She, the ghost of his mother, is the last thing he has ever expected to see. But here she is, rising from ash or fire or smoke or hell knows what, right before his eyes.

And though he is surprised, he feels a calm. He is not scared. He feels his eyes lock with hers, so steel and cold, so familiar, so enchanting. They're... comforting.... Knox thinks to his ancestors, turning as if to find them standing beside them. But they are quiet, and they are gone, and save for this feline ghost, he is alone.

"Helovia was never your home," he says, cooly. He steps closer to her. Will she be there if he reaches out to touch? He cannot remember when he last touched is mother--if he ever did.

But he realizes, then, as he looks up at that column of fire at her back, the exact time when he last touched her. When he killed her.

"Your home was with your family, wasn't it, Mandrake?" Knox walks around her, looking over her, trying to determine if she is real. He doesn't doubt her appearance. He's heard too many things, felt too many things for other minds, to ever doubt reality now. If she is before him, then she is real. She is dead, and in a way he knows this is a haunting, but she is real.

More real than anything his aching heart has ever felt in her long, cold, absence.

"I've left them. But you must know that," Knox offers. He gets the sense she is in some state of omniscience, now. Perhaps she is more a god to him than any who guards the shrines at the veins. She, at least, will always be immortal in memory. Her sons will never forget her--their sons, will never be free of her in the ghost stories their fathers will tell them. "Is that why you feel I've failed you? Even when I stand here, covered in fresh kills?"

And when he rolls his shoulders to step forward, he feels the weight of those murders. Four wings rest on his back, now: feathers brushing the ground, gold tracing the cave's stone floor and magenta splattered with the same deep red of dried blood. His bridle feels looser, his body smaller and lean as it once was in his first year, his heart slowed into a careful obedience. Is this, the appearance of the child he was when he still hung upon her every word and dripped with his father's blood, wrapped in a cape of stolen feathers, not something that will impress her?

Will anything?


[[@[*Ranjiri]--Mandrake is allowed to read all of Knox's thoughts. Knox now appears as a yearling, and is wearing Muriel's wings. Eek! So excited!]]


""