He tried to fly, once.
The wings are strange things, a delicate membrane stretched thinly over hollowed bones. They do not bear him aloft, as wings are meant to do. So little of his body functions as it should, so it should be have been no surprise to him when he once saw horses take flight and beat his wings to join them, only to hear a thin crack, like a twig snapping, and a wrenching feeling of agony radiating from his left wing and into his skin.
(The fracture had long since healed, leaving only a slight twist to the line of his wings, unremarkable to the untrained eye.)
He still thinks of flying, aches for it in the same indefinable way he aches for so many things.

He is a glass house is a world of stone-throwers, a boy who should not exist – indeed, a boy whose existence was snuffed out, fate met whilst torn between two women he loves
(loved)
and should not have.
He is resurrected, now, through magic he does not begin to understand, but he could not tell you why, or to what purpose. He is no stronger now, he is still the same frail glass thing, with papery wings and skin so delicate it’s translucent, a network of veins and arteries mapping his livelihood. He is the same thing that begs to be broken, his existence now an affront to nature twice-over.

Yet.

Yet he breathes. Yet he continues, moving and living and persisting even if his state is sometimes wretched. His veins still map a living thing.
His interactions with others since his resurrection have been few, scattered conversations that meander nowhere. And maybe that’s for the best. Skim the waters rather than sink.
So when he sees this girl, he smiles. The sun shines through his skin and highlights what lies beneath.
“Hello,” he says, “I’m Contagion.”

contagion

be careful making wishes in the dark

His family is a thing gone – his parents had left him and Adaline tanged on the sands as they walked into the ocean, the morbid endnote to a relationship built on tragedy. There are distant relatives, half-siblings and cousins, all scattered and none with names he knows.
There was only Adaline, as family (as more) but she is gone, too; thus, he is alone in this.
He is alone and he is glass, and every heartbeat is a miracle because nature should not allow this, should not allow such a delicate creature to transgress the earth. But it does, and he exists in his own strange tenuous way.

And though there’s been a kingdom, once, the possibility of a home – the falls, with water powerful enough to break him and a wolf-girl who led him through its paths – it was no more, for he had died there, and he could not go back without remembering the stench of blood and she way Adaline had cried his name.
So it’s back to the meadow where he is a ship in the night, where those he knows are long gone, where he walks on breakable legs until he doesn’t, until he stands before a stranger and offers his name because it’s all he has to give.
She asks what brings him to the meadow and he considers it, wonders how to distill his terrible history into a facetious sentence, lest he send her running.
“I was…” he pauses, muses on the choice of words, “…displaced from my former home.”
Enough about him.
“What about you, Kena?”

contagion

be careful making wishes in the dark