Mount Everfall your skin knew battle before it knew war

“Unlikely,” Nero mused in quiet, coy agreement, a small hum of amusement drawing in the back of his throat, tail giving a single, soft wag against the earthen stone he reclines back upon. “I like unlikely much better than impossible.” if he was being honest, that was. Impossible was too limiting, he felt. A word designed by more superior beings to keep those with potential from reaching their full potential even if they are inferior: by birth, by circumstance. There is a twitch of Nero’s lips and a small duck of his head, humbled as he takes Darcia’s words of complexity in correlation to him to be a compliment. It hadn’t sounded as an insult might, at least, but in truth it was up to Nero in how he interpreted it. He chose compliment — perhaps because he was quite desperate, vainly so even!, to hear one fall from the titan’s lips.

“Perhaps because it is easy for me to get lost in them,” and even if Nero had not always known it he’d sought to lose himself in the mythos he’d come to learn to weave as expertly as his mother before him. Expectation was a heavy thing and being the chosen had been easy at first. It had made him feel singled out, special, the superior of his litter even as his siblings fell beneath his shadow because Nero is a vain and narcissistic creature at his (very) worst and until the heavy burden began to press against his shoulders as the sky presses against those of Atlas for the rest of eternity did it open Nero’s eyes. Keeping Manakin safe, re-telling the myths in poetic verses that make his telling different from Gaia’s own it kept him from being crushed for the longest time even though.

“It is dangerous to love the sun, I’ve heard. Icarus loved Apollo so much he fashioned wings so that he might finally touch his lover as he runs across the sky; but it is not for mortal to touch and when he got too close it melted his wings and he plummeted to the sea where drowned.” There are no heroes with happy endings — only tragedies. Icarus, Perseus, Hercules, Achilles and Patroclus. The Macedonian let out a small, terse sound of amusement. “What about you Darcia?” Nero seeks to make an inquiry of his own, now. “Have you never desired anything unlikely?” He does not use the word impossible, true to his (rather stubborn) nature.