[open] show me how to lay my sword down; any

[auric]

sometimes I think about the ones that we’ve replaced
all the millions underneath the burnt and waste

He doesn’t know what to make of it when the pale wolf lays down in the grass across the way. It is foolishness, he thinks, regardless of her purpose. So he pins his ears and snaps his beak, letting those dark oily wings unfurl at his shoulders so that he might seem larger than the emaciated creature he has become. The feathers ruffle and the wings lift higher, fall wider, but, for reasons he cannot name, he does not chase her off this time.

It isn’t gratitude or debt, not kindness. He has none of those things left inside him anymore. He is more like his father than he realizes, and his father had been a man made soft only by the love of Auric’s mother. Love was dangerous like that. Auric could not imagine allowing anyone to have that kind of power over him, to cause that kind of change.

But it didn’t matter, because certainly no one would try, no one would stay.

He decides, after so many moments pass, that it is curiosity that tethers him here, and an unhealthy amount of stubborn arrogance. He could no sooner turn his back on her and leave than he could submit as she had - though he hardly trusted her submission. She was clearly well fed and well muscled, his opposite in this nightmarish new world.

So he feigns indifference, though his cold, dark eyes never wander far from her pale shape. He grooms his wings with his beak, resettling the feathers and laying them smooth again while she watches. He scratches a foreleg with his horns, and when she still does not leave he allows his attention to resettle on her, but his gaze is hard and unfriendly, his blue ears pinned back so far they half disappear into his mane.

and I get sad because, of course, we’ll be the same

Auric

all of history collapsing in its wake --

@[The Monsters] hello please PLEASE mess with his beak
@[Ferran]