Winter

The night was cold. The chill seeped, snaking and winding and falling. The moon was stark, aghast, and silent.

And he was still. His flesh pricked in effulgence, the hum of his breathing filling into a low, heavy silence. He was Alone.

The moonlight fell softly, covering the world in a misled snowfall. He breathed in the dusty wisps of his own self confusion, watching each strand of wind blow away the stomach-fulls of a familiar ache.

The night felt different as he stood at the end of things, staring down into the inky depths of his bane. His salvation.

The wind rattled the windowpane softly and whistled, inviting him. His head throbbed and he took another breath, thoughts whirling around his tormented brain. The moon would go to sleep, soon, and the clouds would drift across the vast blue, turning first bright amaranth to the sun in greeting.

His eyes drifted to the sky through the window he cleaned so carefully, the stars high above twinkling like the eyes of some great beast watching him. He briefly wondered if she looked down on him and thought he was as beautiful as he thought of her.

But he didn't think. He was just a Thing. Only a Doll, created in place of a deceased child from the flesh of others.

A blanket spread across the sky, blotting out the light, he sighed.

The clouds were only visible at night when they blocked the stars. As if the sky spilled ink across the borders of the world. He looked to the place where the great eye once shone brightly and hummed. The moon once lit the unknown, but it became dark, and one must face the unfamiliar, unprepared.

He could deal with that.

Above, a gust of wind battered playfully at his window, but ripped through one cloud, and thought he heard its neighbors scream. The stars peered out wildly as the other clouds rushed to their side, not fast enough. You cannot repair a cloud.

He stood there, the cold of the stone floor of the tower on his bare feet soaking the warmth from his bones until his skin shuddered and his hair stood like soldiers. He let the cold blow through him as the moon crossed the sky and the night slowly became day.

He didn't know how long he stood there for. Perhaps it was centuries, perhaps mere hours.

His eyes opened to see the soft blue of the sky, the white clouds scudding about as the birds began their song-- the bright eye looking down as a warning.

The eye in the blue face saw the eye in the stone face. The nodding flower stretched from the crack in the stone just outside the glass of the window, the yellow center of the daisy watching the colourless wind.

"That eye is like to this eye," said the first eye, "but in a low place, not in high place."

He looked down to the ocean below the tower, no longer a mass of swirling darkness, but a deep blue-green with white foam.

He felt the warmth increase, but not stifling, and looked up once more through the glass. Was the sun coaxing him?

The clouds danced in shapes, swirling to become elongated or short, wide, and thin. They became something new, something old, and spun and rearranged again.

"Who are you?" they asked.

"I do not know," he said.

He had thought of jumping so many times, before, he knew, but each time thoughts of the ocean would cradle him and mix with his tears, bringing him back to the shore of the waking world and non-shattered glass. The spray would have whispered soothing nothings as he would lay exhausted in the shallows, hair drifting around like a dark halo.