my shadow tilts its head at me,
spirits in the dark are waiting.
He would always find the ones in the shadows. He could feel them there, the way the shadows shifted around their bodies. This one wasn’t made of shadows, didn’t control the shadows, but she tried to hide in them. He understood that all too well, though his power to hide inside the shadows was rather infinite. He could turn into them, bled himself into the darkness. He could pull them around him, like he always did. Though he wore the shadows as a second skin, and without really looking, no one would ever know he wasn’t simply a black horse.
He was made of darkness now. Noah always lingered in her periphery, his dead friend that probably never existed but would always be real for Rhonan. His dreams were nightmares of the charred Beqannians that chased him, that tore his friends to pieces. His days were little different, though he found that working for the Valley made his mind more productive.
But for all that he’s lived through, he has never considered himself broken. He is simply Rhonan, and the facts of his life are not ones he can share with anyone else. Who would believe him, after all? In this particular life, he is a master of shadows with no social graces and a general inability to read facial cues.
But he can read the shadows, and so he seeks her out, if only because she finds comfort in the same thing he does.
There’s already another there, though having no idea it’s polite to acknowledge the other, he simply joins the group, looking at the mare who’s words he caught bits and pieces of. “It’s all real,” he says, because it’s true. Even the things that one would ever believe, even the lives he’s lived that no one else has lived through. They were real, at least to him. And that was enough.
rhonan.