He is fleeing again.
He looked to the trees, the stars, the moon, anything that would give him an answer. But none came and his anguish became more. It became his shadow and it trailed after him in the moonlight and like the others it told him he was wasting his time, that he should go back where he belonged. And he listened.
Khaedrik; who wears his darkness like a courtesan´s swathe of silk, wanders through the morning world without destination and meaning. The boy and his shadows wandered through the sun´s rays, as they leapt through a beech´s branch or a pine´s outstretched arms. This day, Khaedrik has the face of defeat (grim, tired, worn beyond time), and he wears it well with a thin smile that means nothing, to the eyes of bush or bramble. What do they care, if this Khaedrik, who has met a girl like a burning sunset and accidentally tried to kill her, is different from yesterday´s? They know only love at the brush of his heels; and offer burr kisses and thorn caress. An even trade; for Khaedrik gives them something rare and truer, if not wholly truth, than the homage he pays to all other living, breathing things: a smile, serene and tranquil and horrible, on his broken face – a dying man´s grin.
After one such smile, the boy of shadows and nightmare and failure turned to find that unbeknownst to him – he had wandered into the Field. And there – before his turgid shadow-eyes stood another lonely creature; this one a study in war-torn grey and not swaddled in shadows. The brume and shadow-mist at his heels cautioned him, against guileless smile and meaningless greeting of this stranger – “Run Khaedrik, run run run”” – and then recoiled their wisping fingers from his legs. Danger only brought delight, unseen, to Khaedrik´s mouth; and he sipped it, coyly, in dawn´s pink light. Disobeying the call of distant waving pines (who have always wished him near, with their stabbing scent and sticky embrace), he turned to the grey stranger.
A nod, and then an echoed “Morning”
There is a void in Khaedrik´s eternity-eyes, a world of self-hate and doubt to contradict the strange smile on his golden lips. He is an aberration, and he has no business here in the field among the other horses.
Nevertheless.
Nevertheless it is company that the boy of shadow and darkness craves, something to take his mind off the death and destruction he brings to all those around him.
”I am Khaedrik” he offers then, ever polite.
What he wanted to say was – “I am a monster”
@vulgaris