speak

He lives here.

He sleeps here.

He drinks from this river.

He breathes this air.

His family lives with him, and he must allow that inevitability. However, that is all. The grey-eyed prince cannot stand his home being trampled, intruded, and desecrated by others who do not share his blood. He cannot stand the scat of others, he cannot stand them breathing his air, taking up his space, partaking in the clover of his fields. No matter how much he appeals to his mother, she brushes away his rage. ”This is a land for outcasts, and all may intrude here from time to time,” she says to him frequently, stern and loving at the same time. When Reginald appeals to his father, the dark brute only shakes his head and chuckles darkly, knowingly, infuriating the prince further as chuckles do nothing to protect the borders of their home.

There are no borders he is told. And he answers in his head, Of course there is. I have placed them. He is ignored; he is not minded. Adults come here nigh-on daily, and they do not ask his permission to reside in this place. Not too long ago a congregation of these intruders gathered in his home, dipping their sweating bodies into his water, holding council over affairs of which he had no interest in. It had poisoned him to watch these interlopers and be powerless to chase them out; he hated them, becoming sick with his own helpless hate—the prince would have vomited if his body would allow it.

This is the spleen that lays dormant in his stomach on that afternoon. The scent of another reaches his notice, and it unfurls itself once again, a fiery-fanged beast awakening in his bosom. It only growls louder as the audacious voice of a young girl sounds through the air. He prowls through the brush, and spies her—she is very young, as young as he is. The fangs behind his lips sense an opportunity.

“Waste your time, when you waste my grass?” It is a quiet growl that slips passed his teeth, but it is cold with his fury at her insolent remarks. “Skulking around this place, when I live here?” He snorts; it’s tiny, but in this moment of his crackling anger, he feels its gravity. “You leave; you’re the stranger.” He never raises his voice, for it would cost him greatly to overexcite himself. He lowers his head as his mother has taught him, his growing horn pointed at the round, dark filly that has decided to intrude, his grey eyes shards of ice and granite as he stares, and stares, at her in his fury.


@[Jorogumo]