06-07-2019, 03:54 PM
and at once i knew
i was not magnificent
Sometimes the breath catches.
Sometimes the cage of his ribs aches and his head swims, weak and weary.
For how long has he traveled? How far has he gone?
What does he have to show for it?
He cannot remember now how he felt when the nerves hummed and the blood pulse and he learned that he would live forever. But there are gone now, all of them, everyone he ever loved. And he has walked until his knees ached, gnashed his teeth on rocks until his mouth bled. He has walked until there was nowhere left to go but home.
He speaks their names sometimes. Plumeria, he murmurs, just for the taste of it. Charity. Just to remember that he lived once. Kensley and Kennice and Vaticana. He has had plenty of time to think about them all. They are precious, stolen moments, when he does not have to feel alone.
But he is alone. Dreadfully. Irreparably.
He stands now at the edge of someplace he doesn’t recognize. Is it fate that has delivered him here or merely habit? It is not the home he remembers and his beloved Tundra is gone. But there is a pulse in the earth that feels familiar.
There is some roucous stirring in his pulse as he blinks into the light streaming through the canopy of trees. There is no one left to remember him, the once-king, the ice-king, so he hangs his head and contents himself for the moment with simply imagining all of them here.
Perhaps he’ll make his way down to the beach later, as if he might find them there, preserved in some way. As if they exist anywhere other than in the cavern of his mind. For now, he is here and they are not and his permanence in a world that is otherwise temporary puts a vicious ache in his heart.
son of caden & fray
once-king of the hidden tundra