I had a dream that we were dead
and we pretended that we still lived
He is not a monster, no matter what stories his skin tells. He is more than appearance, more than an undead thing with protruding bones and decaying flesh and foggy eyes. The world might define him one way, but he refuses to do so. Perhaps it is naïve – childish and foolish in the way that youth so often are – but he cannot seem to help himself.
He would not let the world tell him who he must be.
She is something else entirely. Something he cannot quite name, like his tongue is catching, thick and uncomfortable, on the words. He is by turns curious and fearful, unable to resist the lure of her words, yet inexplicably alarmed by import of her brightly gleaming eyes, of her wide smile strangely devoid of true emotion. His pale, white-blue eyes flick warily towards the creature of bone that still lingers by her side.
The similarities are striking, but the differences even more so. He has flesh still stretched taut over his bones, blood that pumps sluggishly (but somehow effectively) through his rail-thin frame. He owns his own mind, his own will. He had been born, not made (even if that birth had been ghastly in its own right).
”Really?” The words leave his lips before thought can stop them. It is less a question of awe and far more one of curious horror. Isn’t that enough? he thinks.
Of course, he has so little room to judge. Not he, the one cloaked by death, the one who heals and the one who bends light. But his thoughts hold little room for rationality right now.
Her next words draw him in, reluctant, hesitant, but still he cannot seem resist. His interest is piqued, the word slipping from his lips on a breath of air before he can reconsider the consequences. ”Ok.”
Jinn
undead son of Tiphon and Elysteria
