[P] roscian

[Raziel]

well fed devils behave better 

than famished saints

He hasn't left the desert in five years.

Five years of four walls and one silence. 

But he's not rueful; he doesn't know how to be. His life, this pitted half-life, is as large as he's ever wanted it. It doesn't matter that his mother had wanted more for the House, that his father had needed more for himself: she was dead and he might as well be dead too. What matters is that Raziel had lived and his heart had grown smaller in the absence of a world that had not. 

Perhaps as a boy he'd dreamt of castles under a kaleidoscope sky and promised wilderness all the while cocooned in the safety of his brother's shadow. But could dreams carry grief? Were they strong enough? Raziel could tell you, if you wanted to ask. He would say it depended on a number of things: who you were, what those dreams meant to you, how desperate was your loss? In his case he had been a bulb without filament, they had meant nothing and his loss had been everything.

Alone, the world transformed into a valley he could not navigate: it deepened and darkened and tunnelled into the very nucleus of his despair. Alone, it grew too large and too fast and he was faced with the realisation that he didn't want to see it: the cliffs of Praistigia, the mountains over Denocte, the warmth of a Deluminian sun, if it meant he had to see them alone.

And wasn't that just as bad? That he'd lost something of himself, too, even if it had been an illusion. The way his cowardice bled as yellow as the sun, to find his weakness a skin he could not shed. In vain he prayed Gahenna hadn't seen the way his fingers had fumbled over the knife he'd once pressed to his throat, hoped she would not see his fear; he could not bear it if she should leave him too.   

So his world had swallowed itself over and over again until it became small enough to fit into the palm of his once-shaking-now-paralysed hand. It became docile. Here he had been okay; nothing more or less. Always-drunk and ever-callous but still, somehow, okay.

Years on and now-sober, the desert has since become his graveyard. He walks over its bones, a pilgrimage he cannot abandon, until he is deafened by the sound of the dead crunching under his feet. He wonders, with their skeletons broken into pieces, if they will follow him still.

He knows the answer will always be yes. 

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