i am the vanguard of your destruction

Something hung in the early morning air.

As intangible as the filaments of mist, tendrils of fate (curses) sweeping through a mortal world; as soft as a hushed heartbeat, pulsing in time with something—

(She was a lightning crack through the bones of the world.)

And he.. he was dust and death, shadows, blood, seeping softly into sand and fading; sun-bleached. He was nothing; he had become that which he had always been called—wraith. He could leave, now. He could leave this place, go to ground, hide in the dead lands by Helovia's coast, and in a decade, a century, a millennium, he could return to this place. Come back to haunt. Ghost. The smile curling his dark lips was bitter and broken, like his frostbitten heart. Had he burned his bridges here? He didn't know—he had kept on running dainty circles, dissipating like so much smoke each time someone came near.

Coward.

And fool—

How could he have been so stupid? What grand, damnable notion had struck him on that night? Fucking moon-blinked, thinking he was somehow—somehow special, important, but not quite, more like, he could do something useful for once—

The grandeur of it had ensnared his dreamer's heart. To be a shepherd of this world, an ageless, eternal protector, a shield: but what had he done?

He had begged his best friend to kill him.

Like, faux-kill him because he couldn't fucking die anymore.

What had he been thinking? That all of a sudden dark monsters would spring from the earth and he would charge into them, a spear of light in the darkness, a ray of moon-shine to keep his precious mortals safe? Had he, for one fucking moment, believed that the Moon was offering him salvation through eternity, a purpose for his aimless, miserable, wandering self? Had he honestly believed that?

(No.)

But it had offered him hope: a chance, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not in a week, a season, a year... But a chance somewhere down the line to hunt down the scattered pieces of his lost heart and become whole again. Happy. Sighing bitterly, he glanced at the mossy, fog-strewn ground. She had had nothing to do with it; he had damned himself. He had chosen this. No one had forced him.

(Though, ironically, the other option had frightened him; it would've put pressure on him to father more children, breed forth a new generation of blessed misery, and he was not that young anymore—)

Had he truly chosen immortality out of fear of pressuring himself into sex again?

Perhaps.

The world works in mysterious ways. Moon had claimed to only have the best interest of Helovia at heart—so where the fuck did that put him? Maybe that was where he had fooled himself, felt needed again—

Someone was coming. Someone was coming too fast, too close; he was tired beyond measure, barely sleeping, barely eating, gaunt and fragile and drawn. Too lost in the spring hanging in the early morning air he had been taken unaware, tripped, caught in the noose which had been slowly closing on his throat. He didn't even know if Tembovu had (forgiven) him. And he was too afraid to find out, but his mind spat out things like witch-hunt—

But it was Elding coming out of the trees, heading for the border, and Mauja was almost straight in her path.

It almost seemed as if he had been waiting for her.

[ @Roskuld ]