Desreal: hai; CIEL

He watches her jump, watches her emerge tremulously from a nearby bush, so young and pale with sky-blue eyes. His eyes, though, match the sky more accurately today – snow-white and emotionless, frigid and remote.

Sometimes, those eyes of his pierce like arrows. Even now there is something hauntingly knowing about them, a sort of distanced intuition which is never benign and which can be horrifying when the uncontrolled, vehement Nachtmere-side of him overshadows this calculating creature that he is now. She is so young – a miniscule fraction of his age, which far transcends the normal life expectancy of any creature. If he weren’t covered in scales and immortal, he’d probably be some sort of fossil. Age, it seems, does not lead to wisdom. It leads to intelligence, knowledge, a vast degree of insanity and makes you a sociopath.

With teeth. Sharp teeth.

“Ciel,” he repeats – the one word she says to him, and he captures it, holds into it like a captured bird and observes it in a similar way. He pauses, inclines his reptilian head toward the ground, thoughtful – he tilts his muzzle toward the canopy. “Ciel…the sky.” the sky, pale white behind the gnarled treetops only beginning to stir with spring life. The seasons change and the Nightmare hardly notices; there is something about him that is forever trapped in winter. Perhaps this is where the mind resigns itself after thousands of years – snow-covered forests broken occasionally by wild cloudbursts of madness.

He looks back to the filly, spreads his leathery wings – magnificent and torn, impossible, paradoxical and purely Dragon – and he thinks of the sky. “You are young, aren’t you?” he asks, folding his wings again, “There is nothing like youth. It’s the one thing in the world that you cannot hope to regain again once you lose, no matter how many years you search. So hold onto it.”

I do not know why he doesn’t attack her, threaten her, manipulate her – instead, he ruminates, and the Nightmare is subdued and lost in his own reverie.