I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Again, he is changed.
His body is not his, it is a thing to be warped, colored, stretched. A boy who was born black and traitless – like his father -
(like the father who stayed, at least)
is now a slick purple stallion with wings jutting from his shoulders, and with something thick and oily under his skin. He didn’t know, at first, how his time in the storm had changed him. Powers had fritzed through his body ever since the eclipse, electricity and acid, and he had used neither. But when he emerged from the storm, back into this broken, chaotic world, they were gone. In their place was something else, something twisted.
The first time he changed it was unintentional, it was simply as if his body had opened up to drink the shadows down, and before he knew it, he was a shadow himself, twisted and strange.
And then he wasn’t. Then he was Sleaze again.
He can feel it, though. An itch under the skin. He wonders if it will quiet, in time, or if the shadow will claw its way out, consume him whole. It is not necessarily that Sleaze is afraid of dying – he had died in other worlds, he is more familiar with the ritual than some – but he is afraid of becoming something unknown, of losing himself to whatever changed inside him. Like drowning, but without the death.
He shudders at the thought.
He moves on through the forest. He misses the meadow, aches for it – the forest is so rife with shadow. This has never bothered him before, but now he feels all too aware of them, as if they have weight.
But he moves on. He pretends his skin does not itch and that the wings have always been there. He pretends that the storm never surged through him, never changed him. He pretends he has only ever known this terrestrial world, and not a half-dozen others.
Sleaze, you see, can be very good at pretending.
Sleaze
