who we are and all that we're trying to be
A scoffing of the gods, a noteworthy annotation to his mind, more and more beings who’d either been ignored or discarded by them. He’d only grown slightly tolerable in their eyes since gaining Attuned capabilities – otherwise scorched, scorn, and rebuffed just the same (and he’d followed through on those intervals and patterns once – only crossing lines when it mattered and counted – even then, they hadn’t come). The Sword didn’t hang in her bitterness, too much of his own resentment and rancor stored within, listening instead to stories, where monsters always dwelled (and that was the thing about demons; they lived with feverish fervor no matter where one traversed; be they human, fiend, or an actual cretin from hell). His mother’s stories hadn’t been: but that was a different time, a different world, and instead of malicious cretins, they’d been legends. Namesakes carried on winds, titles and myths, stern tales and lessons embedded in each. He might’ve tried to orchestrate and contort each of them as a child, much to her chagrin. He might’ve sunk into their warnings, into their omens too, time and time again.
But still, he said nothing – absorbing, nodding, piercing eyes lifting with their ghosts, wraiths, and shrouds, too many other depths and fathoms to name, reaching and scorching for the blows, for the fury, for the ferocity he’d rather cling to than any other semblance of sorrow and memories.
Her step backward was the only warning he’d receive, and he took it, snagged, too many warrior tendencies lodged in his brain, muscle memory eternally intact, spinning towards his side, the glint of a knife towards his ribs. In another world, the beast might have smirked. Instead, he lowered the edge of his blade so the pommel’s descending, plummeting, blunt force faced her dagger, her stiletto, her nuance, shoving it down, down, down, intending to knock away or pummel.
Have you been to Halo sizzled in between his veins though, and he nodded once more. “Yes,” uncertain of the proclamation’s heresy – that the world he’d died within had been mountains too and they’d been sealed, been torn apart, been enclosed in shadow – he couldn’t go back, had been too tempted, too enticed, too wanton for a glimpse of the summits. Of things that sounded, whispered, like home.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
