who we are and all that we're trying to be
The hues blending before him were like dancing colors of the past: intertwining aurora hymns and columns, skimming over mountaintops and chilling winds, igniting a world otherwise untouched. It made him nostalgic for the first time in a while, inhaling sharply and expecting Siberian air to settle into his lungs: instead it was the dimming of the heavens, the plains of darkness coming down, down, down over the sun, where he belonged, back in the shadows. For he was no star, no shining, lustrous thing, but like the cosmos around it, the consuming black holes, the devouring eclipses, and the midnight décor.
It felt like irreverence to be there, amidst the pious and the holy, amidst the channels of combined forces hoping to regain a goddess fallen from her Elysium; unworthy, undeserving, abandoned, forsaken, desolate in the sweeping stretch of all the others who’d come before him, who had bowed, who had pleaded, who had been greeted. The deities simply never looked upon him: a speck of dust, a pebble, a stone, there on the earth, amidst the rabble, the rubble, the ruin.
He was only there for her.
His hands still held the torch he’d been keeping lit throughout the passing hours, in the drifting silence and the orchestrated, composed sunset, his gift in his satchel, not even remotely enough for the things, the souls, that have been lost. What did a goddess require? What would a goddess want? And did it matter, in the great scheme of the world, when an abandoned beast tried to pay homage to those who wished he didn’t exist?
The Reaper was spun into silence: nodding his assurances to Amalia, but his features were stoic, reticent, almost grim – he didn’t want to mar and blight the ceremony, the ritual, or the offerings - not enough a whisper in his ear. Zuriel was nearby, waiting in the darkness, but she had nothing to add – perhaps believing he would diminish the circumstances too. I should not be here he wanted to voice, he wanted to add, and yet, tucked it away in his chest, in his mind, as Remi approached. The monolith gave him a nod as well, utterly perplexed and muddled, struggling to come up with anything that would make him useful, purposeful; hushed, eyes lingering on the horizon.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
