"….Playing a game?” my dad was saying, this voice full of all kinds of mocking and daring and sarcasm, like I had done something so laughably idiotic and he was savoring the triumph of my failure. Also, that was a really melodramatic sentence, but that’s what I was seeing, alright? My dad, nothing but a shadow looming in front of me with these impossibly blue eyes and a smirk that said everything I didn’t want to hear.

Am I dying? I asked, and was shocked when I felt absolutely nothing but some vague buzzing in my bones.

“No, I don’t think so,” he said, coming right next to me, almost on top of me, so that a cool shadow came over my sight, blocking the southern beacon I had been following so resolutely. It was hard to look at my father; his image swam and shifted in so many different colors and forms and popping, shimmering lights—yet those eyes were still there, watching me, evaluating the weakness in my blood and the strength that had run away the night I grew up and left home.

Where’s Ma? I asked, still with that unnerving sense of lethargy.

My father shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not sure,” he said, and his tone was haughty and so full of indifference it was almost painful to listen to, “and I’m not bothered, to be honest. Hates my guts with a seething passion, and I don’t like looking at her face too much either. Also, she’s mad at you.”

Mad at me?

“Are you a goddamned parrot? Yes, mad at you, for leaving the herd, I think. Broke her heart, or something to that effect. Disappointed in you. I think the word ‘coward’ came to mind once or twice…”

And all the while he was staring at me with those eyes, those blue things filled with mirth at what I was feeling—because he could look right through me, right into the hurt in my chest that his dagger-filled words were inflicting on me. Just….watching me as I crumbled under his gaze, like it didn’t even matter, like I was just….a thing that had happened, a mildly curious thing that shouldn’t have been a thing at all.

Don’t leave, I begged, because suddenly my biggest fear was watching my father walk off.

He certainly smiled a little wider, and the lights popped a little more boisterously, as though he seriously contemplated turning his hoof at that moment. “And why shouldn’t I? Why should I stay by your side and watch my daughter die an idiot’s death? What’s in it for me?”

I don’t want to die.

“Tough. Should’ve just stayed home like a good little girl and kept Mesec company.”

I’m not little.

“You shouldn’t be little, you’re right. But all this power you have at your hoof-tips, and you don’t even know what to do with it. No, you’re a child, Roskuld. A child who refuses to grow up, a child who doesn’t deserve the right to my inheritance.”

Dad, please, I begged, because he looked away from me; his eyes left mine, and he was just a blurry block of shade coming in and out of focus, and from far, far away something was hurting and stinging and aching and I couldn’t run away from it and I couldn’t get dad to come back and there he was, going, going, going….

-------

I didn’t know others had found me by then; some scrawny kid and this other huge dude I had seen before had seen me laying in the dirt and sand, twitching, murmuring strange words and phases like daddy and please don't, all the while battling with the demons in the dark—and I heard them sometimes, and even felt the warmth of the young boy’s wing as it embraced me from the cold. But I was separate from them, disconnected from their worry and their inquiry, because without the shield of the world and my own stubborn will, my mind was punishing me and I was defenseless against the deepest fears of me.