new mercies in the morning [pollock]

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

He never feels lost.

(All those times he had felt lost have been forgotten. They are, now, the dead and discarded oral histories of an extinct organism. They make up the defunct mythology that had been replaced by a better God and scripture many lifetimes ago.)

He has never felt lost.

Perhaps, he has never felt lost because he has never felt bound. He has never felt that clenching blow of waywardness (that monster, Fear) because he does not have a navigational star, but a hundred violent constellations pulling him in a hundred different directions at once. 

Not until now. Now he cedes, to some degree (and to some degree, resentfully) to the place in the galaxy where Carnage had gone once he was done raping and pillaging. 
Now he is indentured to a land of dust and…

It is hard to be King when discord and dishonor rest in one’s heart like a pair of welcome lovers. He has been a shepherd; a lion leading sheep—he has gathered the weak under his feet like so many stepping stones and helped them learn their value. By crook, he had led them and he had named them. He had loved them, in a way a lion might love a sheep.

Simpler times.

Now, he is a snake leading rats and wolverines and tigers. Restless beasts with restless appetites and treacherous, beautiful minds. 
(‘An idle mind,’ they say, ‘is the devil’s playground.’)
And he had let them all grow idle; inert and lost. He had left them, become distant and solitary, as he contemplated the weight of their cracked, diseased atlas across his back; the heft of the crown, passed to him from a God-king’s hands; he had left to consult the sea, that clergyman whose hands he had run pink with the offerings of his transgressions.

They had been strangers, the two of them, for too long now.
When he returned to his monster-flock, he did so with a revelation.

“Everyone can hear you,” he says, softly. “Sound travels far, here.” He comes to her unseen, at first. He comes to her the way he used to; he examines, close enough for her to smell the brine on his chest and the dusty stagnation of his breath. 

It is a mere formality of the ritual, nothing more.
It reminds him the simpler times.

“It is a good thing you came,” he moves from his invisibility, feels that bitter sensation like paddling through ice water to reach the frozen surface. He stares at her with those flat, black eyes—there is no kindness there. There never was. (Or, if there ever was, it is forgotten, too.) His tail flicks against his haunches, well-muscled now from the endless climbing to be done in this godforsaken hellhole; his lips are a straight and solemn frown.

“You are much needed here. What is your name?”

the gift-giver