10-23-2025, 10:34 PM
these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—
It has so fully infiltrated his senses that it has gone from something worth noticing to simply the way the world smells. For how many times could he punish himself for all the things he could not change before he grew numb to that, too?
He had not been able to save Mazikeen. He had not been able to save his mother. And now there have been so many countless others that perhaps he cannot make each of them as important as the last.
Which is all to say that he is tired, Selaphiel.
He is tired of the grief of it. The split-bone agony of knowing and never knowing.
See how it has taken its toll. See how there had once been hope in those eyes, see how it’s gone dark. He had been so alive with fear once that he couldn’t sit still with it. It had sent him to pacing, sticking to the shadows where perhaps they wouldn’t find him. Perhaps they wouldn’t send him away.
And he sticks to the shadows now, too, for the same reasons. Perhaps they won’t find him. Perhaps he won’t have to pretend. Perhaps he won’t have to dig up whatever energy he has left for a smile, a conversation, prolonged eye contact.
He has always been a solitary creature, Selaphiel, but this is a specific kind of estrangement. He has not seen his mother since he’d apologized for not being the one to protect her. He has seen Mazikeen’s daughter–his niece–more recently than he’s seen her. He hasn’t seen Este since before he’s seen any of the others.
Could he bear to look any of them in the face now?
Probably not.
So he loiters where perhaps they won’t find him. He lingers in the Ruins, as he has for years. Because it smells so strongly of death here that he has convinced himself that this is simply the reality of the world.
—I just bite my tongue a bit harder
