[ ooc/notes | word count | tags ]

I follow. Like an idiot sworn into some larger cult of idiocy, like a monk flocking to the falsest of gods, I follow. His shadow is long in Frostfall's cold. When I look back at my own it feels small--insignificant compared to the weight of my father's.

But is he really my father? Why must I hide from that power, if it's meant to nurture? Is it because I've given up hope on finding affection? Is it because I've lost all interest in affection? Why at all do I follow?

For oh, I am only a fool. The recognition of the fact hits the moment he turns to me, fixing his one, wide, functional eye upon me. His right side is covered in a creeping wound, something he will not explain. He just screams. He screams. He screams, and I stand in silence.

He stops. He moves. His body presses, a persistent force against my being. Does he not love me? Does he not care? Of course not.

He has never cared. And so when his massive weight strikes my growing figure and I am knocked aside, knocked out of the careful balance I always strike and into a tide of pain, I feel something not unlike his own outrage. Why does he torment me, neglect me, when all I have done is be silent and dutiful, out of his way? Isn't that what he truly wants in a child that he abandons with his brother, that he never calls by name?

When he tells me to move I know, deep down, that he wants me to leave. Move does not mean move to follow, it means move to get the hell out of my sight. I know my father well, even if he understands nothing of me. To others he may be an enigma, but to me he is a swiftly read book.

I ignore his order, however, and press on. When he cuts through the border of the clearing to move towards the light, seeming hesitant at first, I have no pause. Fire has come during painful times in my life, times of the halycon flats and crocodile gods, of tiger tar blood set aflame and the death of my only friend. In the wake of it all, though, despite the pain I carry, I am strong enough to confront the flicker of that flame.

It is Knox's face that I notice, though, and not the beautifully mated pair of winged beasts before us. Knox's face, so struck with shock that his wounds seem to fade, that the silver inhabiting his ruined eye falters as if he cannot control it.

From his lips come a single word, or perhaps a name, I cannot say. He whispers it loud enough for all of us to hear, like a promise long broken, and I am shocked to hear in it something that could be love.

"Darwin," says my father into the hollow wood. And so my education begins.



""