Moonbeam: A Timeline series companion

darkstalker character study

Kindness doesn't come naturally to you. It never did.

No, you've always been a creature of sharp edges, the gaping holes in your chest sewn shut with barbed wire. You have been smashed out on the cobblestones, and you have tried to put yourself back together. But when you look in the mirror, sometimes all you can see is the dragon you might have been in another life.

He would have smiled without hesitation. He would have loved with his whole heart, and given his love a sticky-sweet smile.

But it's too late for that, now.

Because sometimes when you look in the mirror, you see a dragon on fire. Always on fire. You see thunderstorm eyes and a thousand vendettas you could never quite bury.

And your daughter will be just like you. She will learn to put up walls and wage war across her small, fragile body. And you will watch her, from the distance. You will close your eyes. Because you would not wish this fate upon your worst enemy.

Your daughter will learn that life is a battle, and she will do anything to end up on the winning side. Your daughter will sew her scars closed with barbed wire, you will silently clean up the blood on the floor.

She will never get to be young, and innocent. To see the world through gentle eyes. She will dream of fifty lashings, and search for her future in the broken mirror. And she won't find anything, of course.

You remember when she was little—when she'd stub her claws or cut herself accidentally. How you'd give each of her wounds a little kiss, and tell her it was all better now. Because back then, you still knew how to love it better. You miss those days.

But now she's five years old. And she's known more loss than most will know in a lifetime.

And what about her brother, the boy of smoke and mirrors and a thousand different lies that never quite fit? What about her little sister—a ghost of a daughter, made of lavender smoke and mourning? What about them? What about the lives they could have lead—the happy, normal dragons they should have been?

You will grieve for them, quietly. Even though they're right in front of you. Let them hollow our your heart like an empty cavern, and loathe the ground you walk on. Loathe the sun for shining, and the world for turning, for moving on without you, and the worst part is, I think you knew all along. That no one else could fix you. And sometimes, that's the hardest knowledge to hold.

But when there was nothing left, there was her. There was a love who gave you gentle kisses, and drank too much coffee, with her weary silver eyes. Who'd seen things she could never speak of—and yet somehow, she still remained so unflinchingly kind; as though it cost her nothing. And she stayed, didn't she? Even when you did not deserve it, she gave you her heart. Soft and bleeding and yours. 

The girl who gave you roses from her mother's garden, who made you syrupy sweet, grinning ear to ear 'cause she looked so pretty in the starlight. 'Cause she guided your talons and you painted a future with her—a disgustingly normal future. With six kids, and a little house surrounded by fields of daisies. With no screaming, or fighting—finally, a life you didn't have to survive.

So you will learn her soft, gentle kind of love like a second language. You will talk yourself down from rage and panic and hatred, you will let the little kid in your head go. After all these years.

You will tuck him into bed, read him a story, and close the door. For good this time.

You will whisper to her as she falls asleep in your trembling arms: the war is over, the war is over, the war is over, and we are at peace. Even as bombshell fragments fall like rain from the sky, even as the death toll rises, even as the world comes to an end before your eyes. Because how the hell else are you supposed to sleep at night?