intrigued by first impressions; offspring

[Offspring]

You're looking at an absolute zero;
I'm not the devil but I won't be your hero.

  There was a stagnant thickness to the air that had been, at one time, stifling to him, but he had grown accustomed to it and instead, he felt enveloped by it. Embraced by it. Thus, the volcanic island had become his own. He had once thought it impossible to feel that he belonged anywhere else but the frigid tundra from whence he came prior to the rumbling, reformation of the Reckoning, but time had inevitably proven him wrong, and the tendrils of swaying vegetation caressing the length of his heavy, muscular legs and the growing plume of smoke rising from the crest of the volcano itself were soothing to his wild but weary soul.

  He could not stay still for long.

  He had spent much of nightfall along the western border, his gaze settled somewhere out onto the voracious, angrily churning sea - it is not often so untamed, but there is a cloaking of darkness in the distant sky along the fading horizon. A tempest is coming, brought forth by the wayward wind, caressing the length of his body and entangling itself within the matted tresses that lay haphazardly across the thickness of his neck. He had watched it move closer, mile by mile, its shadow descending upon the island and with it, a thin veil of warm rain.

  By morning, it is gone.

  When he finally turns away from the sea, there is a glint of light that catches his wandering eye. There is not much that piques his interest (two centuries of life steal the joy of the simplest things) but the glistening does so remind him of the snow and frost he had known intimately so long ago, and so his legs carry him across the grassland, while tendrils of drying grain caress the underside of his belly. When he is closer, he can see that the gleam beneath the pale sunlight of morning is across the soft, feminine surface of another – a vaguely familiar face, to which a name comes to mind.

  ”Good morning, Neva,” he utters, his voice a deep, rumbling baritone, rough from disuse – stirring the stillness of dawn.

OFFSPRING

another zealot with the weight of the fucking world.