DEIMOS
For a moment, he was cloaked in white, heavenly and devout, never a color he wore except when snow rested on his skin (made its home there in the back of his mind; long-lost winters of eternity, of vice and virtue). The beast glanced up to find her surrounding him, pervading his existence again, raising him up when he’d nearly fallen into the drink – the chain of mockery mixed in with concern and chagrin. He absorbed the well-fitted taunt, ignorant and inexperienced at the notion of spread wings and their limits into other elemental boundaries; he cannot find his seabed here, in the drifting of slow currents and the glide of plumage. Between their connection and foundations he released a bellowing snort, an inward roll of his eyes, a gesture of smirks and ghosts. I can swim perfectly fine as a human wasn’t said, a boy of the ocean and tides would never be allowed to sink into its confines. They split apart again, and he was allowed to right himself, span spread out once more in great undulations, powerful means and measures, gliding out into the ether on the wind, on the chill, on the eaves of midnight expansion, utterly undaunted despite previous setbacks. Mistakes were sojourns towards precision and prowess; he hadn’t been gifted with a sword on day one, he cannot expect himself to be immersed in raw talent here either. It would come with time, with practice; and the beast had always been one to honor skill and tactics, polishing, preparing, rehearsing the delicate balances.
Before he could streamline further into the whirlwinds, she called to him – a goal, a bright, illustrious thing taking shape in his mind, and he tilted his avian fixtures towards the source, come, a beckoning, siren charade he wouldn’t have chided or shied away from (her enticements, her allures, were luminescent beacons). It was the tree – the one she’d described before, when they told stories before the art of failure, before he trembled and shuddered at the notion of falling apart, of failing.
Not now – he swallowed down something beating ferociously in his wake, and then followed, taking to the branch, the bough, the towering, giant timber, talons outstretched to clutch the wood, waiting for the inevitable, for the moment, for what she was destined to do, to commit.
"who's gonna let you?"
they asked. i said
"who's gonna stop me?"
