Though he doesn't know it, and though perhaps he may not remember until he awakens, she is nothing more than a figment. Mandrake is long dead, this ghost is just a haunting of his own creation. What he knows, she understands. What she speaks, he has already known for a very long time.


But in this moment he knows her only as a creature outside himself, forcing him to stand at the threshold of cold-hearted and broken, of murderer and friend. He could obey, and as he listens to her wicked commands some part of his heart, deeply buried, yearns to. But she has gone too far: he will never hurt Manhattan.


He will never hurt his island.


"She has never faltered!" the colt says, his voice booming, the tide of his figure rising until he stands tall as he should and towers over the old frailty of the bitch who raised him. "She has been beside me when you would put me down, and she will always be at my side, and I will never harm her! She has sacrificed everything for me!" His blue eyes are lit red by the column of fire, his heart beating nearly loud enough to wake him. And he realizes how true his outburst is, and how much Manhattan means.


"This, you cannot ask," he says with a snarl. But just as he is about to continue, she does. With her wicked tongue she spills what he wishes were lies and what he knows, somehow, are truths.

Aylin.


By all gods or goddesses, wicked as they are, forsaken as he is in their shadows, Aylin.


He has hurt her. He has hurt her more than he knows, and Mandrake's ghost has seen it all. In this dark cavern, she knows what the hunter has tried so hard to forget.


Knox is not scared of Mandrake, anymore. He walks towards her, not stopping, backing her closer to the fire, maybe even moving through her if she fails to alter her course. In that red column is a heat he has to feel, a flame that might wake him if he stands close enough.


It is whether she backs down, whether she steps aside, that will determine this.


And it is he, somehow, that decides her every move. Even as he speaks he feels her speaking, too--that dry raspiness of the throat of the dead, sitting somehow inside him. "The harm done to Aylin is my regret--my fault to fix. But you have no right to speak of it, not at all, not as if it were just another job well done, another son's trophy to place on the mantle. You are the foul creature that could do such a thing and feel no sort of pain for it," he says softly. He is powerful, perhaps even menacing, in his sincerity. She will not respect this, he expects. She will not consider his fondness for that mare and his companion to be anything but further weaknesses. But she will be wrong, and he will always know it. Even as he stands, drawing closer to the fire in hopes of abandoning her presence someday, even if it means death, he knows the many faults his mother bears and will never admit to: hubris, being the greatest of them all.

And he knows too, then, how he has hurt the one who loves him so. But the pain has always been there, and it has chased him from the Old Country back to the site of his birth. He has let it rule him, and now?

Now, he can only seek forgiveness. Now, he can only seek her.


[[@[Ranjiri]]]


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