Rikyn

When did I forget how to read his face?

It’s a thought that nags at me, his silence pervading the room as much as my childish crowing. I may have been running around having fun, but he was learning arts I couldn’t get a grip on, no matter who I was talking to. It’s hard pretending to be someone you’re not, and I don’t want to hide who I am from him. That he may be hiding some of himself from me…

The melancholy rings its low bell again, it resonates, darkens the feelings that are already jagged metal spirals in my belly when I think that, maybe, I’m losing him, too. The stone propelled forward by my anxious hoof skitters into the wall and spins in place.

What he says makes me look up from the ground with a renewed vigor, a dark humor that has tempered itself within me all my life, raises its ugly head to spit at his concern. My face comes alive with it, the bark of my short, sarcastic laughter humming through the drone of the fire falls.

"The world is pain," I remark, all those winding trails I’d walked alone cumulating into this statement that is more often heard from the mouths of those much older, more jaded, than I am. I’d seen enough of it to believe my words as truth; the wolf kills the deer to live, and the rest of us struggle for the power to not be the deer. He’d seen the weathered, weary denizens of the Rift himself, the tired sheep of their faulty shepherds; he knows death, death without reason but to be stronger than.

That I know does not stop me from scrambling with the rest of them. It does not halt my blade, or dampen my vigor to conquer, even if it is a simple joust between brothers, and the prize is nothing.

My own mask rises, the selfish shadow within me whispering, cradling the most fragile parts of my heart in its cold, forceful hands. He does not understand me. He never will. Even his smile does not warm the chip of ice that blooms and seizes me, though I do mimic it as best as I can, trying to grasp hold of childish daydreams of conquering a kingdoms. Side by side, he says.

"Who would our enemy be?" I almost demand, that self-same shadow driving bitter malice into my words, over the remnants of his laughter, that I regret as they sound, "our parents war is lost, their enemies dispersed. I have seen the winged ones in the mountains, and the rust on father’s guardians."

Stop it, I tell myself, you’re being an ass for no reason. He cares for you. You'll hurt him. For some reason, its harder than it seems like it is for other people to shut myself up. Like water boiling over the brim, my temper continues to hiss, even after dousing the heat. Gritting my teeth together so that my brows knit down and my cheeks flex out with tension, I try to swallow down all the resentment. I shift through the heaviness to find the real point of it all: "Is it worth fighting at all if even the winners lose?"