_{Some say you're trouble, boy Just because you like to destroy All the things that bring the idiots joy} Well, what's wrong with a little destruction?

He does not know that this will be the last time his lungs will keep him caged and trapped, his heart acting as his own personal scourge. He does not know that he is so near to his own liberation from the debilitation of a body he sees as weak. These things are lost to him; he can only now feel the steady, heavy thump of his heart, the sweat that coats his body as his lungs ache and burst in a way he has not felt for some seasons now. Fate loves playing with him, ridiculing him with the death of his mother just as she’s found, the loss of a sister as he meets her--the pull of an inborn weakness that he had thought had long died before.

He should have been furious.

He would have been.

He would have found the branch again, surely smaller in a much larger maw; he would have razed the fields, the land, the entirety of Helovia, willing it to engulf into a blazing ball of fire; he would have gutted these headlands, cleansing them, purging them of filth, sowing them with salt and pissing on the graves of the lesser; he would have slaughtered the young, taken the meat of a mare now that he knows what it’s for, castrating those beta males who would have challenged him.

He would have done these things, had his fury raged inside.

Instead, he looks into M a c a r i a ‘s eyes.

They are filled with tears; they swim in them, crystalline and bright with his Father’s eyes. She wails, and he feels it in his chest, twisting a knife that someone has carelessly dropped inside him. He bends his neck down; he touches her, a tiny body vibrating in the dust. He sees how one leg in particular jerks and thumps on the ground; he sees the wreckage of a tiny hoof, and knows the she is in pain.

“Mmmm,” he hums into her coat, that tiny body of hers. “Mmmmm.” It is nothing but a vibration in his throat, no words needed to string together to get his meaning across. Shhh. Shhhhhhhh….

The child’s keening lets up--it does not stop, for she continues to hiccup and squeal with displeasure--but he sees the tears cease falling from puffy lids. Something lurches within him--then he draws back suddenly, crying out in pain, in shock of his sister, for a shower of stars erupt from her, sparkling and brilliant, searing his flesh as they fall upon him--the kisses of starlight turn out to maim, indeed.

Below him, his sister succumbs to tears once again."talk talk talk"