letting my armour fall again

Gabriel de le Poer · 01-26-2011, 08:35 PM

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This is dated for January 12th. +5

It had been six months.

Like most animals, Gabriel did not have a clear perception of dates as men once did. He observed the passing of the seasons and the changing of the moon without any true concept of time. He was a wolf after all, and he lived in the here-and-now. To think about time, as this flat and scientific thing, was contradictory to his nature. There was now, there was then, and there was the future. He could not worry about things that had not yet come to pass, or things that had once been.

Except he was more than a wolf, and this diseased had made him conscious of the past despite his own mind’s attempts to block out such things. He recalled tactics and battles in his flesh and blood, recalled the sensations of love and loss, remembered what he imagined was pain (for no memory can duplicate pain) and felt the ache for things he had once known. Sometimes, too, he recalled darker things that made his skin crawl and made him wake in the night. He no longer screamed, no longer fought these shadowy effigies as he once had. The short, wolfish sleep forbade such things. Gabriel could not fall apart when Inferni looked to him as a leader.

Yet when this dream had come, he had known it for what it was. Haku’s death replayed before him, over and over again. He killed his Shadow or his Shadow killed him. The dream changed as it came, but in the end he recalled the beast and saw himself as the killer—saw himself through Haku’s eyes and knew that he had slaughtered the wolfish part of himself that he could not face. Gabriel had to kill the demon, kill his Shadow, in order to be free. Still, though, they were chained together. Perhaps they always would be.

He woke with the echoes of the dream fading from his mind, leaving him only with the sensation of dread. Sable colored fur did not betray him in the darkness, though few would be out at such a time. Hybrid, perhaps, but Gabriel knew that the coyote did not journey to this part of the forest. He had made certain that no one would, marking the place aggressively and barring the area with branches. Yet as he crossed through the open plains of the Waste a shadow fell over him. Marlowe swooped low and the hybrid paused at the edge of the forest to greet him.

They passed mundane reports to one another before the bird finally eyed him with those terribly piercing eyes and got to the point. “You should destroy it,” he said, oddly clear for his often broken speech. Gabriel looked at him darkly, aware of his own rising aggression regarding the cursed place. “You don’t think it would make a good trophy?” He growled, finding little humor in the idea. The raven laughed, a wretched cawing sound, and shook snow from his back. “You gave it power. You must break it.” Mythology. Marlowe had his share of that, given that he was remarkably smart for a bird. He was too damn smart, in Gabriel’s opinion. “I broke him,” the halfbreed snapped. “You and your companions erased his flesh from the earth.”

“No,” Marlowed croaked, cocking his head. “You say his blood goes on. You break bone tonight or never. Power stay or go. No more, no less.” The raven took wing before the Aquila had a chance to respond. He stared into the darkness and after a long time, slunk into the tree line.

The skull, half-buried in snow, grinned as it always had. Tayui’s marks still remained etched on the damned thing. Gabriel shifted to his Optime form and picked up the cold bone. It had never felt heavy to him, never felt as he had imagined it should have. He spent a long time in silence, staring at the now-fragile skull and thinking over what the bird had said.

He built a fire out of pine and when it was hot enough he threw the skull into it. It smoked and hissed as if it wished to speak, and perhaps it did. Gabriel listened and felt the cold against his back battle the heat at his chest. In the fire the skull hissed and popped, charring black and turning terrible. The fire burnt for what felt like eternity.

In the end, ashes were all that remained. They blew away with the cold, biting wind. He realized what Marlowe had meant and left that barren place behind. When he made it to the borders of the forest, he found the raven perched low. They spoke again, this time in low speech, and watched the sun rise.

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