libera me - write a small drabble about why your muse is awake at 2 am. (:
He's all but memorized the steps it takes to take a full loop of the area 'round the Lighthouse. It's quiet right now — it's not quite dark, because here in the Fade there's no real true sense of time or night and day, but it's dimmed a little and the sky is a hazy grey.
It should be disconcerting — a lot of things should be, really, from the truth that it never feels warm or cold here, just pleasantly neutral, and it always feels vaguely like being stuck in a dream. A hazy dream, a dream that he would take over so many of the others he's had: Warden dreams, Archdemon dreams, dreams where there's something horrible and discordant and there's death all 'round.
Those, though: oh, those he's used to. Those don't wake him in the middle of the night the way he did when he was new, those first years where it all felt so real and it clawed him awake like those claws were actually sinking into skin and that singing, that sound, drove into him like nails. Somewhere along the line it became expected, it became normal, it became something he was able to ignore.
He comes to the edge of the balcony wrapping 'round the Lighthouse, and rests his forearms there. Above, fractured fragments of buildings float, drift, and he wonders briefly what they were when they were true, and what they'll be when this place crumbles at last. Wonders, briefly, if this place will end when they all do, or if it will yet live on as a memory ——
But that's not what keeps him awake this night. This night, and for the past number of nights, the dreams have changed. The discordance in them has shifted — subtle, but more every time it comes. And in that shift comes something almost beautiful in the undertones, something that calls to some part of him, something that pulls him to pay attention, fills him with a yearning that borders on grief and yet feels like destiny.
He knows what that means, and once he would have taken it as a grim reality. Now, though, it makes his heart skip, pound faster. It makes him fear, and not for himself, but for the one he loves so desperately it hurts. The one he hasn't told, the one he's left sleeping in their shared quarters.
The one he can't tell, the one he won't tell, the one he has to tell.
He breathes, and it feels like fire. Dimly, he hopes maybe this is another false Calling — he remembers Corypheus all too well — but knows somewhere deep and true that it's not. How is he supposed to go forward?
Time passes, as it always does, and it gives no answers.
