How many times will he falter like this?
There is something about Mandrake that warms him. He will never forget how she drowned him, choked him, and at the same time he will never fail to feel a sort of comfort in her presence. He killed her, he felt her bones snap under him, and now when her ghost is here (and then mist and not there) he is scared, again, like a child.
How has she diminished him to this?
The wings drop from his frame, landing with a thud on the earth in a flurry of white feathers. His face falls when she reappears as an equine. His large ears, ones he has no longer grown into, droop but not in the thinking way, no--in the crestfallen, defeated fear that he was once so familiar with.
He can hear so little. He can hardly understand what she is saying to him, what her intentions are, but he knows that she is disappointed. And he remembers that feeling of having disappointed his mother. As his figure grows smaller and he stands as a colt just a few months after birth, unaware of his own being, he feels his cheeks growing hot and remembers the shaking of his legs as a youth.
"What would you ask of me?" he cries out, his voice young and ill-determined, shuddering. This is not strength, it is submission. His child's tail lashes against his hind legs, his fore two spread to steady his shaking self. "I have tried! I tried to succeed with you and then I tried without you, and I have been left with nothing but my own failures! What would you ask of me now, mother?"
And he is pleading, and begging, and hoping for some words of truth. He seeks anything that will build him up, turn him from this child to something stronger. What was he then, again, in those early moments of his life? So different from what he's called himself now, the hunter. Ah yes, he remembers. Surely, she will too.
Little defective colt.
[[@[Ranjiri]]]
""
.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
