I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
He feels frail before her, breakable. He is used to so many kinds of torture. He has fought so many monsters - battles he has mostly lost, for he never considered himself a fighter, but he’s here, isn’t he? - has done so many awful things, yet this is a new torture brewed.
She is closer then she is touching him, and he is so frail, he half expects to crumble at this. Expects cracks to radiate from the spot where her muzzle lays, for his body to shatter or turn to dust. That would have been the easy way out, he supposes. Instead, he lasts, though his breath is ragged, his heart racing.
Are you all right, she asks, and he doesn’t know what to say because he is certainly miles from all right but he cannot articulate to her the exact severity of it.
Where have you been? she says.
He speaks and he tries to answer these questions.
“I keep being taken,” he says, voice hoarse, a shade above a whisper, “I keep changing. Everything keeps changing.”
It’s nonsense. It’s what’s happening.
“I was taken, now,” he says, almost to himself, “and put here. But I don’t know why. No one’s told me why. Usually there’s a messenger.”
Is that right? Sometimes he’s just changed - a toy, a plaything - and somewhere new. To point him in any direction is a kindness. At least then he knows which way to start walking.
“Why are you here?” he says, then. He doesn’t mean to sound accusing. He doesn’t even think he’ll get an answer, but maybe this will speed things along, this daughter-mirage will tell him what he must do now.
It should stop there. He cannot dwell on her or he will be lost.
But she touched him, and he didn’t shatter.
“Sigrid.”
He says her name again because it tastes as sweet as it ever has. He says her name because he is still too scared to touch her.
“I’m very lost,” he admits, “and I don’t think they’ll let me know.”
Sleaze
posts that make sense are overrated.