02-24-2017, 11:09 PM
I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray
“This place needs to be fed, Famine.”
He smiles, but the humor eludes the boy.
He looks up at him from deep, sunken sockets, his thin, bony head tilted. It is a dumb, empty look – he does not suffer fools kindly. “Go away boy, if you have nothing to say.” He shifts his weight, stepping out from a shallow cave where they hide from the noontime sun.
Without speaking a word, Famine ambles by, his gate stiff and wobbly. Sickly and weak, but Sinew had promised: there is more to them; claims to have seen them as they are meant to be on the Mountain’s peaks. He had conceded that it was easier, in any case, to let the boy fade away on his own steam than to provoke the ire of his mother.
And yet, he perseveres; everyday, he grows thinner and more ghastly looking, and every morning, he wakes up and and shuffles through the wastelands like some delirious consumption patient broken free from a pest house. Amazing, in a cruel kind of way. His brother is a sturdier boy.
He watches, from the corner of a hard, black eye as the colt disappears entirely. “This place needs to be fed…” he mutters to himself, again, a thought that had been lodged into his head by an agitated dream – one he cannot remember, but for a few colours, like globs on a painter’s palette: red and blue; grey and green. Wet and glistening and then, strangely alive.
The gift-giver moves away from the sandstone hollow and out across the unbroken, dusty valley. Only a couple of years ago, this place would have repelled him. Perhaps, he might have brought a pretty thing here to see how the climate affected the decomposition
(– would they desicate and mummify?)
He prefered the rich moisture of the Forest. The earthy quality of their perfume once laid out on the ground. The way the leaching of fluids made an island of brown grass around them, and then…
—he could have lived happily as the Forest’s warden. It’s keeper and it’s sower.
He is a simple man.
But also an arrogant one.
Now he has a vast, feral wilderness of ugly, pocked rock to call home. (But, if it were fed.) The gift-giver comes to a stand by the river’s edge, stretching downward to slake his thirst from the turbid, cold water.
He could love her, he thinks. For now, he tries to enjoy the brokenness of her, but the novelty of Pangea’s birth is wearing thin. Now, she needs to be made theirs. She needs to be made his.
She needs to be made pretty.
POLLOCK
the gift giver
the gift giver
@[Deimos] I am so garbage right now. It'll probably get better.