who we are and all that we're trying to be
The familiar sound of maneuvering steel, unsheathed, unfurled, ricocheted along his ears, and his head maneuvered to glance back over his shoulder, an arch to his brow. Hunters, the whole lot of them, predators seeking one another out in the predilections of other callous indiscretions, distractions, diversions, expressions of molten infernos and things that once were when everything else seemed to be falling apart. He knew the clash of steel like the back of his hand, the inherent, driven, primordial essence of lacerations, of brutality, of mettle and grit and fire in one’s blood when they should’ve been dead on the ground. It was familiar, it was comforting, when it shouldn’t have been, when instincts had always registered flight over fight; but not to soldiers, not to warriors, not to those trained and regarded to be sent out first, a fleet, a scourge on the horizon, overthrowing, harpooning, tearing, ripping apart no matter the cost. It’d been his desecration and his survival, coiled, contorted, knotted, and embroiled together like sanctions, oaths, and vows amongst, amidst, pandemonium, breathing venom, living menace, calculating his worth in the amount of things he could destroy, in the amount of lives he could take.
It’d been everything.
It’d been nothing.
The Sword turned towards her, regarding the space – a glade, lush and overgrown, not caught in wildfires or the haze of previous blights, enriched with moss and ferns, boughs and hanging vines, neither spectral nor eerie. Cast in light, the whims of shadow missing entirely, a makeshift battle arena, when strangers challenged one another on hunches, whims, and rushes of death again. Perhaps that’s what he’d missed after all this time, after all these downfalls, tragedies, and treacheries, just the opportunity to wreck, ruin, and savage, just to push until he couldn’t any longer, just for his muscles to bundle, to coil, to undulate in absolute fervor and irreverence. “Go ahead,” he announced, nodding at the proclamation, hand dropping to the blade at his belt once more, listening to the rush, to the singsong glint of its grasp as he pulled it, as it, he waited, defensive stances, maneuvers poised beneath his skin; a beckon, a siren wail. The unicorn shook her head, somewhere nearby, a creature of the forest where he’d been something conjured out of ocean salt, ether, and mountain crags. He didn’t ask her why Weaver was doing this. Maybe it was a creed, an understanding. Maybe it was nothing at all.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
