I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray
Would that he could sleep without fit.
Tucked into the safety and warmth of his demi-godliness and rebirth, dreaming of the chase, or of her body in a state of rot; or of the soft baby-stuff that does not disturb him, but suspends him in that homely womb, a time of lovelier nothing...
He is disturbed by the clinging ashes of his cravenly past; the thing he finds most contemptible of all, setting his hackles upright. When he skulks in the night, unseen and wearied, it is only because he cannot seem to slough from his bones the relics of his boyhood or his dream-time. Unlike her, he does not find weakness in sleep, but he does finds it here, in good measure – in himself.. His inability to move on with his life. His powerlessness to quicken the slaughter of his former self. His mulling and wandering do not sate anything. But does it gain her anything either, really?
Maybe that confusion is insatiable, and that colt is dying, albeit slowly. And the time he spends awake only seems to lengthen the stay of his execution.
In the nakedness of light, bloodshot and limping, he feels no more or less fulfilled. If he could, he would hibernate. Sleep through the glut of his excess self, wake up thin but unhindered.
His dreams are full of strange, green headlight eyes. The heft of a kitchen knife, and the sensation of plunging it into black flesh. The queer bipedalism. And yet, even there in that place, she had come. Not in the flesh. He never got the scent of her sweat and sex, but her voice had curled in on him like a constrictor. Phina's rebukes, and her abuses, tracing the wounds of his past and present life in that faraway place. (Here. Where he is now, where he has always been.) And when his dreams are not animated by these things, they are sad. Or they are empty. He would be so lucky as to have more of the latter, but he has never been particularly fortunate.
Like her, something unsure had taken him and turned him inside out. Reached into him, but it did not leave him empty. It left weight and newness there. He had lost nothing up north, as far as he was concerned. By gaining his darkness, he might have lost the remainder of his softness – is that loss? It had taken from her everything, and what she had been left with, she resented. How regrettable. He revels in the tokens of his mystery. They have made him better.
He paces, his single wing dragging like a cloak at his left side, so limp it might be mistaken as utterly boneless. It is only shattered, broken in a thousand places at birth. Not the doing of his dear mother, surprisingly. She had given him the loneliness of his one appendage, an incomplete set – unbeknownst to him, between the two of them, his parents had four of their own. It would only be a twist of the dagger to know the true mathematics in their meager offering. Nature had rendered it a grotesquery.
He halts for a moment, running his curved horns down the hard trunk of a bone-white birch. Something about the sound comforts him. Reminds him they are there, his enormous weaponry.
He does not hear her come through the fog, he is too entwined in his own piteous feast of exhaustion and agitation. It is her scent that he finds first, and his nostrils flare wide and pink for it. As it hits the sensitive network of receptors there, he blinks out like a lightbulb for a second, a habit he can conceal at night and so he only indulges it here. He turns to look at her square, the hostility in his eyes diluted by fatigue. But the antipathy is still there, as he is revealed the feminine turns of her haunches and face. The horns that stud her bridge, and even in the hush of dark, the richness of her tint. She is a pretty thing, if he could see pretty things. Even in the grey of night and fog, he can see her suspicion. At another time of day, he might have drank deep, with intemperance, on even the tiniest hint of worry. Things like that sustain him, like chinks in her armour, flashing delicious skin below. For now he is only annoyed at her intrusion.
“Why?” He snaps, his voice a touch raw.
Pollock takes a half step forward, peering harder into the dark. His eyes moving, with a dangerous kind of greed, over the indigo and black. Into the roiling of her own dark eyes. “I prefer to spend my nights pacing this godforsaken woods.” He takes a step forward, pressing his cloven prints into the earth.
“And you? Do you need someone to help lay you to sleep?” His eyes glint, and his muscles shiver – were it not for her gift (or burden) he could do something for her. A mercy, perhaps. As she is, he only has an endless place to test the sureness of his new self. A kindred spirit, in some way, but she is... oddly enough, perhaps the more wretched of the two. How very novel that revelation would be for him.
The gift-giver.
![[Image: kkN1kfc.png]](http://i.imgur.com/kkN1kfc.png)