Let's reinvent the gods - Malis.

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

He wakes up restless.
Bleary-eyed, the gift-giver moves through the grey-green darkness, through the sheets of fog that bulge around the cold bark and horns, with a pent-up disquiet.

He has shed the coat of aggrandizement, chased into the sulk of invisibility. Forced into old patterns that cut hot marks into his psyche – driving from their regression the demons of his young disgrace, and the pale shades of his northern exploits. His mind stirs with a discontent. Borne from self-loathing, that which he has pressed down neatly into recesses agitated only in the cold rub of night; and from his puzzlement, his struggle to string together the ripped fabric of his memory. Because, it is not his memory at all, but someone else’s. It must be, or else the impossibility of it threatens to gorge itself on his sanity.

He recalls strange fingers, strange weakness – even for him, then, as he was.
He recalls strange voices and headlight eyes, eerie and green, the low whine of steam and machinery. The groan of disfigured monsters, animated mercilessly; the smell of blood, some self-same in its redness and irony tang, and queer, thick, black blood.

He recalls it all. And he does not.

And yet, when he came to – from dream or abduction – his head was heavy with new weight. His feet were dexterous, split in two like a stag’s. His muscles felt warm and readied, capable of more. And in his chest, hanging beside his heart like an ornament from where his spine meets his shoulder blade, was a thrumming darkness. A shard of something, halved and stolen. Grabbed by those strange fingers to gentle his fall. And he knew at once how hungry he had been for it, somewhere and in some passageway of time, and there it was. Pressed past his sternum, apart of him.

He was bettered by what had happened there. Or, otherwise he had evolved overnight into a demigod. He cannot say the reticent nature of the truth did not haunt him, but he was glad for whatever means had concluded this end. Though, after days of wandering, or nights of inciting terror, he limps with the tenderness of his strangely vulnerable shoulder and thigh – he cannot recall having injured them, so they are subsumed by the mystery.
Small prices to pay.

He stops, plagued by the stiffness in his weakened muscles. They disagree with the cold, and cold clings here in the early spring and the dead hours of night. He returns from transparency in a fluid transition, his eyes shot with red and all the more hostile for it. Fog rushes into the still air around him, thick and damp. And still his mind churns over images and he cannot fashion them into anything reasonable. They remain aggravatingly unwieldy.

They elude him, slipping through his hands as he grabs for them like a fool.
He does not don the fool's motley any longer, and so he grows irritated.


Pollock,
The gift-giver.

@[Malis]