Everything is black.

The son is not afraid. He has faced down too many demons, become one himself, to fear the cloak that falls around his eyes. There is no pain in the wounds that litter his forelegs in his blind strides, for a broken demon does not feel pain. Somewhere, deep inside, sunlight still filters through the makeshift branches of his ribcage, feeding the confused soul that hides away in darkness. He is infected, a disease, something tangible and disgusting. Shouldn’t he have expected it? After all he was a son of Mandrake, and every colt had stumbled after her in blind acceptance into the darkness she weaved about her like an illusionist. Even so, the Earth King had smiled upon him, blessed him with the strength of the soil beneath his hooves and the serenity of the slowly blooming flowers. He could weather every storm with the continuity of every tree he passed by, if only because his Lord told him he had that strength. A demon and an innocent had clashed inside his body, and he was helpless to stop the war that raged on inside the vessel he had become. There was nothing he could do but continue to move forward, towards a horizon that bore no light. There would be no daybreak to signify a new chance, a new collection of lightened hours where one might seek change, salvation, or redemption. Instead, the citizens would dwell in inky depths of despair, rotting away in their own shame and guilt, until there was nobody left but the strong and the desperate when the immortals returned. Wars waged on no matter the environment, after all, and something sinister curled in the ruins of the absence of their Gods, poisoning the very soul of Helovia with its darkness.

Here lies the prince of the forest, borne of the demonic feline and the soft spoken knight. Let it be known that he was the one who did not taste his father’s blood, nor taint his newborn hide with it. An angel stuck in a family of devilish brethren, and with a similarly unwarped child with new breath in his lungs beneath him in their years. Crimson stains his body, long washed away by the weather and his own carefully controlled decisive bathing. Why break down when nobody would come to kiss away your tears of blood and ash? All he did was burn and destroy, black sewn lips of his own silence creating more chaos than the ever-moving mouth of any infamous biased king. Crystallines had seen, there were no blind eyes to be turned, but nothing had escaped his tongue to beg for it to be stopped. He was guilty, steeped in far more blood than that which he had garnered himself. Within his palette his tyrannical dam’s life force seemed to linger, the taste of a carnivore unfitting in the jaws of an herbivore. It does not go away, haunts him with a dryness he cannot parch with water. Had his brother turned his tongue to stone, as he so pridefully crooned about? No, for the useless appendage in his jaws was not bone, though it would have mattered little for how often he used it in the presence of his family. Oh the joys of youth, yes?

It is this brother he heads out to find. Evers the Able, Archibald the Dauntless. They are heroic, important, and well-known. Kipp is merely...Kipp. The jovial spirit may be in hiding, but the mischievous nature cannot be stamped down into nothingness. It will merely crawl from the earth once more, unbeaten and well-rested, to pursue once again. Is it this deviousness, stemmed from playfulness, that drives him to follow his family into herd life? Does he wish to tease and torture them with the new level of mischief he has discovered? Archibald would sneer upon him no longer, Kipp had decided firmly. He may be a child, but the blood of their mother had bonded them, and the drugs in his system had warped his mind into a far more serious battleground. Even Casimir had broken beneath her death, something that Kipp could still not fathom or stomach. Sickeningly, he felt almost disappointed in his favorite brother. Was he following in the arrogant footsteps of his elder siblings after all?

There is no beacon to draw him, no place to call home for him to return to. Emerson was the only home he’d ever had, a strange relationship at best, but one that had worked for the both of them. Casimir was nowhere to be found, and Evers was the only brother he could think to find solace in. The Foothills no longer held the serenity it once did with it’s patron god’s protection stripped away. Even so, some worn out memory is alive in the youth’s brain, and cloven hooves follow an unseen pathway into the forestry he had returned to only to face punishment from Mandrake. For some reason he wishes to go back to that time, when life was simple and he did not feel as if he had a split personality. Physical pain seemed so frivolous to him now, he doubted the punishment would do much to him with all he’d gone through.

Borders are harder to see in a world where everyone is blind, but the familiar and well-traveled path is easy enough to recognize by scent with enough time. Hopefully he has not trespassed. It makes him laugh bitterly aloud at that thought, for had this not been his home at one point? How could it be sensible that he could trespass on a land he knew so well? Regardless, he was not below manners, and blood-sharer or not he would call for those who could welcome him back once more. Would it ever feel like home to him again? Would that word ever pop into his thoughts when musing over the Foothills? Or was he just dragging himself into a safe haven alongside his kin so that his mind would not tear itself apart?

And since when did he become a deep thinker? By the Gods.

Chocolate charcoal muzzle lifted skyward to a canvas that would not be illuminated for unknown amounts of time, and into its unnatural darkness he sang out for somebody to come and take one more cursed Mandrake doll into their fold. After all, wasn’t it the former sheep that wore the wolf charade the best? Surely they’d make use of him.