Reach out and touch faith

  An unsettling dread treads through his sinewy muscle as he touches gently to the moist soil beneath his weight, the scent of nauseating flora encompassing him and leaving him heady and irritable. Though tension is obvious across his stoic features, his mind remains a mystery, unseen to even the most skilled of prying and inquiring minds. He is a vulture personified, with empty, mirthless eyes, a terse jaw and taut muscles - each individually rippling beneath his sooty flesh, flexing the delicate bones of his heavy wings. 

   Gleaming beneath the pale sunlight, he draws the length of his bristling plumage up to shield him from its blinding light, but something draws him out of the shadows of the valley and into the light of day. Diplomacy leaves a foul taste in his mouth, but there is nothing he will not do for mother.

  A wicked smile tugs at the corners of his whiskered lips as something sinister begins to fester within his dark gaze; he watches quietly beneath the shade of an old willow as he draws his magnificent wings tightly along his slender sides. He cranes his neck gently to the left, savoring the caress of the draping branches as they pool across the nape of his neck, and he watches - waiting. It had been a tiring journey, and his weary bones were tired from tireless flight, but a renewed energy soon stirs as he watches the mesmerizing waves of amber rustle in the breeze.

  As the sun begins to set beyond the horizon, illuminating the sky in its vibrant shifts in color, he emerges from the shadows at last with a slow hissing sigh, his dark eyes peering across the individuals gathering across the emerald plain. Tilting his neck to the sky and expanding the length of his broad black wings, he cries out into the heavy air, bellowing for any and all to hear. Nameless King, he seethes within, searching still. Come to me.