10-14-2017, 01:45 AM
You're looking at an absolute zero;
I'm not the devil but I won't be your hero.
Time was unyielding, and it would wait for no one.I'm not the devil but I won't be your hero.
He had learned such truth the hard way – and though his own youth remained, it escaped so many others, and he had lost all that he had, time and time again. Love, companionship and even his darkest, most malevolent enemies – all had been lost, and swept out with the wayward, but ravenous tide, swallowed whole by the sea with nothing but sand particles and drifting ashes left in its wake. Eventually, time no longer had any meaning – it carried on, and so did he, and the days became months and the months became years. He stopped counting; he stopped yearning for a life that he could never have – love, most of all, had been intangible for him.
Time had always found its way into the wise and dying eyes of those who captured his heart, and though he had braved war, famine and destruction in his time, there would always be a small shred of cowardice in the face of mortality. Not his own, but of those he loved.
It had been a long time since he had felt anything more than a stirring in his loin. His heart had thought itself taken, only to be spurned and rejected for the darkness that lingered inside of him, like a flickering ember within a hearth of white-hot flame. He had given his all, until it had been too much, and then his eye had wandered – and in time, her heart had wandered, too. He would take the blame; he had been selfish and consumed with himself and his own anguish – and the old, familiar wound of his self-loathing had opened again, blossoming into an abhorrence for his own prowess and for his own existence that he had thought deeply buried.
Her love had been conditional.
He wondered if it had ever been true.
Yet, he no longer felt that he had an eternity before him –
He had begun to feel his bones and tendons ache and creak, and there is a subtle line of age in the crease around his dark, scarlet eyes. The heavy scarring across his breast and along his neck and shoulder had largely been obtained each and every time his heavy, burdensome body had been thrust against the jagged shoreline – each and every time he had tried to drown himself in the restless sea, only to be spat back out, bleeding and broken but mended - again, by the hand of time.
Perhaps, even for him, the hand of time would stop –
His mind would drift, to the many years he had lived and all that accompanied them.
He would think of her, of that distant eve beneath the pale moonlight, with anguish and desire swirling within the golden iris of her gaze, uncertain, unsteady – he wondered if his heart, so often settled and nearly still, thrumming rapidly inside of his chest had meant anything. If the shiver her lips had sent down the length of his spine was truly awakening a fire within him that had not been lit in many years. He wondered if it was too late for him, to find some semblance of contentment, to find someone willing to take all that he is – his past, his present, the darkness and the light.
And when he does see her, with the soft sunlight shining across her cheek – playing along her telltale markings, tracing the feminine slope of her neck, and highlighting the golden gleam of her eye, he is certain that the unfamiliar warmth he had felt stir in the pit of his belly and the hearth of his chest had not been by happenstance. It had been so long since his heart had been stirred by anything at all that he had forgotten how it felt for a knot to slowly become wound up within his chest, stealing his breath, leaving him faint –
Fool, he quietly broods. if she cared to see you, she would have sought you.
But he cannot keep his heavily muscled legs from carrying him to her – and his mind is elsewhere, as his gaze traces over the curve of her hip and the finely preened feathers of her tucked wings, where his blunt teeth gently nip with a soft whuff of air, inhaling the salty brine of the sea that has woven into her skin and into the delicate fold of her feathers. The sun is hot along the broadness of his back, sinking into his flesh, highlighting the puckered pink of his scarring – but he does not mind it, focused rather on her, amusement flickering in his own gaze.
”What are the odds of finding you here, so far from home?” he murmurs to her as he finally averts his heavy stare to the gathering before him. It was not often that he wandered from his own domain, but even he grew restless for more than the stagnant humidity and dense, wavering grassland of his volcanic island. The memory of Nayl, scathing and prying into his intentions with Tantalize, resurfaces, and quietly, he is left wondering what Tantalize might say, should she find out that her Queen saw her as little else but a pawn in a game with an adversary.
But for now –
”I wondered when I might see you again,” he confesses to her quietly, gazing to her again, his stare steady along the feminine curve of her cheek. ”if I might see you again. I hoped that I would.”
OFFSPRING
another zealot with the weight of the fucking world.