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He never adjusted to the weight of the robes on his shoulders.
They were heavy, dragging his body closer to the ground each time he shifted them to take the weight off the wounds in his chest. They had gone through the physical healing process, leaving behind scars that hurt when it was cold.
It was always cold.
The walls seemed to drip with cool air, flooding the tower with it. The type of cold that bit at any exposed skin and left a mark, usually a warning to wrap up. But he never did. The cold reminded him of before.
Sometimes he struggled to remember. Ruling over the city with an iron fist didn’t leave much time for water to cause rust. Occasionally a flitter of a memory would cross his eyes, hands round a warm mug with breath abstractly painting the sky and heat prickling at icy bones. A blanket being tossed over his shoulders, green instead of red. Huddling in a sleeping bag in a tent, the cold exterior contrasting with the warm interior.
Now, his hands remained black. There was once a time where they would turn blue, then white, and someone would run and fetch a pair of gloves, then a warm hat, then all of a sudden he was dressed head to toe in warm layers and his hands were no longer blue but red and pulsing, life making its name known.
When the memories gained too much sentience he would sit at the top of the tower, robe billowing across the floor as he stared out the window. How could he believe that this would end? It would never end.
He could push vialism onto the citizens, seize more Gone and scare them into submission. He was, after all, the leader. The others looked up to him.
An example he had to set.
An escapee had been caught recently, from one of the other districts. A young woman, eyes full of the fire that his own had once burned. She had been caught trying to escape through the manhole covers, seen by a guard as her fingertips pried it up.
How could he punish someone that he could see himself in?
-
The neon gravestone burned into the night as it was set down in the outer rim. Her ashes now returned to her Bishop, to be used to keep peace and order throughout the city.
He wouldn’t recognise himself now.
Staring out the window at the moon, within the tower’s cold embrace, he wonders where it all changed.He knows when it changed. And he won’t stop until every last mistake is corrected, and he reclaims his ultimate power.
Just a shame his memories won’t cooperate. Another one flashes by, of laughter. Just the sound of it.
He weeps into the silence, matching the tower’s damp corners and overboding nature.