Don’t take it to heart.
 
The words cut against the grain, reverberated through his acrimonious entity, because that’s’ what he’d always done – painted everything across the shackles of his beating, thriving organ, watched it turn nefarious, blackened, charred, and it was still difficult to acknowledge the sagacity of such advice. He’d chiseled and sculpted and refined his calamity to lies and pretenses so no one else saw the blatant hurt spun along his soul; some days he was more convincing than others, presiding with that Cheshire grin that emulated mischief instead of anguish, that regarded deviancy instead of the misery, wrath, and abhorrence twisting and corroding him from the inside. He nodded, mute again, incapable of doing anything but standing there like a dunce, incompetent, floundering, wondering where she’d come and gone, why she’d reappeared like an empty slate, unburdened, freed from everything she’d ever been (a gift or a curse?). It was as if she had no memory of the world before her, all the leagues she’d crossed, all the pathways she’d intersected, the ruins, the upheavals, the glories touched by scabbards and cutlasses – and he pondered what life would be with just the future on the horizon and no past to mark and scar and ripple across one’s hide, one’s mind, one’s intervals. What would it be like to not be burdened with sadness and despondency, or simmering, glowering, avaricious hatred?
 
Then you wouldn’t be you, Orsino summed up in one brief scowl, in one harsh hiss; and the boy was sickened by the notion in the first place (because then he would have never known his father, his mother, his sister, his friends, his brethren, his comrades in arms – and he longed to stare her in the eye and ask how she could have just tossed them all aside).
 
But the words didn’t come. They stuck to his tongue, glowered behind his teeth, because somehow, someway, this likely wasn’t her fault. Had Ki’irha ever been one to simply abandon them – her kin, even her children? Could she recall her own flesh and blood, the speck of stars and galaxies, or the hushed reverence of the aurora? Do you remember anything?, the phrase whispered, haunted, rasped along his skull, and she delivered the answer without requiring his inquiry; because she didn’t belong anywhere. The prince’s mouth parted for a moment, bent on screaming out how she did - how she should’ve always been intertwined with the mountainsides, with the glaciers, with the wide, beautiful, open valley interlaced with rime, with power, with majesty, might, and perseverance. The General yearned to mention how she’d once been in his very post, aligned to greatness and supremacy, eager and keen, fervent and ardent, ready to supply them with wisdom and dominance, how she’d tried to overcome the smoldering, dying tempest of a floundering empire. His voice still didn’t glimmer, didn’t glow, didn’t resound amidst the mirrors and abyss, clicking his teeth back together in a tightened jaw, in frustration, unsure of how to appeal to someone who couldn’t known what she’d lost or what she’d gained.
 
Then she prospered it all on her own – and his guard dropped, just a little, past the hues of storms and misery, back into the roots of a boy who’d looked up to a warrioress, who’d stood below her meetings and contemplated how to become something. “Erebos,” he responded in kind, simple, the tiniest of smiles curling across his lips, an old habit from childhood dreams and mercurial ambitions, “from the Aurora Basin.” Thereafter, he allowed it to slide, the slightest of punctures, of slashes, to see if she altered, if she changed, or if she was truly gone from the ice and the snow, with no memory, with no recollection, of what her life used to be. “You used to be too.”

Erebos

i have nothing, but then the have is not as good as the want