Emberwood [m]Reach for light.

       

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He ripped across nature paths and made his own, head on a swivel on ready to target something familiar. Something he knew. There was nothing wrong with Gunnar. He knew he was not ill. He knew he was not rotting. 

He knew even more that it was a deranged attempt of dramatized pity. He was not sick, and should he be, he was a weak man if he could not pull through it. Anyone could. He was no father if he couldn’t. No man. No leader. If he had stepped down from his position because of it, then he never deserved to be a man of order. No Fadir. There was nothing wrong with him.

At a stop, spiky fur raised at a bristle upon the simplest of towns. The mane along his back shook wildly with a wildcats eyes, hackles rippling down his spine in jolts. The look on this boy, hardly a man, was feral. Black tipped guard hairs, a pelt of rolled dust and a mouth that tore through stone. There was her. There was him.

And this woman.

In his way.

If they wanted him cut from this stone, then he would become it. He would be it. He would be everything they wanted him to be, and look them in their eyes when their disappointed faces fell upon them. A nasty growl erupted from the street-borns throat, cracking along his tongue as his unkempt tail lashed in the air after a terrible still. A foot forward, electrocuted by the ground. A head leveled to his shoulders, then to a raise.

Undeniably, there are bone shards in his bloodstream. Riddled with a steady breath that slips from his mouth, nose. Calm, in the eye of a violently rapid tornado. They wanted to fix him? He would undo it. All of it. One by one, to pluck threads hardly strung and bridges hardly built. His tail flagged. Look to me. Come to me.