august
It wasn’t his intent, to keep climbing the mountain until the path became stone-strewn and tripping-steep. Wasn’t his intent, to look back over his shoulder and see the glimmering of city lights like faint embers in the sunset, and the last distant strokes of light over the sea.
August is no pilgrim.
But here he is anyway, the palest thing in the new darkness, shivering in the cold before Caligo’s temple on the peak. He can’t remember the last time he came here; he must have been a boy, before he became an orphan. Senna had tutored him in many things, among them religion, but belief itself had never been the point, nor much concern of the unicorn’s.
August believes - he has seen and heard, after all, as much as any of them over the past tumultuous years, signs and wonders and horrors and plagues - but worship?
He already belongs to the White Scarab. There is no room for more loyalty than that.
And he is not here for praise or for prayer. The nightmares have been beaten back by Macha’s remedies, but the questions that birth them still remain, flickering sometimes like fire and sometimes like moths (or butterflies) inside his brain, spilling shadows everywhere, making messy the carefully organized compartments of his thoughts. There is nothing, no matter how familiar, he can do now without them needling at him sharper than teeth, why? why? why?
Why aren’t you dead, when others are?
Why weren’t you chosen for the Relic, why weren’t you good enough?
Why is everything falling apart?
The entrance to the temple is a dark mouth with a tongue of flame inside, remarkably steady. August tells himself he’s here; he might as well step in out of the wind, out of the cold, out of the dark. He does, and the sound of his hooves echo softly on the floor. The silence feels thick; it only heightens the mad-scrabble buzzing of his brain. He breathes out between his teeth.
It takes him a moment to notice the man prostrate on the floor, so cloaked is the stallion in shadows. Once he does he is startled for a moment, eyes full-moon wide, still as a carved figure until he sees the stranger breathe. Then he notices the paleness of his rump, begins to make out the crescent-shape on his shoulder, knows him to be a living creature. How strangely well the shadows had cloaked him - August knows better than to believe it was natural.
For a moment he considers the man, wonders if his knees ache pressed against the floor. He knows it’s cold; he can feel it rolling up from the stone. A wild impulse whispers join him, but August did not come here to make a confession. If anything he came to hear one.
“I think she’s out, for the moment,” he says, and makes no attempt to hush his voice, or question the note of cruelty that turns it cold. “You can probably get up.”
we drink the poison our minds pour for us
and wonder why we feel so sick
and wonder why we feel so sick
@Tenebrae | oh I didn't even know he could be a dick
