All Welcome torment - Printable Version

if you wanna start a fight, you better throw the first punch

He cannot stand her pity, her understanding, the way she looks at him as if she knows the knobby-kneed colt he had once been. His teeth grind against the feeling, against the reminder of his stolen youth, against the terrible sinking feeling in his stomach that screams of helplessness. He had sworn he would never feel like that again, and yet he feels like he’s spiraling out of control beneath Teiran’s gaze, his demons clawing at his mind and that thrice-damned vulture waiting, waiting, waiting for him to crack and break down, to give up and bare his throat to the world.

He does not have an answer for her, except for a soft keening that drags from his chest, a noise that sounds like breaking and being broken all at once. Teiran was a soldier -- she had a purpose behind her, something more substantial than a stubborn unwillingness to die, and if he has sensed bleakness within her then he has looked past it, unable to recognize a soul so similar to his own without looking too closely at himself.

If Adriana had her way, he would have been like Teiran: a brainwashed soldier, shackled to duty, bound to her every whim and order. He had been too defiant, and she had been too impatient, too biased from the moment of his birth to see his potential. She had been all-too-willing to break him instead of mold him, and here he was -- a creature made of trauma, of pain, of abandonment.

A monster without a heart.

A coward.

He turns away from her knowing, knowing eyes, away from the words that bite too close at the heart of his anger and the truth of his pain -- he turns, and he begins to run as fast as his hooves can carry him.