are you ready for a perfect storm? any. {M}

[Offspring]

something has been taken from deep inside of me;
the secret I've kept locked away no one can ever see.

 Life was ever changing – a winding road shrouded in thick, dense fog, unveiled only when the delicate hand of time permits. He had lived a thousand lifetimes, or so it felt to him – every heartbreak, every lingering moment of longing and loneliness etched into the solid mass of his muscled form; each puckered, pink scar a symbol of what he had seen. Of what he had done.

  Though many looked upon him as a pillar of strength, as an intimidating force, the scars he bore were not simply from the toil and drudgery of battle – but rather, many were a mark of the multitude of times his immortality had kept him tethered to his unfortunate existence.

  He had attempted to end his life more than once (admittedly, he had lost count long ago), and the memory of him falling away into the sea, being swept into the current, and pounded against the unforgiving coastline, strewn with jagged rocks stayed at the surface of his mind, even years later. Still, his immortality prevailed, and he eventually washed ashore, his body battered, bleeding – as broken as the spirit trapped inside of him.

  The deafening roar of the river is a reminder of his weaker moments, entrenched in a deeply-rooted depression, drowning in his own misery – and even now, as his steady gaze is settled upon the smooth boulders protruding from the powerful pull of the water, he does not feel too far from the frail, enervated man that now lay dormant – dead – inside of him.

  There is a light illuminating from the soft curves of her body, and his attention is yet again drawn away from the allure of the rushing river. Instead, he traces the solid line of her shoulder, and the thick curve of her neck, before searching the plane of her feminine features. Though the moon is warm and generous in its glow, the shadow of evenfall has cast a darker presence, and he can barely make out more than her bright, vivid eyes in the dark.

   A rumbling chuckle bubbles from somewhere within the hearth of his chest – humorless; with a tinge of bitterness. He had asked more questions of the river that she could likely fathom. Why, he thought (thinks, even now). And why was the most devastating, grievously unanswered question he had asked of the cruel hand he had been dealt.

  ”Perhaps not, but I have yet to find an answer in my many years, and I doubt that I ever will.”

  He does not linger on it, though – she does not need to hear of his wretched past, nor of his never-ending existential crisis. He pauses, then, searching the darkened plane of her rounded cheek in the dark, his browline creased in thought. ”Magic," he murmurs then, with no shadow of doubt in his tone. A statement; not a question. ”I sensed it long ago. You are a magician, then.” and there is something undiscernible laced in his tone. He had known too many magicians in his lifetime, and all but one had caused him grief and agony.

  Magic had festered in his blood, and left him burning hot, searing on the inside – with a flickering, scalding flame burning brightly in the hearth of his chest, aching to seep through his skin and set the deciduous forest into a scorching, sweltering inferno. Yet he, made of fire and brimstone, knew nothing of the power and prowess she inevitably had in her own blood.

 He only knew that if the fire alone could do to him what it had, he could only imagine how magic consumed her. He didn’t want to.

  ”My daughter,” he murmurs, but his blistering eyes of red are settled upon her, searching. ”our daughter – she has fire, as I do,” He pauses then, uncertain. ”but it is a part of her – it has never been a part of me. It was a gift,” a curse, he doesn’t say, as an acrid taste rises on his tongue. ”a gift that I have never been comfortable wielding. She does so with such ease, but I ..” he looks to the river again, with its unyielding waters. ”if I do, it will consume me. I can feel it, at times, becoming more a part of me with every passing day. It is not a part of me, the way it is a part of her. It is me.”

  And then, a shaky breath, his browline furrowed in thought.

  ”And if I let it in, if I let it take hold ..”

  A confession hanging on the edge of a precarious precipice, unspoken.

wounds so deep they never show; they never go away.
like moving pictures in my head, for years and years they've played.

Offspring