who we are and all that we're trying to be
With her caught in his clutches, normally he’d howl and laugh, call out in some other amusements. But his heart was burdened, heavy, and cracked, so he simply stood as the much smaller otter grabbed hold of his hound muzzle, clambering and climbing along his cranium. He could easily shake, shudder, undulate, and ripple his body until she flickered, scrambled, or fell –
But gods, he was tired of everyone falling around him.
So instead, the Sword ignored the rules, making his own in the throngs of the dark garden, in the pathways of Spark Bird light – a restless sedition twisting and turning over his bones. He rampaged and ran instead, his own assault (if she couldn’t cling enough, if she couldn’t find some purchase in all the Stygian fur) of lightened proportions – semblances of liberation, of freedom, of deliverance across the grounds, racing, racing, racing into the midnight paradigms, where embers and cinders reached and monsters couldn’t destroy them. Wild, untethered, free in the pretenses of small, minuscule moments, before returning to haunted wings, before the world was wide and open again, and they’d have to remember, recall, the disasters awaiting.
Is this enough? rumbled through their connection, the first words he’d uttered since their arrival, for he wanted something to be, even for an instant.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
