i love the way that your heart breaks
with every injustice and deadly fate
His body is no longer ablaze but still he burns. Every nerve ending screams a protest, sizzling and scorching from his roasted skin. Even breathing is painful, his lungs seared raw by heat and smoke. He cannot remember his cell walls forming around him again, cannot recall the moment he had come back into his dank prison. He knows only that the coolness of the air, the dampness of the room, is a relief upon his charred flesh.
He does not know how much time has passed when he appears before him. The most handsome stallion he has ever lain eyes upon stands in his prison. The massive equine is as white as newly driven snow, sleek pelt covering a body corded in well-defined muscle, limber legs accented with a hint of elegant feathering to decorate his fetlocks. His pale tresses hang long and tangle free, falling thickly against his sculpted neck. His tail is equally thick, settling in graceful waves and long enough to nearly kiss the ground.
The stallion stares at him with eyes the same dull gray as his own, but they are somehow different. Deadened. Cold and listless in a way that his are not. He shakes his head, thick forelock falling away to reveal a single imperfection, a brand in the very center of his forehead. Finally, he speaks.
"I am Raelynx," he says. And the burned colt’s mouth gapes in shock. Surely this could not be him? He is too perfect, too beautiful. It is rather horrifying, really, to think that this might one day be him.
He continues speaking then, but Raelynx is only half listening, too stunned to do much more than stare up at him. A key, he understands. This stunning horse (his future self?) is a key to his escape. But the disfigured colt still lay sprawled upon ground. He can do nothing from this position, so he stands. Or rather, he attempts to. It is an ugly thing, his struggle to rise. By the time his feet are planted shakily beneath him, he is panting, his exposed flesh stinging fiercely as sweat tries to escape his charred skin. In many places he is too burned to sweat, everything the fire could reach having given way beneath its onslaught.
Once standing, he considers the pale stallion before him as he gasps for breath. Does he truly wish to leave, to recover the key and escape? Even if he did, how could he possibly wrest it from this strong and healthy specimen? From himself?
There is a sweetness in his torment, a liveliness singing in his veins even as his body is wracked by agony. He had lived. He had truly survived such a horrendous torture, and it is simply divine. Even as fever burns across his skin a shudder of delight causes his body to quiver. He had thought his enjoyment deadened, but it had simply been dormant. Like a glutton that had feasted on cake, he had filled himself with pain until his body had become sickened with the excess. But as the worst of the pangs fade, his pleasure returns.
His gaze latches onto the angelic specter before him, desperation in his gaze. ”How?” he croaks.
“How had he become this?” he means to ask, but his ravaged throat simply cannot expel further words. Regardless, the future Raelynx seems to understand perfectly well. Perhaps he recalls asking the very same question.
"He remakes you," he says. "Time and time again, he rebuilds you so that he might tear you down again. Fire and ice. His own teeth and hooves. He allows his hounds to feast upon your living body, tears strips from your bones to dangle in front of them as morsels. You die in water, buried in sand, in liquid metal. His imagination is limitless."
Raelynx shivers, envisioning such a future. Most of it he has little concept of, but suddenly he wants to. The fire had been terrible, but there is a sweetness to it. Pain and pleasure growing so intense that they mingle and become one. Sometimes he cannot even fathom which is worse. And in that moment, he understands that he must stay so that he might one day know.
His cracked lips curve into the faintest hint of a smile, resolve in his bland gray gaze.
”I… stay. I… become… you?” The words are ripped out by agonizing persistence. But he has to know. While the vision before him is horrifying to contemplate, he will endure anything if what he promises is true.
"Yes." Those chilling gray eyes (his eyes, yet not his) stare at him. "But you are not worthy. You never were." Confusion comes immediately, followed by dread. He has no time to ask though, as the stunning white stallion bucks, sending his powerful hind legs crashing into his cell door. The door flies from its hinges, allowing his future self to exit, a faint hint of maliciousness coloring his eerie gaze.
Raelynx stumbles after him as quickly as his scorched body will allow him. His head peeks from the broken door just as the stallion throws himself headlong into the pack of hell hounds.
”NOOOO!” He wails at the foolish stallion, the single word breaking and crackling as he screams, ravaging his already wrecked throat further. But it is too late. The hounds attack him with vicious abandon. They tear him to shreds, spraying blood in wide arcs across the chamber, soaking his once pristine white coat (now torn into tattered fragments) with crimson. And, in no time at all, the key is released.
Raelynx
khaos x eyrie