Work Text:
Here, where he was now, the clouds were heavy, sinking to the horizon, sinking between the buildings, sinking into the fabric, and the bones, and the sin, that made him what he was. Here, there was no sharp sun to scare the clouds away, no unforgiving night to freeze the weak until nothing remained but what belonged. Here, where he was now, there was only the clouds, and the water that seeped through wood and through stone; here, where he was now, there was only loneliness.
Oh, there were places he could go, people he could meet, things he could do. Always, there was more in the world, but he could never again watch the sun set over the western waters of his home. Alderode might as well have never existed, save for as a ghost that haunted his every waking moment. He didn’t deserve it, not anymore, not with his bones peering through his rotten flesh, not with the endless hunger that writhed within him, threatening to consume him. He had left nothing beneath that distant sky, save for devastation and grief: a dead girl, her blood reddening the snow, a son who would not know his face, a wife with nothing left.
He had nothing left.
He could never again be among his own people. They would burn him, if they knew what he was, and he would welcome it, but to choose death was a sin, and so the truth of his own existence was his best kept secret. Secrets were exhausting, however; they ate away at his soul as the insects had eaten away at his flesh. This did not keep him from keeping them, from himself or from others. He had stories that he told himself, ideas of the world, ideas of his nature, ideas of what had brought him to this point. He still knew so little, but no matter how much he tried to shut his new eyes to his new reality, there were things that slipped through.
Duane Adelier would never again feel the touch of his wife, his wife who now mourned the loss of her husband and her daughter. He would never write another sermon, his mutilated form too sinful to instruct others in the teachings of Ssael. He would never return home, no matter how much he bathed in those memories, no matter how desperately he tried to drag himself back, if only in his own mind, to the life that he had been given, and the life that he had been promised.
There was nobody who would take him for what he was, a rotting priest, his decayed mind painted with images of the motherland, tainted by a home to which he could never return.
All that he had was what he had in his mind, a crude approximation of a distant sky.