03-18-2020, 01:47 AM
choke them on the ashes of the dreams they burned
He had hoped it was just a dream.
He had hoped that he would open his eyes to the dawn streaking across the sky and the light would chase away the darkness of that vivid nightmare, that the image of his mother dissolving into insects and the chorus of his family’s voices assaulting him would fade away with night.
He had hoped he would blink the sleep from his eyes and he would be in the forests of Taiga and that maybe in the coming days he would forget following his family desperately into the gaping mouth of that wretched beast – that just like all dreams, even awful ones, it would eventually fade away.
Instead, he was returned, and he was changed.
In some twisted way he had gotten his wish. The boy that had once been so plain, and so starkly different from the rest of his family was now born of the very shadows he had wished that he could control. Awakening from that nightmare he had shed his blue roan coat in favor of the cool, impersonal shadows, not so completely different from his father.
He is not made of the same shadows as his family, though.
He is something entirely different, and he is so different in so many ways that he cannot yet comprehend it.
He just knows that he is hungry, hungry for something that nothing tangible can sate. His chest and his gut feel empty, and he doesn’t what it will take to fill either of them.
Except there’s a part of him – something so small in the back of his mind, something buried in the far corners of his soul – that knows exactly what he needs, and it terrifies him. He craves things that he should not, he longs for things that aren’t real.
He doesn’t go back to Taiga, though he desperately wants to. He wants to make sure his family is okay, he wants to make sure that maybe it wasn’t all entirely real. But he is also afraid; afraid that maybe some of it was. That maybe they are alive but they hate him, or maybe they are dead and he is entirely alone.
And so he isolates himself, but not completely.
He should have gone further into the forest, he knows. Instead he lingers where the light still strains through the trees, where it sometimes cuts right through the shadows that he is made of. And from the dark he watches them, red eyes peering at them, and somewhere lost in the shifting shadows of his face, there is a sorrow that he is afraid he will never shed.
He had hoped that he would open his eyes to the dawn streaking across the sky and the light would chase away the darkness of that vivid nightmare, that the image of his mother dissolving into insects and the chorus of his family’s voices assaulting him would fade away with night.
He had hoped he would blink the sleep from his eyes and he would be in the forests of Taiga and that maybe in the coming days he would forget following his family desperately into the gaping mouth of that wretched beast – that just like all dreams, even awful ones, it would eventually fade away.
Instead, he was returned, and he was changed.
In some twisted way he had gotten his wish. The boy that had once been so plain, and so starkly different from the rest of his family was now born of the very shadows he had wished that he could control. Awakening from that nightmare he had shed his blue roan coat in favor of the cool, impersonal shadows, not so completely different from his father.
He is not made of the same shadows as his family, though.
He is something entirely different, and he is so different in so many ways that he cannot yet comprehend it.
He just knows that he is hungry, hungry for something that nothing tangible can sate. His chest and his gut feel empty, and he doesn’t what it will take to fill either of them.
Except there’s a part of him – something so small in the back of his mind, something buried in the far corners of his soul – that knows exactly what he needs, and it terrifies him. He craves things that he should not, he longs for things that aren’t real.
He doesn’t go back to Taiga, though he desperately wants to. He wants to make sure his family is okay, he wants to make sure that maybe it wasn’t all entirely real. But he is also afraid; afraid that maybe some of it was. That maybe they are alive but they hate him, or maybe they are dead and he is entirely alone.
And so he isolates himself, but not completely.
He should have gone further into the forest, he knows. Instead he lingers where the light still strains through the trees, where it sometimes cuts right through the shadows that he is made of. And from the dark he watches them, red eyes peering at them, and somewhere lost in the shifting shadows of his face, there is a sorrow that he is afraid he will never shed.
