[m] - blackbird singing in the dead of night

Gabriel de le Poer · 01-07-2011, 02:20 AM

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SSWM:443. We can fade to black or play it out, your choice. :]

Had Gabriel ever truly gotten to know his son, his first and only legitimate son, he would have balked at the knowledge and faith that Ezekiel placed within his own history. His son understood that heredity made men what they were—that they were all of them made up of ghosts. He would have recognized the need for conquest came from his ancestors, and they had been barbaric and terrible monsters in their own time. He would have tasted the long-gone blood of conquerors who had taken power by force and by chance and known it would forever be so. Gabriel was too, made up of ghosts. One of them, darker than the others, was also a Shadow that even he would never escape.

The faithless would never understood why it was he did what he did. To burn, to set fire to unscarred lands, this was done without doubt and without fear. Guilt had no room in his faith. When the Voice spoke, he answered. It was his duty and it was thus owed. No-God was a frightening idea to him. Without his faith, he would become responsible. Everything he would have done would have been for naught. He would need to face the madness even now he fled from, face that madness that was in itself a ghost carried on from the first de le Poer that had born red eyes and slaughtered his brothers.

He closed his eyes against her weight, so very frail against his own scarred body. Gabriel would never have imagined her to feel like this now. She was so slight, so much like a girl-child, and yet he knew she was capable of doing him harm. The half breed slowly found her face in the gloom and sought to capture it within his own eyes. How desperately he wanted to explain the world to her, to warn her of such things she knew as truths, but he saw the uselessness in this and held his tongue. Black tendrils snaked over his shoulders, hair unkempt but as sleek as a raven’s wing. Once he had been very beautiful. Now all that was left was a man worn by war and by turmoil. The beauty had left him for the mask of a warrior-king.

Gabriel breathed in her scent and knew that even if he wished it, she would never be his. That stung with a bitterness he had not felt since Jezebel’s departure—yet he did not flee from her, as the last woman had fled from him. “I am here,” he reassured her. “Dona nobis pacem,” he whispered a prayer, and closed the distance between them.

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