my shadow tilts its head at me,
spirits in the dark are waiting.
He wants to know more. She acts like it’s so easy. But how? How is it easy. Maybe Rhynn was born with her skill, maybe it was part of her blood. But Rhonan? He voted away two horses to be tortured for a year, he let his friends die, he let the crow die. He watched world after world burn while he managed to stay alive by the goodwill of others.
That is how he became this. It’s appropriate, giving a worthless shit like him that ability to manipulate the shadows, the ability to understand them without knowing how or why. He wasn’t suited to anything good, to anything that was destructive in nature. Because everything he touched crumbled, burned, died. He didn’t even have to try.
They take their leave of the others. Having completely hijacked that meeting anyway, it only made sense. And he tries to think of what she said. Tries to stop fighting all the memories that have made him what he is. But he doesn’t want to embrace the death and destruction that gave him that ability to destroy as well.
But he’ll have to, won’t he?
If he wants to be anything. If he wants to stop falling through shadows. If he wants to build and manipulate the darkness around him.
So he remembers Noah. He remembers his crow and the horde and his friends dying, one by one. He remembers it all, and it’s horrible, but he can feel the shadows around him now with more clarity than ever. It’s cruel, almost, using their memories to make him more powerful. But they are gone, and he must move on.
He pulls that shadows on his skin around him completely until they form a more solid armor. Not quite solid enough, but far more than just a wispy cloud of black. He tugs at the shadows from the trees nearby, pulling the shadows of their branches from the ground and commanding the finger-like branches to reach into the sky, snapping at birds that fly by (though he doesn’t catch any, he’s not trying that hard to actually hit them).
And then he grins. Something wicked and pleased, something so very unlike the lost boy. “What can we do?”
rhonan.
hope it's okay, figured we could/should just start a new thread with them