Oaks
02-22-2024, 08:43 PM
OAKS
you look well suited
like you came to win
There has been a suffocation that defines much of his lonesome life.
Watching the first feeble life fade from the world before him had been damaging enough. He’d been just a boy barely steady on his feet and the realization of death’s permanence had horrified him.
Then it happened again, just as rapidly and yet so pitiably overlooked by anyone other than himself. He had wept that time.
By his third encounter, the mere dread had settled in and he had watched almost unfazed, steeling himself against the surge of emotion with a slow-developing ease.
All these years later, years spent in solitude with death as his only companion extinguishing the lives of small wildlife and flora, it has not gotten any easier to bear. Easier to expect, easier to predict, but no easier to accept. He wears it like a noose round his throat, cinched tight enough to gag him and leave him gasping, always pulling him in unwanted directions but never fully smothering him.
That would've been too easy.
That similar sadness, a familiar and identifiable thing, appears to hold away over his pale counterpart now. Selaphiel affirms his question with much the same weight as Oaks might have expected. He smiles in an almost tragic way and Oaks nods, a small gesture of his darkened head.
A slight twitch ticks the corner of his mouth when the other continues – it all hurts, doesn't it? – and Oaks mimics the angel in taking a moment to consider the question.
“In different ways, perhaps,” he replies eventually. If he truly understood their similarities as well as their differences – one, the mournful onlooker, unable to intervene; the other, an unwilling reaper – he might better grasp the precision of his words. “It has become a comfortable pain.” Surely Selaphiel would understand that this ‘comfort’ is not a pleasant sort. It is phobic and distressful.
“Do you suppose there is any remedy?” His wings waver and shift a bit, their ghostly aura growing dark as he staves off the ache of memory, the ache he feels each time he watches death claim yet another life. Despite the boyish hope that dares to tinge his words, he is not expectant of a positive answer.
Watching the first feeble life fade from the world before him had been damaging enough. He’d been just a boy barely steady on his feet and the realization of death’s permanence had horrified him.
Then it happened again, just as rapidly and yet so pitiably overlooked by anyone other than himself. He had wept that time.
By his third encounter, the mere dread had settled in and he had watched almost unfazed, steeling himself against the surge of emotion with a slow-developing ease.
All these years later, years spent in solitude with death as his only companion extinguishing the lives of small wildlife and flora, it has not gotten any easier to bear. Easier to expect, easier to predict, but no easier to accept. He wears it like a noose round his throat, cinched tight enough to gag him and leave him gasping, always pulling him in unwanted directions but never fully smothering him.
That would've been too easy.
That similar sadness, a familiar and identifiable thing, appears to hold away over his pale counterpart now. Selaphiel affirms his question with much the same weight as Oaks might have expected. He smiles in an almost tragic way and Oaks nods, a small gesture of his darkened head.
A slight twitch ticks the corner of his mouth when the other continues – it all hurts, doesn't it? – and Oaks mimics the angel in taking a moment to consider the question.
“In different ways, perhaps,” he replies eventually. If he truly understood their similarities as well as their differences – one, the mournful onlooker, unable to intervene; the other, an unwilling reaper – he might better grasp the precision of his words. “It has become a comfortable pain.” Surely Selaphiel would understand that this ‘comfort’ is not a pleasant sort. It is phobic and distressful.
“Do you suppose there is any remedy?” His wings waver and shift a bit, their ghostly aura growing dark as he staves off the ache of memory, the ache he feels each time he watches death claim yet another life. Despite the boyish hope that dares to tinge his words, he is not expectant of a positive answer.
@Selaphiel