to make something beautiful should be enough; pollock

[rapt]

there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail ------ the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream ------------ but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever There are things he forsakes. He forsakes his mother and father – not with any real malice, but with an idle sort of forgetting. He does not visit them. He does not speak their names. They are quiet and miserable and he has no need for them. The land’s change has not affected him – he is unmarked, he looks as he ever has, a simple boy with bright eyes and a simpleton smile/ A devout boy, though the thing he falls to his knees for is vile and should not be the recipient of such devotion. But ah, he’s such a foolish, devoted boy. For though he has forsaken many things, he does not forget the monster, no. No, it is the monster he honors, the monster whose face looms tall from the moment he wakes up. But he has not seen him, not recently, and he aches for it – aches for the monster’s presence, that strength, the way he tells him good boy and it’s like heaven’s light shining down. He knows the forest is the monster’s most common haunt, so it’s there he walks. He looks and looks, at all their idle faces, but none of them are horned and striking the way the monster is, and that emptiness inside his belly grows stronger, until-- “You’re back,” he breathes, although truth is, he is the one who left. rapt caius x else

@[Pollock]

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

Good.
Forgetting is good. The giver had long soughed off the fleshy bits of thought that had secured shackles to him – one finger and toe, ankle and wrist, at a time – (mother, boy, colt) – until, with nothing to keep them on and a lubrication of blood and snow-melt, they slipped right off.
It had been a calculated labour. A deliberate and purposeful severance, interning each in earthen tombs of lost and unwanted, like an undertaker.

His graveyard, full of cannibal remains.

Good.
His golden apostle does not need such things clouding his mind.

(‘You’re with me now,’ and the son had said ‘I am’; and then Bruise came, like a demi-god to a mortal wretch, and… well, like father, like son – they build. ‘I cannot wait to see the world tremble before you and the Fear.’

—so let it be done.)

Pollock leaves his firmament of dust and spoliation,
(‘...my boy,’ for he had been the First – the most loyal, when everything else insisted on forsaking him; the one who had not forgotten)
down to the wreckage of his old kingdom, come so undone by the traitorous hand of that divine bitch. And yet, he thinks he knows every corner, still. Her cheeks, still suffuse with the grim and ghastly blush of their carousals; her flesh, the same softness he had fed when he was her watchkeeper, and she was his confident. As he wanders this old greathall, he runs his horns down the bone-white skin of naked and winter-hardened birches, leaving behind his prophetic scars.

Such a pity, though, she has grown haggard, past her prime,
—he comes back only because he knows what things are best forgotten, and what things must be remembered. 
When the world had shook from her malcontent, his mind conceived of only baby-dreams. Of what once-was, that humble and ignoble start, as anger and bitterness rebirthed them all. Naked and plain. But as the dust settled, he begun to wonder when he would find each of them. It had been inevitable – that malice, so blue; Lirren, they had come together like angry molecules heated up; Etro, though she had left him something better to find; Sinew, his garden and disquiet; and him. 

Of course, Rapt.

“Yes,” he smiles, as the wanton tendrils of his power scream out to the beautiful mind in front of him, but he quiets them. “I never really left, my boy. You know that.” Something warm fills his restored muscles, through to the tip of his boneless wing, like love – but like all things tender, it mutates in him, borne of hubris and depravity, “I have been waiting for you, Rapt. It is good to see you so... well.”  No... so unchanged.

He still has promises to deliver on, and his disciple to usher back into his flock.

POLLOCK
the gift giver

so, just to keep on a timeline, this is after Bruise gives him his powers back.. hopefully that's alright
also, there's already a 60% chance Pollock would avoid Rapt while naked so as not to risk ruining the mystique lol
if you were more interested in them meeting while Polly was a mortal loser, let me know :P

[rapt]

there is a dream in the space between the hammer and the nail ------ the dream of about-to-be-hit, which is a bad dream ------------ but the nail will take the hit if it gets to sleep inside the wood forever The monster is unchanged, which he had expected – such trite powers on the mountain cannot undo things spat out by hell itself. (Rapt himself had nothing to give, nothing to be taken. He’s plain.) He takes him in, awed still, because memory warps things, sometimes – makes them bolder or more beautiful, tinted rosy by nostalgia. (That he’s nostalgic for such horror is something we shall ignore.) But no – no - instead, the monster in the flesh is as fantastic as the monster that walks his memory (and dreams, and nightmares, and fantasies; the image that consumes him whole). His breath catches, a little gasp caught in his throat. My boy. His eyes flutter closed at the praise, letting the words sit like warm honey in his marrow. My boy. His. His. “There was nothing for the land to take from me,” he says, a bit sheepishly. Though his father could whisper with ghosts, it had been a thing granted later, magic does not reside in his blood the way it does so many others. “I’ve missed you,” he says then, a bit suddenly, in a rush of breath. It feels dangerous, to say this, because what he feels surely does not matter to such a glorious monster. But it must be said, the words have demanded themselves upon his tongue before he has a chance to reconsider. “It’s not right without you.” rapt caius x else

works for me <3