no matter what they say, I am still the king
We always want to know that which we do not. There is a yearning inside us to be familiar with the things that are so strange. The desire to seek darkness is no different, little ocean serpent. When you are so keenly coddled and cared for and held into the light, how could you not desire for something a little bit more … intriguing. When you are carried so gently from the darkness of the night, how could you not keep looking over your shoulders for the things that may follow?
There is a dastardly line to dance between want and warning. There is a taste to the shadows that will linger far too long on your tongue if you let it, and it will turn all of you dark and black and as thick the night. It is much too easy to dive headfirst into the delights that wait to tear you asunder with their teeth and their terror. But you, little thing, you wait patiently. You do not stare at the tick of the clock, or tiptoe impatiently at the line of the dark night. You watch, wary but ready to war.
But what do you do when you become a part of the night? When you are one of the spooky things? What happens when you are transformed from the babe in her arms, to a creature waiting at the edges of the shadows? Your eyes could be apart of the gospel at the edge of the woods. Your body could be thrumming among them, thirsting for an inch more of the night to crawl into. Your body slinks into a sheen of infinitesimal plates- your mother’s son, without a doubt. Eight thought he would be more repulsed, carried again with the disdain of yet another serpent in his life. But he cannot find the abhorrence inside him just yet- your pleasantry with the transformation yet another surprise he was not expecting.
It is so simple to forget you are a child (a delicacy he does not often encounter, given the hundreds of years of his life). Inside you he can picture something ferocious- teeth and wings and fang and venom. Something so malleable in innocence, yet willing to please. And please he must. “Oh!” He exclaims and lifts his front legs a few inches off the earth in mock fright. “Immaculately fearsome! I would not approach you in the dark of the night, for certain. ”
There is the silence of your thoughts- your discovery of all that it is to be something scarier than what you thought. But the magician knows what you are feeling, and he tugs his magic to sink himself further into your bones. You see as a serpent (and oh you could be a feral and ferocious thing!) - there is red and white and a halo of heat. “Yes. That warm glow means something living. Red means alive.”
He takes off then, his dark body would blend in the night to most, but with your serpent eyes, you can see much more. He runs lithely through the small clearing around you, darting behind trees and moving his body between fast and slow, limber and lanky, by flight and by foot- here is what it is like to see, here is what knowing is like. The red enflames when his body works harder, dissipates behind trees, fades when he slows: here is what power is.
He comes to a stop before you after a few cavorts around the clearing, shaking his wings and looking towards you with the kindest smile he can cajole. “You can do this, and more. “ He says, a glimmer of a smile in his eyes. And the smallest of his dark feathers fall to the musty forest floor.
(now, the storm is coming in)