staring at the bottom of your glass
hoping one day you'll make a dream last
but dreams come slow and they go so fast

Pull out your heart to make the being alone .. easy...

The King I used to be, is dead.

And that was still true; the racist King of the Edge lay buried under many feet of snow and ice, frozen gracelessly in his white tomb. No gravestone marked where he had fallen; no date of passing was scratched into the ice. There had been no struggle. There had only been the long, cold walk, and slowly diminishing flame, and one step after the other grew slower.. and slower.. and slower.. until finally, there had been no more steps, only the cold, sinking deeper and deeper through flesh and bone.

Straight to the heart.

Valves and veins clogged up with ice Mauja the Frostheart, finally true to his name, had become buried by the light of dawn—by the pale sunlight arcing across the horizon, striking a shimmer in the snow piled on top of the corpse of his past self. There was no grave other than that: snow.

If Mauja paused to look back, he would still be able to find him, somewhere under all that ice, and if he wanted to, he could breathe some kind of life back into him—reanimate him, all flaming blue eyes and frost-breath, and wear his skin like armor.

But he didn't want to do that. That part of him was best left dead.

Pale eyes scoured the murky dusk of the southern grove, but he didn't know what he was looking for—the things he could never find, as usual, so they were better left unlabeled to soothe the aching disappointment their lack of presence brought. He had spent years in this kind of limbo before, but that time, he had made the mistake of allowing it to devour him. It had ruled his world, defined his thoughts, fueled his every action in the most backwards of ways, and in the end, it had only brought him further ruin. So this time, he held back, chasing shadows and lightning but never admitting that he did.

One shoulder leaned against a sturdy pillar, and four rough talons clutched metal beams on the worked glass roof; they faced opposite directions, heads moving, eyes sweeping. They looked for other things, though, mice, and whatever else that was unfortunate enough to be afoot.

But none of them had had any luck yet—neither with finding their friends, nor excess food. A small, fond smile curved Mauja's lips. There had been a time when both he and Irma had wondered if all that hunting would make her fat.. it felt like a lifetime ago.

But, in all honesty, it wasn't. Irma had hatched after he had lost the Edge. Those memories were tinged with the arctic cold of the Basin, and the auroras dancing in the skies. Those memories belonged to someone who had neither been the Frostheart nor Queen Mauja; they belonged to someone transient, someone who denied what he already knew and clung to the weight that was slowly dragging him down.

A man desperate to swim, yet causing himself to drown.
A man desperate to breathe, yet choking himself with his own hands.

Mauja's smile had faded, and the last of the blood-red sun slunk beneath the horizon. In so many ways it felt like he had gone back to his earliest chapters in Helovia, to re-write or to re-live them, he didn't know which yet—like a circle closing, a cycle beginning anew. And..

And, he wasn't sure he liked the feeling.

[ @[Roskuld] ]

lord, the demands you're making-
help the monster on two feet
walk him down the hall, repeat
and when he's strong enough to stand alone
you'll notice what big teeth . . .