06-03-2021, 09:26 PM
ILLUM
This dark is different from the dark he has always known. It is more than summoned shadows, more than the culmination of all the rot that lives inside his chest. More than wickedness, more than wrongness. At times he cannot tell if it is an evolution into something more or if it is a devolution, an unraveling of everything that he is into something less. Why else would dark seep from him like black fog, drifting from his skin like he is night bleeding away into night. Can he bleed like this forever? It is worse that he does not know what to wish for. He is not ready for death, and yet it does not feel as though he has any idea how to live.
Night drifts around him - a true night, the same that finds everyone when the sun slips beneath a waiting horizon. But it seems somehow nearer, the colors somehow more vivid where he walks. There are shimmers of dark indigo and even darker violet, a navy so deep it is almost indiscernible from the black night it clings to like a swirling iridescent sheen. There are colors where there should be only a lack, and yet when he turns to face them directly they reappear elsewhere, gauzy in his periphery. The stars are less shy though, reduced to a silver dust that flickers red and orange and gold at the edges. They drift about his ears and through the haze of his indistinct silhouette like they are welcome there.
They are not, but so far they do not seem to listen to him.
There is a quiet kind of frustration that sharpens in his eyes and draws lines of tension along his jaw that no one is near enough to see beneath the haze of black. When he glances behind himself he is unsurprised to find that path of lingering stardust in his wake, a midnight trail always pointing to where he’s gone. It has an ethereal kind of effect that often leaves him swearing beneath his breath for the way it makes strangers look at him with softer gazes than they ought to. It is dangerous to be beautiful when the dark inside is something far more vicious, more volatile.
In an instant he is gone, teleporting back the way he had come so quickly that he thinks he can see the after image of where he had stood a moment before. It is a smear of night darker than the rest and illuminated faintly with twinkling stars, and then he blinks and it is gone entirely, and he wonders if he had merely imagined it.
There is a sound somewhere to his left, and though his initial instinct is to ignore it entirely, there is a different kind of weight to the gaze he can feel settle on him. His wings lift and resettle, suddenly restless or perturbed, and for one second the burn scars along the arms of his wings are bared down to the glowing seam where an angel had healed them. He turns his head and those eyes are cold and hard, bitterness like a sneer on his mouth when he asks a question that should not sound so much like an accusation except that he had crafted it to be. “Stargazing?”
And then he finds a face in the dark, two golden eyes that are bright and beautiful in a way his have never been, surrounded by a face like molten silver ore and crowned with a single gold horn. She has the kind of ethereal beauty that he has never been impervious to, a kind of delicate radiance better left to the stars. His jaw clenches with a sudden distaste, a sudden disgust that is directed only inwards at the dark that had rushed up inside him so eagerly. He does not soften and his gaze does not seek her again, but the image of her quiet eyes still linger in his mind long after he’s turned away from her. “There are better views for that than this one.” There is no barb on his tongue now, just a heavy kind of quiet that settles over him while he thinks about that delicate starlight face.
@[cressida]