OAKS

Of loneliness and death alike, Oaks is well aware. When one’s whole life, from the first breath, has been plagued by loss and expiry, subsequent isolation seems only wise.

From his earliest memory, he had seen too much loss for his feeble heart to bear. Born amid a world already befouled by plague, his unseen (and unruly) powers had seen fit to paint his life in gray shades and black veils. His own mother could not bear him, nor his earliest playmates. Not even the local flora could withstand the gentle reaper.

Therein lay the loneliness.

He cannot say he regrets any of it, the time spent sequestered and apart. The guilt outweighs any pity he might have borne himself.

In that aspect, it seems, they are rather alike, the blanketed scourge and the frosted angel. Appearances alone may not speak it, but the irony would not be lost on Oaks if he were ever to know. They are both quite put-upon, in their own (very similar) respects. He has already come across a nightmarish stranger, somehow full of life despite his tattered, shattered appearance; at the same time, he had met a nearly ethereal mare whose silent kindness had impressed upon him some strength to be found in the world.

And now, as he continues to wander while emboldened by these recent encounters, he is met with another intriguing soul. This much he can tell from outward appearances, through Selaphiel’s downcast gaze and general aura of solemnity. Though Oaks lacks most of the more common social skills, reading another’s body language is a natural enough skill even for one so oblivious as him.

The fractured white stallion seems radiant in the darkness of the trees, but his grief is even more prominent than his coat. For all his usual reservations, Oaks cannot fight the inclination to approach him, though he keeps a slight distance between them. Not near enough to cause discomfort (he hopes) but not far enough so that he must raise his voice when he speaks.

“Does it hurt?” he asks simply. Although he glances at the pale blue cracks trailing like broken bolts across the other’s body, he does not specify the true object of his question. Even he is not quite sure what he's asking.

He waits, ghostly wings held loose as if to suggest empathy.

OAKS

There has been a suffocation that defines much of his lonesome life.

Watching the first feeble life fade from the world before him had been damaging enough. He’d been just a boy barely steady on his feet and the realization of death’s permanence had horrified him.

Then it happened again, just as rapidly and yet so pitiably overlooked by anyone other than himself. He had wept that time.

By his third encounter, the mere dread had settled in and he had watched almost unfazed, steeling himself against the surge of emotion with a slow-developing ease.

All these years later, years spent in solitude with death as his only companion extinguishing the lives of small wildlife and flora, it has not gotten any easier to bear. Easier to expect, easier to predict, but no easier to accept. He wears it like a noose round his throat, cinched tight enough to gag him and leave him gasping, always pulling him in unwanted directions but never fully smothering him.

That would've been too easy.

That similar sadness, a familiar and identifiable thing, appears to hold away over his pale counterpart now. Selaphiel affirms his question with much the same weight as Oaks might have expected. He smiles in an almost tragic way and Oaks nods, a small gesture of his darkened head.

A slight twitch ticks the corner of his mouth when the other continues – it all hurts, doesn't it? – and Oaks mimics the angel in taking a moment to consider the question.

“In different ways, perhaps,” he replies eventually. If he truly understood their similarities as well as their differences – one, the mournful onlooker, unable to intervene; the other, an unwilling reaper –  he might better grasp the precision of his words. “It has become a comfortable pain.” Surely Selaphiel would understand that this ‘comfort’ is not a pleasant sort. It is phobic and distressful.

“Do you suppose there is any remedy?” His wings waver and shift a bit, their ghostly aura growing dark as he staves off the ache of memory, the ache he feels each time he watches death claim yet another life. Despite the boyish hope that dares to tinge his words, he is not expectant of a positive answer.