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12-12-2013, 04:37 PM
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The night was a cool one, sung like the writ of someone’s final nocturne, and dimly lit by the faint flickering of what translucent starlight managed to cut a clear path through the orange-hued swell of dark clouds gathering before a gibbous moon. It was that light — though but a mock of everything celestial with its needle-thin shafts weakly puncturing the thick latticework of canopies it could not quite muster the energy to completely wrangle — which gave him away. A portrait in shadow, some would say, and others, in swirling black smoke: Dresden, with his fine veins of curling baby hair bouncing in loose coils around his kneecaps, a lucrative glow of high-strung wonderlust brightly burning in the pit of prying feline eyes, ghosted over the grassy floor with an autumnal and frigid chill nipping at his heavy-footed heels. His large raptor wings tucked closely to the sides of his dark-skinned belly, navigating the semi-dense copse was relatively effortless; Dresden would look one way and, in hot pursuit of his line of sight, his body then would seamlessly follow. To the inhabitants of the dark wood he surely must have appeared to know precisely where he aimed to go, though to ask him would have been to understand the true and mortifying terror of which his body, and four-fifths of his soul, was quite overcome. His flight (figuratively speaking) was in fact more aimless than of someone who was lost. Dresden turned and he spun and he dashed, but to what end he would meet was dark and abhorrently fathomless in his mind — for too long now and for too far he had been doing as he did now, running from a monster that was more vapor at this point than flesh, or muscle, or ruthless bone. Nevertheless, this was his one and only constant aside from change: each night, at the break of sundown, the marathon began; its conclusion arose with the dawn. For in the dark, in his version of it at least, he felt the oppressive, snaking breath of his father still curling up the length of his prominent cheekbone and into his ear, felt the rake of his teeth threading along his neck and digging gorges into his boyish shoulders. There, too, was the low, murderous rattling croon of his father’s ghoulish voice, which had, over time, settled deep in the nooks and crags of his heart like poison. As it was, Dresden, nimble as the brush fox, began to grow weary. The sweat lathered on his skin fell thick to the floor as he shook himself mid-stride, the tumbling ringlets flailing and, to his blind misfortune, catching in the low-swinging boughs stretched crookedly above him. His head jerked back and his neck crushed into his shoulders as all of his weight sharply transitioned onto his back heels; instinctively, his wings spread and one punched into the nearest trunk, but he held steady and did not fall. Prancing backwards, he exasperatedly gathered himself and went to bat his hair free with his uninjured wing, a fierce tremble curling over his bottom lip. It was not yet time for morning, and he tried to pin out the shadows which swirled silkily around his long, lanky legs, the sound of thunder eating the mountain peaks in the distance. This was not his night. |
