monsters and philosophy {South}

I was a monster once.

(You still are, child. A creature born of darkness knows its roots no matter how long it may spend walking in the light. A year of sunshine smiles may have bleached the night from your bones, but it will always return. Everything else is just transient.)

Somewhere along the road I forgot what it was like, to be the nameless fear in the shadows, the cautionary tale told by parents to keep their children off the streets. A year with Colt turned me into something softer, something that forgot the icy embrace of merciless wrath and the heady rush of holding life and death in my hands. In his presence I forgot how to be a monster. I remember now. It's been two weeks.

Two weeks of waking up with one side of the bed empty, an arm wrapped around a pillow and holding it to my side. I used to sleep alone just fine. Now I don't sleep at all, if I can help it, fighting unconsciousness with a caffeine-nicotine time bomb that keeps me jittering through the hours until my body finally gives up the fight and I pass out for nearly a whole day. I hate those times. To sleep is to dream, and to dream is to dream of him. Colt never featured in my night terrors until now. Now he's got a starring role, holding me a captive audience to hours upon hours of everything ranging from listening to I hate you on an endless loop to helplessly watching as he rips a wizened, blackened thing that's supposed to be a heart out of my chest and grinds it to a pulp beneath his foot.

He's weakened me. That's the first thing I realize every time I claw myself, gasping, back into the waking world. There was a time where I was so much stronger than this, where the world trembled at the mention of my name and I reigned over the masses as a god of discord. Now? Now I'm scarcely more than a broken, abandoned little boy, bursting out of my nightmares with a strangled scream and clawing at the sheet-ropes tangled around my legs until I can feel some semblance of freedom. It's the deepest part of the night outside, when all the monsters come out to play.

So what am I doing cooped up in here?

There's a dagger under my pillow put there by force of habit and nameless paranoia, the cold steel feeling almost like comfort when I shimmy into yesterday's jeans and shove it into the side of my boot. There's no war business to handle tonight, but the monster in my bones has woken up, the tide of my own weaknesses serving to make it hungry.

(You were a fool to believe that he'd stay. Your poison touch clears a path around you miles wide, Kaelen. That's the way it has always been, the way it will always be. In the end, your madness is all you really have. Hold it the way you would a lover, and it will make you strong.)

The night embraces me like its long-lost prodigal son, satin-fingered shadows hiding me from the eyes of nonexistent passerby. The good folks are all at home, warm in their beds, and the derelicts won't stumble through the streets until the bars close and the sun threatens to rise. I'll wait for them with the patience that only the world's best predators have perfected - the books all talk about lions and venomous snakes, but they seem to have forgotten me - cloaked in darkness in the corner of a damp alley. Remembering how to be a monster is easy: in its own warped, demented way, killing's a lot like riding a bike.

"You can come out. I know you're there, and regardless of your probable misgivings, I am not afraid of you." A shifting shadow, a silhouette, a glint of steel in the small illumination of the distant, guttering streetlights. As my eyes adjust, I can make out some of the girl's features - willowy, light-haired, pretty, something anxious in her posture that says she isn't sure whether to run or not. A slow smile stretches across my face. About time I went out and had some fun.

The laughter comes unbidden, frigid and humorless as it flows out over my lips. In one fluid movement my blade is flashing beneath the dim light, spun carelessly between spindly fingers as if it were no more than a toy - when you think about it, that's all it really is. This is my toy, and this is my game. And oh, how I've missed playing. There's still a kitchen knife hiding in my bathroom cabinet, stained with three lives from the night Kiera died. This is a weapon, good steel stolen from the Shores that's crafted to kill. Dangerous in anyone's hands. Lethal in mine. I'm not afraid of you, she said. For some reason, that only makes me laugh more as I slip into visibility, all feline grace and the quiet veneer of murderous intent.

"Are you not? There's a whole list of dead bodies who would tell you that's a very stupid attitude to have, sweetheart."

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