Can you find me soft asylum - any

[Pollock]

He hugs them against his belly, glossy and bright as if newborn (new-made, at least, without a drop of dirt or the tickle of a wing mite, biting at the quills). 

He reaches them out wide, brushing the middling boughs of trees bearing their fleshy, spring fruit. He swishes the new appendages, jarring the harvest loose and watching it fall to the ground around him. (Worm’s meat.) The test of their heft and their power... – oh yes, they are glorious things. He watches light play off the barbs and down, each vane neatly lined up in tight, aerodynamic rows.

Yes. Long ago, he would have coveted them on another’s body. He would have wrung sweaty palms together, devising a way to take them from slender shoulders, sew them to his own.

Complete. A pièce de résistance.

He flexes the muscles of the arms, anchoring all those long flight feathers, bringing them around in front of his face. He remembers the smell, even now, as he draws the right close to his quavering nostrils – a sick kind of sweetness, sweat and skin and oil. (His own, limp and useless – bones so destroyed beneath the mangy skin that it might as well have been boneless, entirely. Alone – it’s twin severed during cellular division.

Her’s. Two, jutting sadly from her shoulder blades, scrawny and stained. He cannot remember, thinking back, his mother ever flying. She chose, instead, to pursue earthly pleasures tirelessly, letting them grow weak. And filthy. And disused.

The wasteful, thirsting sow – somewhere, wasting away in a drink of saltwater.)

But these… (foul) parting gifts, are odorless.

Clean. So, so clean.

He draws them away from his dark eyes, folding them back against his ribs. They feel like strangers on his body, uninvited and peculiar, with their virgin softness. They have been found wanting – insufficient substitutes for that which has been taken from him, by larcenous and resentful hooks. She figures herself gracious, the motherland. The earth and wind and womb, from which bastards and brides poured like juices and blood... until she felt used. 

Then She took.

And when She took... She took all.

(That which was hers, given willing.

That which was not, exacted sourly.

A woman scorned.)

She comes, as he hopes she might. (She, and others, he waits for with the quiet confidence of planets stuck in shared and mirrored gravities. They’ll come to him, all.) She comes – hips and horsehair – and he can look at her, now, like he had not gotten the chance to before the Rapture. She had been young when they first met – now her curves begged for impulses, and he maps out in his mind which would come first and then, thereafter… “Sinew.”

Once, he had praised her boldness, when her innocents was there to guard against his rancor.

But times, and horses, change. He has… softened his stance on somethings.

To a degree.

He reaches out his wingtips, towards her and each other, closing like a crescent moon around his front body. The longest of his primaries search to brush the scarred places of indulgence – the arch of her neck, the tough leather of her ear. (If he could have known she had entertained disappointment, he would have ran her through… crown or no crown, she is naked and he is still savage.) 

—now we take back what is rightfully mine.

—now we hunt and imbibe and screw. And forget – always we forget.

—now we make castles out of teeth and bones to lord from.

“Now, we build.” It is what he is good at. 

Rome wasn't built in a day – nor had a god-monster been. But they had both been... glorious. 

“What has been taken from you?”