I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He doesn’t go far, from the river. This makes no concrete sense – the river is not a birthplace, anymore than the meadow is, or the forest. His real birthplace is somewhere beyond Beqanna’s walls, one he has not returned to.
(He’s wandered, since then, but never back there. He isn’t sure he knows the way, anymore.)
The river means little to him, but he has stayed at its edges. There is something comforting in the rush of the water, the coolness of it at his ankles. It feels grounding, in a way, and Sleaze will take anything that feels like grounding he can.
His own life is slippery, realities streaking in and out, and he tries not to think too often of this, he tries to look ahead and smile and show nothing of the madness he fears lives within him.
He shows nothing of his other powers, the unwanted ability to jump into their minds, their bodies. He has learned to control him, to tamp it down until it is nothing but a whisper inside him.
He doesn’t want to be inside his own mind, much less someone else’s.
Sleaze is not, by nature, a social thing. He lived alone for too long, and it has never come naturally. So he should have passed the boy by, as he does so many of them. But he pauses, and looks at him, at the stars patterning his body.
He stops.
“Hello,” he says.
Sleaze
