Rogues

Episode 5 | Prince

He felt the wave of power drift over him from somewhere deeper in the forest, signalling that it was time for him to leave. The motion of his running feet began to fade away with his body as he ghosted through the trees in his shadow form.

The portal was in front of Leyak in no time, due to his added speed from being in his element. He floated into the glowing circle, watches the small sparks of magic working their way around him and slowly edging him out of his shadow form. He sighed into it, allowing the light to engulf him.

Most found transportation vier portals very dizzying and disorientating, but the process felt similar to ghosting for the first time after a while so he wasn't all that bothered by it.

Leyak was a Titan-Descendant Shadow ghoul. He usually shortened it down to a 'half-titan shadow' when explaining it though, due to the length of the title. Usually Titan-Decendants were born from generations of Titan couples that slowly adapted to life as regular ghouls, but he was a part of the exception. If a male Titan-Desendant produced a child with a female regular ghoul, then there was a 50/50 chance of the kit being a Titan-Decendant aswell. It wouldn't have happened if the female had been the Titan-Decendant though, for whatever reason.

He'd had two older brothers, Malphas and Tunnanu, who were both regular Shadow ghouls. They were pretty much the only reason he'd known that he was a Titan-Decendant, by comparing his abilities to theirs. When reluctantly teaching him to turn into his shadow form, he'd accidentally taken a large portion of the ground below him into the shadow realm aswell and left it behind when he came back. Two things in that incident had convinced his brothers that he was a Titan-Decendant: the fact that he was able to take other objects or people into his shadow form, which regular shadow ghouls weren't able to do, and the fact that he had access to the shadow realm, a small pocket of reality that existed everywhere but was only accessible to the Titans or their disendants. Leyak hadn't even realized that those abilities had been unusual for a shadow ghoul at the time.

He was thrown into a strange other world and had to shift right back into his shadow form to avoid hitting the floor. Once he was stable, he reappeared again, turning to see Poppy and Bismuth huddled together. Poppy was shaking excessively and Bismuth seemed to be pushing the colder air away from them. They noticed him stood there and took a moment to realize his lack of a reaction to the new climate.

"Are you n-not cold?" Poppy asked in disbelief. He could hear her teeth chattering as she tryed to warm herself up.

He just smiled back at them, "It's colder in the shadow realm. I'm used to the quick change in temperature."

Leyak cursed under his breath as he suddenly started to feel a change in Bismuth's emotions, from fear to anger. He turned and immediately noticed the subtle fire that burned in the taller ghoul's eyes.

"Hey, Moth, you alright?" 'Moth' was a nickname he'd given Bismuth a few years prier and he still used it occasionally to signal that he'd felt something from him. Back when the nickname was first chosen, Leyak and Bismuth had been in a relationship and had been very sure that they were meant for each other. A bond had even started to form between them.

However, Leyak ended up noticing that he'd caught feeling for Em and realised that the 'love' he'd felt for Bismuth had been more of a result of his childhood than of true affection. Their relationship had been going through a rough patch at the time as well since the Air ghoul had felt his distance and been very negative about it so, when Leyak announce that he thought it would be best for things to end between them because he could feel something festering for someone else, Bismuth had agreed that it was for the best, despite his hidden disappointment that they hadn't managed to make it work. But, after seeing the way that Leyak looked at Em, the pure love and adoration in his eyes, Bismuth had decided to finally let it go, instead encouraging him to make advances on Em and helping him gain enough confidence to finally ask her if she felt the same way for him.