To the young boy who has yet to see much of the world, truth and lie are all the same to him. Everything he believes he knows of the world lives so exclusively in his own mind that those falsehoods may as easily be as real as truth. And so, that she must fabricate a faraway world she has never truly seen before does not occur to him. Not when that world may as well be more real than the one in which they live.
There is naivete in that, of course, but also a strange kind of freedom. He is not trapped by the vagaries of reality that so seem to snare everyone else. Where others might balk beneath the uncertainty of such a lack, Darkling only languishes in the endlessness of uncontained possibilities. Doubtless he would crash, repeatedly, into the walls of reality with such a mindset. But he is either lacking in the kind of sense that should give him pause or impossibly confident enough to keep that from stopping his momentum. Or, more likely, an unfortunate combination of both.
Whatever the case may be, his delight in the illusion is both genuine and greedy, hungering for more even as he delights in all that he can already see. He doesn’t pause to question it, his hoof scraping as curiously against faux stone as if it were real moondust beneath his feet. He laughs abruptly as he whirls around, slipping as easily into the moment as he had the gruesome disguise he had worn upon their meeting. He is not hampered by fear or worry over what has been or what would be, living purely for the here and now.
Were he more self-aware, he might understand how truly rare that is. Of course, were he more self-aware, he might not escape anxiety so easily.
When he finally turns to face her once more, his eyes gleam with a merry devilishness, grin stretching his lips wide. He makes no comment on her admission of imagination, but when she offers her name, he clicks his tongue against his teeth before testing her name on a drawn-out breath. “Or-eeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”
Even as he says it, he draws tendrils of shadow from swirling dust to reach up and pluck impishly at her mane. He ends abruptly, syllable cutting off as shadow falls away, leaving him staring at her, lips tilted in a wide, lopsided grin, eyes dark and glinting.
“I’m Darkling,” he announces suddenly, continuing the conversation as though it were the most normal thing in the world. And to him, it is. “Someone said the sky’s the limit once,” he scoffs, though there is delight lingering on the edges of his words. “Liar.”
you're burning up the sky, you're a constellation
I think that I could die for this revelation