[private] i've always had too much pride

[bolder]

Bolder is still young.

He is still learning. And he is still growing.

When Selaphiel looks away, Bolder looks within. The cracks on his skin breakthrough, and the pale color bleeds to his familiar copper tone. The glacial blue melts away, and the gold emerges again, striping his forelegs and hind ones. The white wings against his sides regain their speckling and their red henna hue. It takes a few moments of remembering who he is, but Bolder regains himself again.

That was his power, his craft. It had taken hours of lessons with Mazikeen and Gale, and the result had been Bolder's ability to shift with ease and confidence. And more than that, it came with the ability to be something more than just his equine shape.

"Have you gone to the Mountain yet?" he asks, aware that though his Uncle as well, he doesn't know that Carnage's blood runs in Selaphiel's veins. He doesn't know what an Archangel and Dark God might create. "Power can be found there. Mazikeen went herself," Bolder continues, reciting family history for this family member. Someday, when he is older and he is prepared, he will go himself.

When he is ready, when the sign that he is diligently waiting for finally comes.

The young shifter keeps talking, keeps speaking with the confidence that comes from knowing none of the sorrows that comes from living. He certainly doesn't understand it when he sees it on Selaphiel's face, though his upbringing in Taiga makes him want to ease it. "Perhaps you could cast it out there," he says, an attempt to turn the sadness in his Uncle's smile into something else. "Or maybe you could find it here."

Uncertainty begins to cloud his moon-marked face.

"Couldn't that be a purpose? To try again?"

@Selaphiel

[Selaphiel]

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—

What have they put in this boy’s head?
What darkness have they polluted his bloodstream with?

Mazikeen had said it herself. She wanted to be powerful. Have they led his nephew to believe that power was the most important thing?

He has never cared for it, never lusted after it, never thought to petition the Mountain for it, never thought to ask his own father. 

He shakes his head, a stilted kind of smile tying up one corner of his mouth while the boy speaks. No, he will not make the long trip to the Mountain, will not ask for the weakness to be purged from his system. He is a thing crafted from ice, made for a singular purpose, and he will warn them when Death comes for them. As if there is any way of really stopping it.

“I am not suited for power,” he tells the boy, “I don’t think it’s all that suited for me, either.” 

There is no self-pity in it. It is a plain truth. 

He does not know how to undo the things done to his nephew. He does not know how to draw him out of the dark and into the light. His stomach clenches with the thought that he is too late, though he had not known that he was needed at all. Not until now. Not until the damage was already done.

“There is strength in knowing that you’re outmatched, too, I think,” he says, one corner of his mouth still tied up in a kind of sad smile. “In accepting that there are some things that simply cannot be changed.”

—I just bite my tongue a bit harder

@bolder