoured, or his disciple. She is not the strange, choking woman he had met and last feasted on. She is not the churn of earth and air, gyrating around him, red and white and neck-bitten.

He groans, opening his black-brown eyes and shifts, his single, limp wing dragging in the many-dust at his feet. His muscles creak, even with their grace returned, twisting his neck to one side and then the other, testing the familiar feel of his great, curved headgear.

No, she is not any of them – his things – so what the fuck does she want?

Maybe the air has thinned the quality of his discomposure, because when her pointed voice demands of him, his ears pin back towards his flank and he turns his body to face hers. But he does naught but consider her – pretty... insolent, perhaps – examining the hard lines of her face. Though, here, in this place She gave them, he could make art from her bones as easily as ever. Though he could, he does not, because he is weary from his journey up and up, and she is not a thing of his. His lip curls and twitches, parting and incredibly dry – “is there more than one reason to come back here?”

They see this too differently – she sees a harsh penance, exacted, and rightly so (and yet she had coveted his provisional wings before he had shed them, happily; she longs and she wants – different things, to be sure, gentler things, but <i>wants</i> them nonetheless); he sees a being scorned, trying desperately to halt the evolution of the monsters to which She gave breath. He has little sympathy.

She may be puzzled by his unbridled appetite – he is equally so, by the way she concedes to her own ruination. But then, he had learned to built as soon as he had dropped, gurgling and alone. He learned to discard home for what it is – fickle and unkind. He had learned to make himself from nothing but the broken thing by his side that his progenitors had managed to form in their copulations and the sweet plunge past the markers of sight. 

And he had learned to bury deep the vestiges of his former selves – so deep, that everytime he falls it is like the first time and so it feel manageable, until night comes and he is chased from his sleep by their ghouls.

(This, no doubt, stands second only to the wintry nights spent peach-skinned and flushed by northerly winds. But he remembers none of that. He buries it deep.)

“I am here for my things. Otherwise I would not scale this infernal mountain.” His jaw is tight, flexing and sore, “and, you have come back for <i>what</i> exactly? Just to prod the bereaved?” He <i>tsks</i> and shakes his head.

“Unkind.”

Unwise.