STARDUST ✶ honkai star rail.

wax wings ◞ ‎ sunday

His complacency has its limits, and now you've strayed too far from your cage, head filled with fanciful dreams, casting aside the world he had built to contain you in blind reach for the skies. But as much as you may dream to fly, you are no more than Icarus — he will ensure your fall, to remind you where your heart truly lies, because what are you, without your wings?

***

"A GIFT FOR YOU."

You turn your head from the window to face the owner of the voice standing in the shadow of the doorway. You're met with a pair of golden eyes — ones you know all too well by now, a placated smile dancing across his lips, as a servant wheels in something on a covered cart.

Your own eyes follow it with a look of narrowed suspicion as it comes to a stop in front of you. "What is it?"

You've learnt not to accept gifts from strangers. Especially from someone like him, who parades himself as some charitable saint — you're not the first in his line of victims to be met with that same disconcerting smile that has charmed thousands equally well with similar acts.

No matter how much he showers you with generosity and priceless gifts, suffocating you with all he owns — you still have some sense within you to retain your wits, however faint they've grown with his overbearing presence slowly chipping away at you. He is no lover of yours, bearing these gifts.

First and foremost, he is still your captor — and it is still his roof that you're trapped beneath.

"May I?" He indicates with his hand.

You don't say anything further, hardly acknowledging him. You're tempted to turn back around and resume your daydreaming, itself the smallest of resistances you can offer amid everything he holds over you. You know it's futile nonetheless — he doesn't need your permission anyways, stepping into the room and striding over to you.

Sunday approaches you slowly, footsteps silent against the carpeted floor, eyes darting between you and your unmoving position by the window. Each footfall, each breath is marked with the same wariness that flashes across your own irises. Unease roils in your gut, itself one of the few things he cannot eradicate completely, when you know of what he's done, and what he's capable of.

The halo that rests atop his head gleams with an almost blinding luminescence as he steps into the light, reflected from the rays of the afternoon sun filtering through the windows. He looks almost ethereal, divine even, as if he could truly move the world with nothing but a thought — despite being the furthest from any angelic being of good.

The notion he can, remains nonetheless. Everything that surrounds you is of his craft, his own thoughts and dreams made into this delicate cage. But he cannot move you as easily — you are not a nameless jewel among his dreamscape able to be carved and shaped to his will, yourself a figurine of glass he so desperately wants to preserve flawlessly, refusing to expose you to the elements.

He wants to appease you, in his own strange way. And who are you to deny him in anything he does, when the world you stand upon is in his hands?

"You didn't appear to be very fond of the jewellery I got you last time." Sunday starts. You flinch, as he rests his gloved hand on your shoulder, reaching around you to tug at the cloth. "I thought maybe something more familiar to you would be better received."

"Familiar?" You echo hoarsely, as you turn your head, forcing yourself to spare a glance at what lay beneath the now uncovered cloth.

It's just a cage, you realise a second later, shoulders slumping forward as you heave a sigh. It seems to be holding nothing more than what appears to be some sort of feathered bird that takes you a brief moment to recognise.