Wanderer // Orpheus Harlow [WIP]

One day I awoke into a dream and I'm afraid I haven't slept since.

Former citizen of District Three... wait for itttt... Bang Bang's biological father. YEAH. I WENT THERE.

Oh yeah. He's off his rocker alright, but it's all fantastically real to him. He knows how to battle forest fires and that if you just hook the wires up the right way, you can definitely hear the trees speak.



Deep in the sweet murmuring of the wilderness is a house made of memories and echoes. There, doorways open into rooms with invisible walls disguised as thin air and a staircase spirals upward into nothingness. Perched atop the highest stair, legs dangling entirely too far past the edge, is a man who has always been too busy gazing into the distance to worry about the precipice of danger he balances on. Falling isn't even the least of his worries. In fact, it worries him not at all.

The crown of his head shines beneath the sun, egg-smooth and ageless, reflecting a sky full of clouds that will never reach as high as his thoughts. Despite his forest-home, he is pale and perpetually proper, forever dressed in a weather-worn suit, socks that time has leeched from black to gray, and a pair of particularly improbable leather shoes that refuse to trade their polished appearance in for scuffs and a confession that they do not live in the urban humdrum of District Three any longer. This is not a man who wears his thirteen years of woodland traveling or four weary decades of life like a shirt or a second skin, but a person could see the evidence mapped in the callouses across his palms if they were interested enough to look. However, most find a great many things to be curious about Orpheus Descartes before they ever get around to contemplating the roughed up pads of his fingers, where his skin has been burnished to something more akin to armor than flesh.

These days it's no wonder that he's growing tougher. The fragmented thoughts that take such rapid flight within his mind — only to discover how fragile they are against the vicious wind of reality — won't leave him be. He wants to stitch them together into sense, but the splitting seam nag him until he's left with no choice but to throw a punch. Knuckles crashing into tree bark or splitting against stone, his brawling fisticuffs never seem to engage him with the target he seeks, but his dogged persistence has burned away everything useless within his body. Only stubborn muscle and aching bones remain, the joints whining when the rain comes, wailing out reminders that he is no longer twenty-something and superhuman.



The rain sings sadder songs than his wife, although their voices could be sisters. Each drip-patter-patter-fall feels like the otherworldly slip of memories and on these days, the nagging of his thoughts takes a more melancholy turn. That staircase to nowhere promises something to him whenever the sky opens up like this, whispering that maybe the forgotten things within Orpheus will open up too.

There are footsteps in his mind that skip in time to his heartbeat, despite the erratic tendencies of its palpitations when the sounds echos through him. This is the evidence of forgotten things: the hem of a sundress, the tiniest toes he'd ever seen, the tantrum war cry of metal clanging against metal with a BANG. Each image ripples against the falling water and the difficulty of his forever failing recollection. It is only the most fleeting of visions that remain; just enough to haunt him with an importance he can't identify.

His wife, Arienette, she remembers. However, she won't say anything more than a murmur about being glad Orpheus doesn't recall the awful truth. Secretly, she is jealous of the way he has locked the traumatic events of history up within his mind, losing himself to an imaginary existence she doesn't understand. It is only in the moments when she sings, hushed lullabies as if wishing one of their children to sleep, that he becomes aware that she lost something... and that he must have to. Their children are too old for such songs, having grown into mischievous teenagers who would rather spend time with the wilderness they live in than with their parents. But still, his wife sings her sweet and terrible songs, the loss ringing through his soul until he feels the emptiness as well. That's how he knows that when the two of them left District Three, they left something behind. Except even Orpheus could never imagine that they'd left their daughter.



With his infinite imagination, Orpheus has found plenty of ways to forget not only the name and face of Valencia Harlow, but rather a lot about himself as well.



Inventors. Uprising.