Illum thinks it is possible that as a boy he must have looked up into the velvet dark of a star strewn sky and felt that tug of wonder inside his chest, the romance of so much unknown, of an entire universe always there and always just out of reach. He has seen that look in the faces of strangers when their gaze first alights on him, a subtle widening of eyes that go soft and liquid dark, a yearning for the stars that drift like glittering dust across the expanse of skin that is cold and dark and only just past the threshold of tangible, silk that does not give beneath curious touch.

He would be the perfect predator in this body - and perhaps he is, perhaps he has been. He thinks of a rose gold girl who had looked at him with so much trust, so much faith, like he was something she had spent a lifetime believing in. A dream instead of a nightmare, a friend instead of a ghost. Remembering, he thinks that she had considered him something beautiful, but now in her absence he wonders if she were too clever to believe in such misleading appearances.

Maybe it had been him that believed in her.
He still wishes he had kept her.

But it seems that none of them see beyond the stars, beyond the twinkling ethereal lights that lance the true desolation of his night. A time of endless shadow, endless dark, where fear takes root inside sleeping minds, planted like a seed that grows into a festering wound. He is that desolation, that festering rot. He is not the stars, not the light, but the cold dark that waits between them.

He stands alone on such a night - it is the only time he ventures out now, the day is too bright, too wrong - and if not for the haunting of stars that wander in irregular revolutions around the gravity of his night, he might be invisible. His wings are tucked against his body in such a way that the scar of white and gold at the base of one wing is nearly invisible. He is sure he had not meant to come this far, not further than the borders of home, but he knows what he will not face, what he will not admit even to himself. That there are too many ghosts in Taiga now, too many memories he would untether and set free if he could.

(He would not.)

The emptiness of space lives inside the hollow dark of his chest, and when his eyes lift to look around him they are a cold, mercurial silver instead of the wam, dusky gold. If there had been any goodness rediscovered in him, it has since come unhinged, hanging on by threads that fray and unravel - and he thinks, looking around again with a face that is ethereally dark and beautiful, star strewn and indistinct at impossibly black edges, that it is not a bad thing to be a perfect predator.