Can you find me soft asylum - any

[Pollock]

He had fallen. 

(He had fallen long and hard through darkness and light; stars and firmaments; ice and fire. Fallen. Fallen. Fallen for days and weeks; midnights and dawns. He had tumbled through space – both the infinite blackness interrupted by the heat of constellations and the places of grass and air between worlds separated by a thin breath of forever – and time. So much time so quickly.)

He had fought.

(Clawed and scraped at the paper skin of his own bitterness. Released from those shackles the anger and fear... Oh, fear. Fear he had reached for through the blinding clarity, a hand wrapping around the handle of a knife. Fought. He had plunged that blade into the ribs of some unholy demon, twisted and let loose the blackened tracks within – blood and yards of foul digestion. Fought. He had brought hideous playthings to life to grind to dust the creations of those.. Others.)

And he had won. Had woken up... remade, from man to demigod. Heavy-headed and light-footed. Split-toed. Unnatural – extraordinary. Inside his breast, a thing of malevolence gave him his power, jingling away like a choir of silver bells on reins…

It hadn’t been her. She had given him nothing She had fastened on wings – carefully, cruelly, She had divorced one from the other, and broken the remaining appendage into something useless and dirty. (It had hurt as a baby, blooming with heat until settling at a low sear, until he got used to it and the nerves all died away.) 

He had found his invisibility, from within, when She had given him naught but darkness and pig’s mud the night he was forced from between his mother’s legs.

(Bitch.)

He spat and bellowed

—trees pulled from their roots and leaned…

—the ground shook and splintered beneath his feet as he watched her circle him until she became a whirl of horsehair and hips.

----

He wakes again, head resting on a pillow of hard limestone.

He groans.

He must have fallen.

His head pounds.

He can smell the sharpness of earth… remade. He blinks open his dark eyes and through the haze of disorient, he can see the mountain he sits atop like a golden star on a tree... fashioned from a million grains of dried out sand, a thousand pine needles, one hundred rocks stained by saltwater, and the ground bark of a felled redwood.

He groans and moves his jaw, side to side, feeling the pull of his scar tissue, more rigid than his healthy skin.

He creaks and he aches, but most of all he longs for trees. "Fuck," he rises, unsteady on his feet. Pollock scales the side of this newly formed goliath like a bird in air, nimble-toed and deft. 

And then it falls, like snow. It falls so softly.

He leaves it, and it plunges him below the surface.

Everything is missing. His muscles – they are slow to respond, uncouth. He presses a hoof to the ground but it loses its purchase, and he slips down on dust and loose stones – they are single-toed and clumsy, made not for rock but for softer things with more give.

He stumbles and heaves, like an injured bird he flaps wildly against the faces of stone and old Beqanna around him until he fingers the opening of his cage and runs. He roars, like a wild thing unhinged. He runs and hey fall from his head like a crown – so light. He runs until he meets the scent of earth and old blood and he skids, stumbles, scabs his knee and scrambles up. And falls still, breathing heavily.

(He unfurls his wings, bright cream and over-large in their span.)