[private] I'll be watching from the center of the hollow moon; Aislyn

[Voracious]

You twist, I turn, who's the first to burn?

You sit and stay, I don't obey.

The seasons here hold sway in a never-ending cycle, tossing them from one extreme to the other like flotsam. Only once had the cycle broken. He had not cared for that time. Darkness had fallen, clinging to the land with a fierce tenacity that had taken him by surprise. And then the monsters had risen, slavering and hungry, beasts held captive to an ancient need this world had forgotten.

Voracious had not forgotten.

For the first time since he had risen from the bowels of his birthplace, he had been forced to wet the tines of his antlers with blood. It had been years since he had trained, and yet, in the face of a new enemy who wanted only to taste his flesh, the training he had once endured brought old instincts roaring back to life.

He should have been content to only fend off those who found him where he hid, but he had not. He had hunted them. Hunted them as he had been bred to do.

Then the light had returned and a foul realization had begun to turn his gut to acid. He had become everything he once railed against. In those dark and tempestuous months, he had become the monster he always feared. And so he had fled. He had spread his wings and leapt into the skies across the ocean.

He hadn’t meant to return, and yet, here he is. There is a sadness resonating inside his chest as he stares at the swaying grasses and gently rolling hills. This is the first place he had ever truly felt alive. The first place he had found meaning in his once meaningless life. He is a creature crafted for war, yet it is never war that he had wanted. He had found peace here, until that peace too had vanished. But out in the lands beyond, he had quickly discovered there is no such thing as escaping one’s own demons.

The bloodlust woken by those dark monsters had followed him.

Perhaps it is inevitable. Perhaps he was always meant to become everything his ancestors had promised him he would be.

With his tired wings drooping over his blue ribs, Voracious peers at the place he had once imagined a paradise free from strife. Oh how very wrong he had been. And yet, as he stares at this place, he wonders if it might be the only place he can remember exactly who it was he had once fought so hard to be.

Voracious

@Aislyn