Ni'Srilan: The Desert: To: Kinh

The thorns he spares when the rose is taken;
The rocks are left when he wastes the plain;
The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken,
These remain.

Call him anything; he’ll take it all and make it his.

He sometimes wonders if he has a split personality: the snarky, quirky young stallion that he is by daylight, the one brimming with joie de vivre and amusement; and the one in the night, lying in a pool of his own loneliness, staring at the stars and, secretly, wishing they wouldn’t exist.

It’s usually by dawn, when he greets the sun, that remembers who he is supposed to be.

He is barely aware of the hissing of sand as it shifts and accomodates itself around his curled body, woven tight into a knot of his own making, the malformed limb held cozily (and painfully) close to his body. He can’t sleep; he almost never does, much like his father. He has no terrors, but he has a familiar, ancient ache lancing through his frayed nerves and that doesn’t help him to relax.

When the sun rises and gives way to morning, he doesn’t move, not today. There are days when he feels like a parasite, a worm basking in a sun ill-fitting for its body, as if he didn’t belong to this body. This day, he thinks, won’t be good; he can tell by the way the leg feels swollen under his body. They are strange thoughts, but they are his, and he doesn’t bother to censor them.

He has never cared much for censoring who – or what – he is.

“Lo,” he answers simply, his own eyes – the ones that reflect nothing but sunlight burnt into his retinas – turning to the stranger-stallion in a flurry of afterimages; he has been staring at the sun again (against his father’s reasonable advices), longing for the unreachable.

Pathetic.

“There is an oasis,” he continues, dragging himself to his feet (it won’t be a day for molting, after all) and shaking the sand from his carnelian fur. He’d always been luminous, a deep, blood-red sprinkled with gold; his father said it was the color of phoenixes. “A few ways from here. I can lead you there, if you wish.”

The thought of water makes something inside him give a sympathetic lurch.

Standing he is little, if at all, taller than the stranger; but his limbs are long and graceful, body slim and trimmed from excesses as is typical with those who survive on very little.

But he smiles, Alerion does, forgetting the sun and his own thoughts for a merciful moment before he turns and waits.

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of eros and of dust