11-01-2021, 03:32 PM
There is a weight inside his chest, a kind of distant quiet like being deep, deep under water. It is a heaviness he cannot shake, a feeling that stays with him as loyally as any shadow, always just within his periphery. He cannot tell where these roots first set, if it is in the soil of his bored mind or in the soil of a lonely chest. He thinks maybe it is both, or neither, or maybe it is in the way his life has been full of unreliable change.
In the way he hasn’t found his place, his purpose.
He has thought about leaving, really leaving. Not just disappearing for a day or two to search for a girl of iridescent blue that now feels like she must just be a ghost from his childhood, an imaginary friend invented to keep himself busy when his twin was tangled up elsewhere. It’s been years, and her face is something indistinct now, a silhouette of shining blue and a smile that still makes his own mouth crooked with fondness. A dream, maybe, or many dreams.
He forces these thoughts of her from his mind, and they go easily with the breadth of time that has passed between then and now. He wonders instead at Tephra itself, wonders at the constant fluctuations of monarchy and whose hands this volcanic stretch has now landed in. There are no more nightmares at least, or not the kind of nightmares from before when Gale had been here. Dreams that felt like falling into pits too deep to climb out of, too heavy to wake from. He thinks that everyone who had stayed had been changed by that, carved into something just a little more brittle. It would seem an impossibility to face the dark so many times and not face the light again with new burdens, new truths.
His blue eyes wander over the rocky expanse of the dormant volcanic mounds, mountains in miniature except that there is not enough soil to hold any vegetation beyond a third of the way up. But he isn’t planning on going up, instead his attention falls downwards again to where the river widens near the base, to where erosion has carved a cave beneath the stone mountain. It is quiet and it is private, and even though the air is stale and still and shadows drape themselves over every distant corner, he is enough light to see by.
He is the sun, after all, or at least an earthbound fragment of it.
Aeson wades into the water, pausing once out of habit to look around and note that he is (or seems to be) alone. Then with years worth of practiced ease he slips beneath the low rock ledge and into the dark cave beyond. At once the nearest walls illuminate with refractions of light from him, from his skin and his sunlight wings, dancing like unlit sparks across the rippling water surface. With no other eyes to see him, something in the quiet of his expression grows dim, a bone deep weariness he is always careful to hide behind a pleasant smile and polite conversation. Here in the dark, in this place that is the antithesis of what he is, he is not afraid to bare the dusk that lives inside his chest.
In the way he hasn’t found his place, his purpose.
He has thought about leaving, really leaving. Not just disappearing for a day or two to search for a girl of iridescent blue that now feels like she must just be a ghost from his childhood, an imaginary friend invented to keep himself busy when his twin was tangled up elsewhere. It’s been years, and her face is something indistinct now, a silhouette of shining blue and a smile that still makes his own mouth crooked with fondness. A dream, maybe, or many dreams.
He forces these thoughts of her from his mind, and they go easily with the breadth of time that has passed between then and now. He wonders instead at Tephra itself, wonders at the constant fluctuations of monarchy and whose hands this volcanic stretch has now landed in. There are no more nightmares at least, or not the kind of nightmares from before when Gale had been here. Dreams that felt like falling into pits too deep to climb out of, too heavy to wake from. He thinks that everyone who had stayed had been changed by that, carved into something just a little more brittle. It would seem an impossibility to face the dark so many times and not face the light again with new burdens, new truths.
His blue eyes wander over the rocky expanse of the dormant volcanic mounds, mountains in miniature except that there is not enough soil to hold any vegetation beyond a third of the way up. But he isn’t planning on going up, instead his attention falls downwards again to where the river widens near the base, to where erosion has carved a cave beneath the stone mountain. It is quiet and it is private, and even though the air is stale and still and shadows drape themselves over every distant corner, he is enough light to see by.
He is the sun, after all, or at least an earthbound fragment of it.
Aeson wades into the water, pausing once out of habit to look around and note that he is (or seems to be) alone. Then with years worth of practiced ease he slips beneath the low rock ledge and into the dark cave beyond. At once the nearest walls illuminate with refractions of light from him, from his skin and his sunlight wings, dancing like unlit sparks across the rippling water surface. With no other eyes to see him, something in the quiet of his expression grows dim, a bone deep weariness he is always careful to hide behind a pleasant smile and polite conversation. Here in the dark, in this place that is the antithesis of what he is, he is not afraid to bare the dusk that lives inside his chest.
aeson
though your heart is far too young to realize
the unimaginable light you hold inside