He doesn’t know how to breathe anymore. Doesn’t know how to think around the ragged hole in his chest where he knows his love for his mother lives. When he sleeps, he dreams of her face. Of her soft smile and the gentle, sure way that she would pull him in for a hug. He thinks of her laughter and what a quiet sound it had been—how much it had rung through his very core, the knowledge she did not laugh enough.
He avoids his father. Cannot bear to look upon the grief-stricken face of Atrox. The man who stands hollow on the edge of the lake, staring out into the horizon but seeing nothing. The man who shows no emotion at all except for the rare glimpses of rage. The fury he takes out on the prey roaming the hills.
But he doesn’t avoid Mazikeen.
He comes to her as a swirl of shadow and his mother’s stardust, a tornado that blurs around the corner before taking shape, the remnants of dust and constellations hanging across his shoulders. His face is thinner than it was before, but only subtly—his magic giving him the sustenance he needs to survive even though his appetite has waned. His golden eyes search for her and he feels something clench in his chest, something loosen. It is an alien feeling to know that someone who had once been the crux of so much tension in his life was now the source of comfort, but he holds it close, still so afraid it isn’t real.
“Maze,” her name is roughened on the edges, his voice raw from both disuse and overuse in equal measure. Large bouts of silence followed by anguished cries into oncoming waves. The feeling of being so terribly useless. He searches her face for a moment but no words come and so he just hangs his head.
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)
@Mazikeen