Just know this too shall pass - any

[Falk]

THE STORY GOES OR THE WAY THAT I WAS TOLD
THERE WAS A KING THAT ALWAYS FELT TOO HIGH
AND THEN HE FELL TOO LOW

If he could see inside her, he might shrink away. 

It would be a primal thing, of course. An ancestral evocation. He wouldn’t mean to, but it would be a mixture of revulsion and precaution that would cause him to cast her away to a kinder, more gently made wind. At the end of the day, he was conceived of in a frothy, furious blood ritual – it is an origin that he cannot shake, even if the details of it had died on his mother’s stiff lips. (His father is an unknown quantity to him, but he knows his mother never spoke of fear or used it like a dagger.)

It is what made him full of fear and the instinct to give fear.
It is what makes him, him, sat in half shadow and light.

It would be counterproductive, to send her away, like a flower evading the sun.

That is why he doesn’t, because she is safe from the prying claws of his mind and because he has faith in better things to guide him – if darkness does not find him first and turn his aimlessness to weaponry, it had almost sunk its fingernails into him once. Almost, in a cove overseen by an iron man; and if his father could find him, he’d bear down on him until the fear found a captain or he found a shallow grave in the dust.

(His father would hardly countenance a weak krampus in his hedgerow.)

But she is here, like sun, and his fear is gone so he opens up, ever so slightly, untangling himself in her warmth. “I’m glad,” and he supposes he truly is. Better to be mad with someone else than alone. “I wasn’t paying attention, I guess, when I came back. Or, I thought I got turned around,” he gets turned around often enough, but no. No, that mountain is wholly alien and suddenly he begins to wonder what force could draw a mountain up from flat ground – what could it do to that cove; what could something like that do to the friends he had made?

Other than that strip of briny coast, and those vague songs of childhood laughter still echoing in the hallways of his mind, he had no home here before he left. His mother was his family, his everything, and she had died – provoking his travelling spirit and off he had gone.

She speaks of time. Her time is his fear, he guesses, but she mourns the partition. “That must be scary.” He has never really worried about time. He isn’t old or young enough – it hasn’t been an endless part of him like it had her, “I can’t say I’m half as wistful for what I lost...” His voice is hesitant, teetering on the brink of a revelation he prefers to keep to his chest, “is that connected then?” He glances the way she looks off, pensively, except his brow is furrowed tighter than ever and he unfurls his wings, as if he means to take off.

“What happened here...” Does it even matter? Everyone around them, bright in new sunlight, seems unperturbed; he is free, though she is less so.

FALK, SON OF POLLOCK AND SYNTYCHE