[P] chaos's lonely daughter

[Aeneas]

The forest rose like a dream

from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter

and the sun fell heavy and thick

One day, Aeneas might understand what it means to be a black hole; to possess a gravity so severe that no particles can escape from it. A spacetime deformation. A hunger that can be replicated only by the ravenousness of the mortal heart, of the way emotions and needs and wants separate the flesh from self, the self from soul, the soul from space—

Her nearness is strange to a boy accustomed only to his family. He thinks he should be brave, and tells himself, she is only a girl, as if her presence does not mimic the haunted eyes of wolves in the woods, waiting for the winter-weak deer to die.

(But what could Aeneas possibly know of this? What could he, the winter-born Prince, understand of suffering that is not in and of itself elevated? Aeneas does not know hunger. He does not know cold. He does not know the fear of a thing that runs for it’s life, not until now, not until in ignorance he ventured forth as if a knight to vanquish a beast—) 

And where is that beast?

Does she sigh against him, her mouth against one feathered wing? Elegant and perfectly useless. Teeth against down. Hunger against the abstemious. He is already too pious; too willing to suffer; too willing to be breathless beneath a baptism. 

His energy undulates; he is red and gold and then red again, just as she is hungry-to-merciful-to-hungry again. 

(But the mercy was there, as his wing extends just-so, and his contour feathers reach beyond her teeth to caress the edge of her cheek). 

Do not call me that. 

“Then who do you want to be?” Gold again; soft; the memory of a forest in the sun, the memory of warmth, the memory of something else. 

He is not shaking any longer; he does not know when the fear began to dissipate, began to become something else—fragile, blooming curiosity. He is, if nothing else, a child—and they are quicker to forget their fears than one might expect. 

(Was it not Romulus and Remus who were caressed by a wolf, once, as mere babes?)

“But—we can’t always save ourselves.” He isn’t arguing. Aeneas says it with bashful, uncertain innocence. He almost doesn’t add more, but then: “Or… well, or there wouldn’t be heroes.” 

This does not seem like the place for heroes. But, perhaps, that means it is a place that needs them the most. 

to warm the blood of a world

not quite ready to live

but so tired of its own imagination

@Isolt | speaks