01-24-2018, 12:52 PM
Khaedrik has nightmares.
He dreams of terrible things - figures in the dark, monsters and devils reaching for him with slender, clawed fingers. His mind is a freight train of sacrilege and obscurity.
But nightmare turns to reality and reality to nightmare.
Khaedrik, with the coat of dying grass and a broomstick plume of a tail - too young still to know much of anything - but this he knows; he is cursed and his mother is afraid of him.
He is not like other children, malleable and with an insatiable appetite for exploring the world, with exclamations of fun and play hanging from their lips.
Khaedrik is of silence and shadows and he does most certainly not want to explore anything. Not when there are monsters out there, with slathering jaws and moon-bright eyes, lurking in the shadows.
Khaedrik - a lanky fierce thing, with a little skinny body and jutting ribs and a pinched, malnourished looks. His eyes are dark, dark, dark -- in an average, but intelligent face. Intelligent? No, brilliant. All the time, every day, every little step he takes he is calculating, thinking, experimenting. All he wants to do is know know know -- everything, so that he might know nothing. So that it all can fit. So that he can close his black pretty eyes and sleep, really sleep. Surrender to that sucking, black, dreamless oblivion and when he wakes up he´ll be different. Everything will be different.
Despite his aversion to exploring, he is out today, having left his mothers side with some half-hearted mumbled excuse of playing or finding new friends she only half believed but didn't question for relief of getting rid of him.
He sticks to the safety of the riverbed - where there are no shadows save the one tethered to his own small frame. This place makes him cringe - the quaint little flowers, perfect old trees, generous swell of grass. It reminds him too much of his own fanciful little family and their happily ever afters. Khaedrik is no creature of pretty little fairy tales - no matter how much he wished he was. His own shadow turns its small head towards him - and two gleaming, yellow eyes remind him just how different he really is.
He shudders.