[open] tell me, are you still hurting?

[Selaphiel]

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

Fool.

Fool drags himself back into the center of a memory, Hyaline.

Fool sucks in a sharp, shuddering breath that reeks of Death.

Fool comes apart at the edges under a cover of darkness and thinks about the things that delivered him here. Remember me, she’d said and he had and then she had emerged in the Ruins of some great thing that had come before them and he had blinked at her and then what?

And then what, Selaphiel?

Fool could smell the death on her skin even still and he’d known, known, known, that his heart would never beat the right way. He had known, known, known that he would never be a brave thing. 

Coward.

Mazikeen had turned him champion and what had he done? Fled. Fled, fled, fled and hid, hid, hid. 

Coward come home to the memories. 

Coward makes himself just as scarce as he once had, not fearful now but something else entirely. (He has no fear of being cast out, not anymore. He has been away so long already. So much has changed since the Darkness. He has changed.)

And yet.

And yet, he is still a fool, a coward, such a lowly thing as he creeps through the slanted shadows and remembers. 

—I just bite my tongue a bit harder