01-04-2016, 10:56 AM
There are things that are inevitable in this world.
Maybe he’d known, in some macabre way, when he first looked upon the woman. She hadn’t been a wolf, then, simply a warrior, all strength and steel and everything he was not. Maybe he’d looked in her eyes and see someone, a feral glint, and his body – his stupid, delicate body – had seen in it an undoing.
She’d turned canine, grown horns, become a queen. He’d stayed fragile, stayed transparent, and found someone he thought forever lost.
He should never have existed, not when he was bred from a woman dead and man who should have been dead long ago. He should never have existed with bones like glass, impossibly stacked to make a creature; paper wings that would be torn to shreds.
(He tried to fly, once.)
Things move too slow and too fast all at once, the world is a blur save for them.
He sees Adaline, falling, the crack of her bones a sound he’s heard in a dozen nightmares, now real.
And a wolf, no longer Tyrna, no longer a queen, but a feral creature made of bloodlust and uglier things.
It tells them to say goodbye but his goodbye is said in a snapping spine, legs crumbling.
For a moment, it doesn’t even hurt.
For a moment he just thinks this will be enough, and hopes to god Adaline will be left alone as the wolf takes its meal.
Blood is almost beautiful, in the moonlight, and in his throes he thinks I see why they liked it.
(He wanted to be a king, once.)
The vivisection takes too long and not long enough. He doesn’t say goodbye, by the time he realizes he should – realizes this is it, this is it, I’m dying - he tries to move his lips but only blood comes out, a trickle.
He tries to look at her, but his eyes no longer obey him.
He dies looking at the sky, at the stars, fulfills the ghastly prophecy written on his bones when he came into existence.
There are things that are inevitable in this world.
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark