Just as he is sleeping, there is this: You never remember how alone you'll never be.
And then Knox wakes in the dark of the cave. Manhattan is elsewhere. His heart is heavy but his body feels light. The cavern is aglow: red, gold, fire. He is unsure of himself and his being.
He is this, he is that, he is a god in the making, he is entirely nothing at all.
Perhaps it is Manhattan being gone when he wakes, but he feels now more than ever the powerful aspect of his loneliness. But his abandonment--is it self enforced? The black stallion surveys and circles the column of lava and light, seeking himself in it as if it were a waterfall reflecting back sinister perfection.
He has orphaned himself of all family and friends. He has no connections, and so he walks now, in the evening after waking from a day he does not remember and several days before that he does not wish to. The irony of returning again and again to this sight of destruction, this moment when his life crumbled from what he knew and dissolved into unresolved ash, is not lost on him. But he is drawn to the warmth of this crime-scene.
Here, where he stands, he once marked his independence. He once had pride he carried like a flag, even when he was too youthful to have earned it. Now, he is a sellsword of the self, left by everyone he's ever cared for.
Even Manhattan, she is gone, now.
The ancestors have nothing to say. The voices he was born with speak only in short, quiet bursts when he is asleep and out of consciousness. But now he wanders in a different sleep, the waking kind where reality and dream collide and intertwine dangerously.
As he walks around that column, somewhere in the woods so far away, where he was born, he is trembling from cold winter with Manhattan sleeping, low beneath his shadow.
[[For Ali. This is a dream. Permission for the coming NPC to powerplay and have all of Knox's knowledge (IE, know of his forms and relationships, etc) as it is a figment of his dream. For any interested, the title of the thread is Gen. 3:11)]]
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