The TwiceBorn

The Devil's Second Stride

"But she's bringing the moon and the stars to me... Damned permanent reverie..." Dermot Kennedy

The fire slowly burned down to embers and the animals of the deeper wood began to move about, on the hunt for food or to avoid being prey but Alora was unaware of it all as she drifted off into a fevered sleep, filled by restless, troubling images she couldn't understand.

A faint rustle and shift broke through her uneasy sleep and she was instantly awake,  her senses  as pure and alive as parched grass scenting an on-coming storm.

It's time...

She watched it struggle up, balanced on its one leg, and look about with its one eye. It was the same boy...

I'm his boy...

...yet with one half clothed in shadow. It stared at her for a moment with one licorice drop eye, then turned away and began to hop, with amazing agility through the trees, like some strange and silent flightless bird as she lay back and watched it go.

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He couldn't sleep. He tossed and turned, kicking away the torn blanket, and the night breeze was both hot and cold against his sunburned flesh.

How could he have made such a mistake?

Aubery lay on his back and stared, unseeingly, up into the sky and played the entire event over and over in his head.

He had drawn on them. Demons...or saviors. His deliverers from this silent black trough of one breath to the next and had driven them away to tell all the others of his weakness.

His shameful need. For her.

He sat up and turned to look at her, his burned face pallid in the slivered moonlight. His teeth bit down on his lower lip and the sudden taste in his mouth was dark and bitter. She lay on her back, one arm thrown across her face, a posture he'd come to know well. A terrible sense of wanting filled him.

Wanting whatever it was to stop yet wanting it to continue forever...

But it could be easy...if he killed her...made an offering of her...a sacrifice...it would make everything right. It would show them that they meant more...

It was an idea that dug in and took hold. One hand reached out and cupped her neck, and the brown stick-like fingers tightened. An owl screamed somewhere off in the darkness, a clash of predator and prey. A hot flush began to creep over him and spread as he willed his fingers to tighten a bit more. His mind calmly chimed in with "Cover her mouth with your other hand; you don't want Gray waking up"

His eyes half-closed in some kind of ecstasy as he saw himself take her body once he was done and set it aflame. Those flames (truth-tellers they were!) rising to the sky and whispering fiery words as they swept through the brush and trees. The smoke would find the saviors and tell them what was true when it came down to the measure of who he truly was.