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There’s this terrible thing.
This terrible, awful thing between the layers of monster and man, all skin and bone and tongue that didn’t know how to speak until yesterday. He calls himself ‘it’, because it’s what he’d been described as. It, like a creature, it, like an omen, it, never like a he. Ask him why, and he’d sneer at you with those snaggle fangs and spin his starlit-stolen crown around a clawed finger and say, “I don’t deserve it, never earned it, never wanted it.”
But he’s a liar.
He lies like cinnamon dropped in tea to cover the bitter poison that pools on the bottom of the cup. It’s sharp to the tongue and sharper to the heart, barbed thorns pressed against his lungs to remind him where he came from every time he breathed. He had two names, answered to both, liked one more than the other. You’d never get the answer of which one out of him, so don’t bother trying.
He’s always hungry. And it wasn’t because of his infestation, gnawing at his stomach and up to his heart so he wouldn’t forget how to pump sludge in his veins. He’d been born with it. This vast emptiness in his gut that could never be filled. He tried his best, though. Shoved himself full of thousands of identities and stolen talents to make up for his lack of everything else.
He breathes rot and is as beautiful as the rotting doe the faeries skinned for a warm coat. His eyes have that dead-gray sheen, and he has a few too many bones beneath the skin, but he’d never let you see and never let you count. That’s only for the special ones, and there was nobody special in this world. Not to him. Never to him. He didn’t deserve the luxury of special ones.
He picks his teeth with the leg of a spider. “This is my third time being alive,” he explains in several different voices. “But it’s the first time I feel a fear of death.”
He’s primal. It’s new to him, so be careful with him. It’s his first time having a heart, liver, lungs, everything that makes flesh a blessed prison. This face he wears both is and isn’t him. It’s the mockery pulled from the water and placed upon his corpse, and he’d worn it ever since. It’s his punishment for his nature.
He holds one end of a stick in his hand. A child holds the other. She’s gangly and awkward at this age, missing teeth and with a few dirty limbs. They walk through the woods, and she pulls a fish from the river. It’s tail slaps her— he laughs. It’s the first time he learned how.
She runs with wolves straight to the heart of cruelty and dares to steal it’s crown, and he’s always right there. He’s always been right there. It starts and ends with him, and it’s so hard to swallow, but he has to do it. His damn heart demands it, disturbingly enough, and he loves her like the crow flinging its young from the nest and praying. He loves her, he loves her, he loves her.
There’s this terrible thing, suspended in nothing, arms crossed behind his head. He’s asleep. He’s been waiting a long time for this, so please don’t try to pull him out. He’ll answer a summons when he’s ready.
A few more minutes of peace, thank you, see you again soon.