Neither wicked nor blessed, a child corroded and grasped in innocent purgatory; calls from the current, tendrils and taffeta of the damned, of the virtuous. From the moment of his birth, he was surrounded by darkness: the evening’s nocturnal hymn, his father’s nefarious press, and his crafted epithet. Whether they were telling, ominous, forbidding, or mere coincidences, together, they infused the capricious haze of the child’s first sensations: sweet breaths filling his lungs, dripping cavern walls, his sire’s maw, his mother’s warmth, the twisting and turning of many impressions. The questions were endless and the queries were eternal, sparked and incised within a churning mind, whirling, hastening to glide on the winds and the twilight, scampering and collecting what little ruminations it could gather and kindle. Where were they? Why was it still so shadowed, veiled, constantly lacking light? Sprawled and nestled in the company of power, of rain, of contentment, the information he processed urged him into necessary vigilance, primordial and primeval, spurned by thousands of ancestral instincts, he chose to untangle one of his long, darkened limbs (if it was his leg – he wasn’t sure if it was his own body or a blending of the grotto floor into his blue hide). Another quickly followed, and another, until all four were spread and extended before him, quaking and shuddering with his external struggle, attempting a laborious rise from the floor as if it were a monumental, Herculean task. The initial endeavor backfired almost instantly and he came crashing back to the earth before he could right his hind into the proper position – stubborn, perhaps an etching, an inkling, a brief sketch of his personality – he took once more to the venture, faltered, stumbled, toppled, and rolled onto his side. With a huff, a wrinkle of his tiny nose, the effort was given one more trial before succession; he teetered, he tottered, he wobbled and wiggled, until finally, his lanky segments ensured some standing fixture and he remained upright. The only other striking figure laden upon his frame, aside from the skull embellished across his withers (a Reaper’s note, scythes, rapiers, cutlasses passed and blessed), was the tell-tale smirk chiseled into the colt’s lips: elfish, boyish, juvenile, and mischievous, as if ready to conquer the world with naughty delusions and proud shenanigans. Time, experience, and prowess would furnish the weight of his future, if he wandered down the sinister streets of his sire’s licentious forbearance, if he keened the might of his grandfather’s fire, inferno, boldness, or if he coaxed the tender, reposed, tranquil aspirations of his mother – but the gleam in his piercing eyes was no different from the branches and brambles of his lineage. He would be no passing star in the sky, no root, no speck of soil. He would be no forgotten soul lost in the weary clouds, left on moors, mazes, labyrinths, or warrens. An appellation to be remembered, signified, recalled, for later moments, brewing and brooding in the clamor of havoc or virtue.