who we are and all that we're trying to be
Distractions and deterrents, limbs maneuvering without a plan, without a mission, without any sense of contemplation – mind fogged, hazed, in the piercing slide of anguish. It bent his head and savaged his bones, weapons at his back but no hunting machinations occupying his senses, the unattainable, the unreachable, a range of living munitions that sunk into the loam, that thought about fissuring and splintering into the earth. Maybe he’d fell apart there and it wouldn’t really matter, not after everything else, uselessness flanking over his shoulders and ricocheting along his soul – an echo, a fringe, a resounding, beating, barbaric curl and coil of yesteryears. How he hadn’t done enough. How he hadn’t savored enough. How he hadn’t cherished enough. How he hadn’t learned, how he he’d charged blindly along, rapacious and ravenous, with no thought to preambles and preludes of disaster, of ruin, of botched lines and schemes. How he’d forgotten what the world did to its inhabitants, sharp and precise, brutal and carnivorous, carving out hearts, lungs, and souls, one moment beatific and enriched with things he thought he’d never have, and vanquished in the next instant.
The Sword couldn’t stay in the house, not alone, not now, not with wooden ramps he’d been preparing beside stairs, not while swallowing down screams and sobs, not while threatening to be swallowed in the desolation of the past coming back to haunt him. Remember, it seemed to say, remember you are nothing, you have nothing, and you can do nothing.
Zuriel turned her head back towards him, a snort in the wind, as if refuting the latest notion. She’d been hanging around closely, hovering almost as badly as he had with Amalia, and he wondered if the unicorn merely thought he’d do something incredibly stupid. If he was planning some other penultimate, capricious, mercurial divide and division, if he thought to just lay himself flat out on the earth and accept defeat. Not yet, not yet, not yet; but the world was an overwhelming cacophony of noise, irritation, and sorrow, and it had been before, when he plunged headfirst into shadows, into darkness, into ichor and ruin. The temptation was raw, on the feral lines of his teeth, on the bestial intricacies lining his movements, into shade and shadow, into copses and groves. Still he moved, still he roamed, further and further, as if purpose would singe his flesh and turn him in a new direction.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
