He fancies himself tall and grand; he sees himself a monster and a terror, a demon in full flower, powerful and terrible and great—yet he is only a boy.

His mind fevers with the image of that filly burnished with the hide of the sun; he wanders the shores of the edge of the world, sneering contempt in the face of the roaring sea. It is an anger that cannot leave him, yet in his coltish heat he forgets it for a time; he wanders once more, lost and aching from his mother, his stocky-chested bravado his only comfort. He comes into a secret place, one he has visited before; the memory of yet another ugly little girl floats into this mind, the spotted one with a coat of dirt and hair the texture of weeds. The image of her tears follows; he grins at the memory. It sooths some of the troubled storm in his breast—but there is no calming it.

He is only a boy. There in his limbs yearns the test of power, the grinning games of sweating, bleeding boyhood he briefly enjoyed in the depths of the earth, back when the world was black and his glory was imminent. His roving grey eye rests upon the slender form of some younger child: a colt, like him, a fellow in arms and sex. Reginald gazes at the spindle-legged form of the growing boy; disgust clouds his eyes for a time. He cannot tolerate weakness; he himself has just escaped its insufferable grasp. His disdain melts away almost instantly, the crime of the boy’s infancy forgiven; Reginald sees that he is young, a mere babe, and is momentarily shocked into satisfaction with the idea of being elder. He has always been Abraham’s elder; he had always been the world’s suckling devil child. No longer, it seems.

He approaches the boy of bronze, his eyes critical of his slender, fey-like tail, the eyes of molten gold. He smells of cold; Reginald remembers the tundra of the north; he guesses and wonders. “Can you run?” he rasps, never more than a whisper—the world will never have his passion. He does not wait for the response; he does not care. He presses forward swiftly, roughly, the severe edge of his growing shoulder crashing towards the side of the smaller child; he wheels away, then, and bolts from the smaller child, snorting his power, grinning his challenge. “Catch me!”

He is only a boy.

”Watch for Circe.”