who we are and all that we're trying to be
Evening swept into his eyes, his movements, his motions, and he was a part of the shadows, the darkness, the waves of starlight and heartache. For a few scarce, scattered moments, he wanted to do nothing but rend and scatter things apart, into the piercing shrouds and veils of midnight, destroy, destroy, destroy. But he had naught and no one to flay apart. He had naught to do but wallow, or move onward, forward, trying, striving, attempting.
The irony, fact that he was here again, kneeling at a shrine, asking for a god’s assistance in something he couldn’t mend, soothe, or assuage (never had; a man built for destruction, for demolition, for wreckage), was not lost on him. There were echoes of worlds before and they were fringes of the here and now, ghosts on the edges of his gaze, wraiths and phantoms puncturing down the traces of his spine. Safrin might have told him once to look within, to snag and pull at the strength he already held – and maybe that just wasn’t enough now. Not for Amalia.
Zuriel hovered over his shoulder, and the stardust collecting on the glassy walls of the windchimes, the ambience of serenity and tranquility, couldn’t settle, couldn’t entangle its way into his soul. A breath, a pause, a weight in his abyss, in his void, before his hands extended gifts, offerings, as if he wasn’t putting a part of his entity into the craft, as if he wasn’t begging and pleading. Another lantern billowed and contorted from gilded palms, darker traces of shades, tinier stars etched into its ambience, traces of fire placed within, placing it along the altar, staring upon its essence. He felt the outlines of the other objects resting in his pocket, blessings he likely didn’t deserve to ask for – tired and exhausted, emotionally wrought and spent. Safrin, a quiet murmur in the connection of attuned animals, because his voice couldn’t take it right now. May I have some guidance?
And perhaps there’d be no response (again and again), and that’d be the answer to everything after all.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
