[open] maybe love is a broken thing, any

[Selaphiel]

selaphiel

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes

The forest has been kind to him. 
It has offered him shelter when he most desperately needed it, a place to steal away to, a safe haven when he thought he would be found and discarded. 

But it has also exposed his failures and he tries not to think of them now as he wanders. 
(He does not dare return to Hyaline yet, his interaction with Mazikeen still echoing in each hemisphere of his brain.) 

He will go home eventually, he thinks, because he had scraped together enough courage to stand up to her even as her pelt had flared with anger and she had transformed herself into something with claws and teeth. He had been brave, even if he hadn’t felt it.

It is sadness, though, that keeps him in the forest now. Because he misses her fiercely, Maze. His friend. And he does not know how to face Hyaline with the acute understanding that those days are long gone now and no manner of wishing will bring her back.

He has always been gifted at drifting through the shadows, as he had been born in darkness, and he drifts now without much thought at all. Until the stench of death—so brutally overpowering that it makes his eyes water—hits him square in the chest. It is more potent than it has ever been and he sucks in a sharp, frantic breath.

He blinks into the gathered shadows, seeking out the source, and then he sees it. A mountain lion coiled on a tree branch overhead and he understands that it is he who will die. His heart stutters and then stops altogether as he catches the cat’s eye. For a moment, they merely look at each other. 

He could run, certainly, but the cat is faster. He could take to the skies, but he knows by the stench that there is no escape for him. So, he stands there and he stares and he swears the cat smiles as it leaps. It sinks its terrible claws into the meat of his shoulder and he recoils on instinct alone, though he knows it’s no use. And the teeth come next, catching him by the throat and he hits his knees as the blood springs forth, dripping warm down his neck.

And then the cat is gone but he can only lie there, choking on his labored breaths, bleeding. And he is surrounded by the horrible stench of death as he sinks beneath the surface. 

I just bite my tongue a bit harder