Ni'Srilan: The Desert: To: Night.

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.

But he, he is part of the masses, isn’t he? He has forsaken the right to become anything else – anything more – because he knows it doesn’t matter. Maybe he lives the life of a fool, as his fathers did, as even his sister, perched in her unwanted power, does.

So he laughs, easily, because that’s how he is. Flamboyant, unmistakably gay (in every sense of the word), far from being a tortured hero (or villain, or cretin), crippled the moment he was born and any hopes of grandeur dashed to pieces rather expediently. “And I’m Alerion,” he remarks, neck arching in a parody of a bow, “the kingdom’s resident skeptic, nay-sayer and occasional comic relief.”

He has a strange way of meeting others, he thinks. It’s almost like he’s a chamaleon, like circumstances beyond his control change and twist him to their own bidding, irregardless of what he wants. No personality, no earnestness, no claim of anything peculiar or particular other than – and thankfully so – a rather pretty body and long, long limbs.

One of which is invisibly imperfect.

Makes one wonder.

“Well Night,” he smiles again, a quirk of lips that doesn’t reach his reddish-brown eyes, “now we’ve passed that hurdle, what have you? I am hardly a conversionalist,” which is ironic, as he is rather talkative and more than a little touched in the head. “I suppose I should ask why are you here and have you liked the desert thus far? But those seem such shallow questions,” he pouts, or some equivalent of it, because already his eyes are analyzing and appraising and catching evidence, the same way his ears and lungs as they breathe in this novel scent and savor it.

He might be silly and shallow, but he sure as hell knows what he is and what he wants.

|||
of eros and of dust