You were automatic, as hollow as the 'o' in God.

The summer sun is blinding, lighting a fire to the world around me. Rays of sunshine bounce endlessly off the drinking pool, creating sparkles where the water ripples from each splash of dry lips disrupting its surface. I am silent as a take in the sheer beauty of it, such a pretty thing in a world less than ideal because there are still monsters lurking in the heart of it. There is no end to them and their kind, they breed violence and evil and I am left to wonder what my part in all of it is.

I don’t fit in and yet I can not leave. Will not.

Rhae still suffers the wasteland as I do and until she can take more I will linger though truthfully I often seek the common lands. I must find succor, I will take in the weak and keep my eye trained for my family should they ever leave the mountainside. This I must do and so as much as I loathe it I leave her alone to conquer the beasts alone all too often.

She must be so ashamed of me.

It is difficult to care for others wholly when you have hardened your heart to stone, a coping mechanism, a defense. I can not afford to break and thus my attachments should be held at arms length, leaving both of us longing and yet it has come to be the way I know.

Loving and caring too hard got you hurt. The inevitable truth was that I was merely a shield to the darkness, nothing more, they would still press their poison upon those which were susceptible. I could stand in their way for only so long, I could suffer only so many injuries before I myself would be of no use to anyone. I managed to keep them from a small clearing in the dead wood that I had taken as my own, it was as much as I could hope to hold against so many.

For now I enjoy the small gift of the sun on my bruised face, warming a scabbed wound but the burning tingle I felt as the heat touched it was insignificant. There would be worse to come.

{TIOGA}

khaos x wichita