all i want is to flip a switch
before something breaks that cannot be fixed
before something breaks that cannot be fixed
He wakes to the sound of subdued thunder, to the splash of rain in the trees overhead just seconds before the drops slip through and land on his skin. The rain is cold, but isn’t colder than the frost that covers his body, so when the raindrops land they leave tear-like smudges of shadow carved out of the gauzy silver. There is no emotion in his eyes as he watches the frost disappear, nothing even when lightning flashes and the world is oddly aglow for a moment, once-familiar silhouettes capturing his attention. It is the anatomy of a world recently forgotten in so many days of dark - tall trees dressed in pine needles, long empty of the birds that left to find safer places to live. Places, he assumes, where the monsters cannot go.
Illum eases forward through the trees, and though he would never admit it, he is curious to see these flashes of home while the storm battles the dark. Even the beasts seem to shelter from the violence, and though he would have expected them to be drawn to it, he can only guess that it is the sudden slashes of burning bright light that forces them into darker places. Still, it is reflex now to draw his shadows up along his skin, hardening them across his body like armor as he steps out into the evernight beneath the thickest trees.
He feels suddenly restless, suddenly as agitated as the sky - and the shadows that leap across his path (shadows he cannot murder because they belong to the trees and to himself, thrown there by lightning) are nothing he can take this sleeping fury out on. His piebald wings unfurl, and he snaps them hard to set loose the water beading along the feathers though the gesture is more out of frustration than anything else. Except in doing so he is rewarded by a sharp ache of pain in one of the larger wing joints, an injury he had let Ryatah believe had been healed completely. He lied of course, he is a liar, but it was out of a nauseating fear that she would reduce herself to nothing in her attempts to rebuild him.
He would much rather keep the pain.
Keep the reminder of her, too.
But her name is like a burr sitting on his tongue now, stuck and struck, and he can neither swallow away the thought of her nor spit it back out.
Ryatah.
That is all it takes to set him back into motion, carving a path through the dark from the forests of Taiga to the low mountains of Hyaline. But he is impatient, and he is furious, he is come undone like the sky in her rapid flashes of stormlight. So he launches himself from a craggy peak, flying low enough that he can hear the harried whispering of the leaves in the treetops beneath him. Hyaline is entirely unfamiliar to him though, and it is no less confusing in these flashes of light and the sudden, crashing dark that follows, but he flies until by some miracle he spots a soft, familiar glow beneath him. Her healing magic inside him, maybe, recognizing home.
He pulls the dark in around him more tightly, disappearing entirely as another flash illuminates a place for him to land - and even when all four hooves are in the grass again, he does not send the dark away. She is just there through the trees, white and haloed, glowing faintly like a beacon in all this dark misery. The gold of his eyes shift from dark to molten, and tendrils of shadow wind like vines over the ground until they are close enough to climb her legs. He is close now too, and he cannot tell if she has heard him yet or if the storm has masked the sound of him.
“Angel,” he says, and though the words themselves might sound vaguely threatening, there is no malice in those golden eyes should she turn to search them, “shouldn’t you know better? There are all kinds of things hiding in the dark now.” He, of course, being the worst. The distance between them evaporates as he steps closer, the vines of shadow climbing gently up her legs, up her neck to brush against the soft place at her throat where he can remember how her pulse had shuddered in different times. But she isn’t his, and this is not why he’s come. He exhales and there is a ripple of motion along his jaw when he clenches his teeth to keep from reaching out to breath in the scent of wisteria he knows clings to her hair from too much time under these trees. “You’re like a beacon to the dark, angel.”
Illum eases forward through the trees, and though he would never admit it, he is curious to see these flashes of home while the storm battles the dark. Even the beasts seem to shelter from the violence, and though he would have expected them to be drawn to it, he can only guess that it is the sudden slashes of burning bright light that forces them into darker places. Still, it is reflex now to draw his shadows up along his skin, hardening them across his body like armor as he steps out into the evernight beneath the thickest trees.
He feels suddenly restless, suddenly as agitated as the sky - and the shadows that leap across his path (shadows he cannot murder because they belong to the trees and to himself, thrown there by lightning) are nothing he can take this sleeping fury out on. His piebald wings unfurl, and he snaps them hard to set loose the water beading along the feathers though the gesture is more out of frustration than anything else. Except in doing so he is rewarded by a sharp ache of pain in one of the larger wing joints, an injury he had let Ryatah believe had been healed completely. He lied of course, he is a liar, but it was out of a nauseating fear that she would reduce herself to nothing in her attempts to rebuild him.
He would much rather keep the pain.
Keep the reminder of her, too.
But her name is like a burr sitting on his tongue now, stuck and struck, and he can neither swallow away the thought of her nor spit it back out.
Ryatah.
That is all it takes to set him back into motion, carving a path through the dark from the forests of Taiga to the low mountains of Hyaline. But he is impatient, and he is furious, he is come undone like the sky in her rapid flashes of stormlight. So he launches himself from a craggy peak, flying low enough that he can hear the harried whispering of the leaves in the treetops beneath him. Hyaline is entirely unfamiliar to him though, and it is no less confusing in these flashes of light and the sudden, crashing dark that follows, but he flies until by some miracle he spots a soft, familiar glow beneath him. Her healing magic inside him, maybe, recognizing home.
He pulls the dark in around him more tightly, disappearing entirely as another flash illuminates a place for him to land - and even when all four hooves are in the grass again, he does not send the dark away. She is just there through the trees, white and haloed, glowing faintly like a beacon in all this dark misery. The gold of his eyes shift from dark to molten, and tendrils of shadow wind like vines over the ground until they are close enough to climb her legs. He is close now too, and he cannot tell if she has heard him yet or if the storm has masked the sound of him.
“Angel,” he says, and though the words themselves might sound vaguely threatening, there is no malice in those golden eyes should she turn to search them, “shouldn’t you know better? There are all kinds of things hiding in the dark now.” He, of course, being the worst. The distance between them evaporates as he steps closer, the vines of shadow climbing gently up her legs, up her neck to brush against the soft place at her throat where he can remember how her pulse had shuddered in different times. But she isn’t his, and this is not why he’s come. He exhales and there is a ripple of motion along his jaw when he clenches his teeth to keep from reaching out to breath in the scent of wisteria he knows clings to her hair from too much time under these trees. “You’re like a beacon to the dark, angel.”
Illum
@[Ryatah]