and she's buying her stairway to heaven; offspring

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

The dreary haze of morning dissipates by late afternoon, revealing a vivid sky and bright, unyielding sun. Its light bores into his skin, highlighting the puckered pink scars that litter the broad expanse of his blackened skin, blemished and flawed from time’s cruel hand. The frigid caress of an autumn wind entangles itself into his wild and unkempt mane, lifting it away from the dampness of his thick, sweat-slicked neck. He is captured; lost in a moment in time. The long, weary day will eventually fade into a dark, forsaken night, as the minutes will turn into hours and inevitably, the hours will turn into days. Eventually, it becomes a seamless consciousness of time – no day is any different than the one before it, and no sunrise any brighter than the last.

A weary sigh emerges from his tired lungs, his whiskered lips parted as his dark, blank stare of fire and brimstone lingers along the dwindling horizon. The once cobalt sky was beginning to give way to pale auburn and cerise as the sun fell beyond the mountain ridge; mingling where the stars soon would flicker and glow in its place. The path that lay before him is forgotten, his mind drawn into the deepest recesses of his memory, lingering on moments that had long since passed. The hardened line of his jaw tenses as a burning ferocity festers within the hearth of his chest.

While ice had, at one time, encased his heart, it now burned infinitely with a dancing ember; a blistering flame he could not extinguish. The warmth envelopes the entirety of his body, leaving a thin sheen of sweat trickling down along the terse muscle rolling beneath his marred flesh. Though it had once caused him strife, he now felt numb, ignoring the dull throbbing fire that burned so brightly within. He longed for the lost days of polarizing ice, and dense, frigid snow – he longed for the dead of winter, and for its inevitable bite.

He is torn out of his lamenting by a gentle but rigid voice, and his fiery gaze is soon set upon her. He follows the rounded curve of her cheek, his fierce eyes boring into hers, observing the green outer layer and the golden rim of her pupils. His voice, rugged and raw from disuse, rumbles from within, though his hardened expression remains stoic. ”It is, isn’t it? My daughter and I walked this path once,” he murmurs, his mind drifting to distant memories of Maribel, his sun and moon. ”a long time ago. My name is Offspring. What is yours?”

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

Offspring