FFXIV Write 2022: Deiform
Cassian had wondered often, over the course of the months he'd been trapped within his own body, if something had finally snapped. If there had been damage done so deeply to his psyche that he could no longer recover from it.
He'd laughed in front of the others, made jokes - because of course he did. That's who he was. And it was who he wanted to continue to be for them. His family. These people who had taken him in when he'd not even had a pair of pants to his name, these friends who had protected him - saved him in ways he still could not comprehend. They had come for him and he knew, deeply in his being, that he was beloved.
Yet try as he might, the hatred he'd tucked down so deeply was boiling up again and the enormity of it terrified him. There was no safe place to lay this rage, to ease it down, to ignore it. It was destructive and corrosive and eventually it was going to tear its way out of him and his worst nightmares would become a terrible reality. Mithras, for all his useless commentary and snide remarks had suggested something useful - for once.
They had worked together to tear the hole, to widen it, to find the right place at the bottom of Witch Drop that had seen enough death, enough pain that the veil was already thin and they had punched through it as one, leaving behind the only world Cassian had ever known.
Here, Mithras had said, was a place for pain and rage and all the emotions Cassian was too afraid to expose under the sun. Because there was no sun here to offend.
No refuge.
No sanctuary.
He'd been warned that once they came here, they might not be able to come back - because they may not want to. Here, they were free to be as they were intended to be. The obsidian horns that curled up from his forehead were magnificent, crystalline in appearance, lightning thrumming deep within their cores like marrow. Others ringed his skull, protruding up through slate hair and extending sharp edges towards the dying sky. Claws tipped each finger, promising disembowelment with relative ease. The eyes that looked ahead were pools of ink, the silver irises ringed with a bursting star of hellish red.
The shroud of wings extended from his sides, flaring wide on either side of him, shadows rolling off the smooth membrane of stretched skin, dripping from the curved claw tips at the apex of his wings. The creatures who felt that shadow fall upon them turned, intentions clear in their bulging eyes as they beheld their newest meal.
And Cassian wondered again, distantly, if he'd gone mad as he consumed the broken things that had mistaken him for prey.
And he wondered if he would ever find his way out.
