He feels entirely lost in this new world, this broken place with rules he has not learned. It is always dark and always cold, and the woods are no longer safe to hide away in. They’re filled with monsters now that spill through the trees like they are made of fear and shadow, wearing as many faces as there had been stars in the sky. The kind faces are the worst ones though, because they make it impossible to know who to trust anymore. He’d heard of monsters wearing the faces of loved ones, of the dead, but he is glad not to have encountered those yet.
There is a path he’s made along the line between forest and meadow, a place just beside the river where he often wanders. It isn’t home, that title still belongs to Taiga, but it is hard not to wander when no place is any safer than the next. If anything he finds that wandering eases the nerves that have begun to build inside him, networks and pathways like electricity webbing beneath his skin. It is an unfamiliar feeling to worry like this, a foreign weight inside his chest that feels too heavy to carry and yet entirely too bonded to him to leave behind.
He passes beneath a low branch and has to crush down the fear that rises inside him, the scream that rushes to lips now pursed tightly shut, because the branch had felt like bones traced over the ridge of his back and even now his heart is a thing mangling itself against the curve of his chest. But when he turns to find his monster he finds only the bare, bent tree, only a mockery of a thing leaned down to reach him. There are no teeth, no claws, no wound except the one festering inside his chest.
His gold and white wings pull in tighter to his sides, which is perhaps the only good to have come from this strange new normal - a strength in those muscles that had never been there before. They rarely ever dragged now, though the longest feathers only just barely cleared the ground, and he’d still had no luck with actual flight. But it was still nice to pull them close like a shield, to let the vastness of them hide him from the ever night.
He feels another touch along his flank, something sharp that drags over his skin, and though he flinches and withdraws further into the tangle of his large feather wings, he knows better than to startle this time. But a growl follows, something deep and guttural, and when he stumbles around to find the reaching fingers of a tree there is only a snarling, eyeless beast swinging it’s open-mouthed head at him.
harbinger
the current is strong, my arms are weak
but you are the branch within my reach
@[The Monsters] please mess with his shadow camouflage
@[insane]