Here the dark has a heartbeat all its own.
And?

And sometimes Bael thinks he must not have one at all with how impossibly quiet it can get, how supernaturally still he can be. It had even unnerved his mother when he’d emerged, shaking, from her cold, cold womb and then gone so horribly still as soon as he’d hit the ice. (And the ice had crackled around him, stretching its terrible fingers to curl first around the ankles and then the knees and his mother had almost thought to let it take him because he was an ugly thing, Bael, and perhaps he’d be better off in whatever hell had spit him out.)

But she had touched him, perhaps to warm him. Alas, a winter-thing is not meant to warm and so the child had been cold from his conception and it showed in the cracked, brittle skin. She touched him and both of them froze.

He wanders now, Bael, and he understands that he is a dark thing. He’d known it in the way his mother had turned away from him, how she’d bound him in place with fingers of ice so that he could not follow her, clacking that terrible beak that drew blood each time he’d tried to drink. She’d left him to suffer. But you cannot blame a cold thing for being cold. A winter-thing is not meant to warm.

He wanders now, Bael, and he understands that he is a wrong thing. 

He is young still, certainly, but he has lost the lankiness of youth. He is no longer awkward, coltish, stumbling. He is strong, has always been strong, his mother had known it, too. (Had she feared him? Had she known when she birthed him that he was a dark thing. Yes, she must have known.) Freakish, perhaps, Bael.

He is not the only strange thing. (By Beqanna’s standards, he’s hardly strange at all.) He happens upon her by accident, there by the river. And for a moment he merely watches as she throws her own light through the darkness. He tilts his horned head, clacks that awful beak, edges closer and stops. They are both still.

“Are you real?” he asks, though the words comes out strange with the way the beak mangles them, stilts them, makes them hard-edged and demanding. 

What a shame that he cannot smirk in turn.
How devilish the smirk would be!

Instead, he merely clacks that beak. Had he any feathers he might have preened them with the way she looks at him, though he clocks no admiration in her gaze. (And what would he have done with it if he had? What would it have meant?) He clacks that beak while she considers that he’d look better without it and had he been privy to her thoughts, he could have told her that he’d ached so desperately for a mouth once that the wish alone had nearly cannibalized him. 

He might have asked her if she knew what it was like to starve.

But she asks if any of them are real and he exhales sharply. (A laugh, perhaps. If he’d known what it meant to laugh. If he’d known that it was meant to be a thing of joy and not whatever dark shape it takes in his chest.) 

(What a concept! To think that maybe they are all living in a dream. No, if it were a dream, he would not have known what it meant to be ravaged by hunger. The pain of it would not have made a permanent home out of the valleys between his ribs.) She looks away from him then, as if she might find the answer in the sky. Or perhaps she has simply grown bored with the question already.

He watches, intrigued. Intrigued to think that she might wear her disdain so plainly. (If, in fact, it is disdain.)

And then she returns her gaze to him and if only he could have smiled! But it is likely his inability and its cause that give him the appearance of something not-quite-real. If he’d had a mouth the same way she has a mouth, she might not have said so.

“Real as you,” he tells her. “I can see your bones.” As if she is unaware.