look up here now; i'm in heaven. i've got scars that can't be seen.

   Blindness. It is a word he aches for; a word he longs to know intimately. The sun is too bright, and the world is illuminated in a way that causes some deep part of his mind to fester as if it were a wound split open by infection and neglect. The agony is insufferable, and in the midst of the migraines that settle into the rivets of his cranium, he often longs for death - for an end to the insufferable misery of eyesight. 

   Though he had long known sight, his own had been filtered, and though many had seen his complex vision of fragmented pieces as a burden - as a flaw - he, himself, had never known anything but. Without his dense, compound eyes, he is exposed - and a thin layer of mere flesh could not shield him away enough from the prying light of day.

    Worse yet, he was only a piece of what he had once been. Once standing upon six legs (four forelegs and two hind), he now only had two in each quadrant, leaving him unbalanced and immeasurably uncomfortable. It did not allow for the same fluidity and grace, and so he often remained rooted, with hooves he was too unfamiliar with settled into the shifting soil beneath him. Along the hollow of his body, no longer did a pair of thin, fragile wings fluttered gently in the brisk breeze of an autumn afternoon - he was naked, laid bare with golden skin and plain, common features. 
   
   His own flesh did not feel as if it was his own, and there had been no reason for it - so many had been stripped away of their abilities, but not many had been stripped of their entire identity, left to wallow in the misery of adjustment as he was. A blistering rage had begun to consume him in the days, weeks and even months following the reckoning unleashed upon the unyielding lands, bristling across his handsome jawline and flawlessly sculpted body.

   He loathed being normal.
   He loathed being beautiful.

   A scent lingers in the frigid air, and the sun has begun to descend along the horizon, no longer filtering its disgusting light into the dense thicket in which he spent many hours and many moons. He emerges, hesitant but longing for the comfort of another - one who knew his anguish; who knew the discomfort of being within what felt like the skin of another for too long. His gait is uneasy, and his flesh tenses with each grazing touch of rough bark along his skin - he is still a stranger within this body; it is an intimacy he refuses to know or acknowledge.

   Gently, his whiskered lips touch along the flank of another - she is beautiful, with a gently sloping spine and dry, soft hair lining the length of her feminine curves. Yet she, too, is not herself - not the way he had come to know her; not the way he had once cradled close beneath moonlit skies. Her jawline is defined, and his lips soon find it, the warmth of his breath lingering on her skin. She is the only thing he knows as a comfort; the only one who knows of his anguish.

   "Karris," he breathes, but he says nothing else.   

elysium

this way or no way, i'll be free.