felicitygs | alphabet challenge

Y - Light

Once, he was light.

“Does it bother you?” she asks, and the shadows stir-twist-collapse.

Not really they whisper.

“He says he’s not an end.”

The shadows pause, and then he’s there, white skin and gold eyes, tarnished hair that might once have been gold, lounging across the couch.

“He’s not,” he agrees.

“Does that mean you are?”

He tilts his head slightly, closing his eyes, clearly thinking, and she watches. She’s half-nervous, startled; there is something cold in him, that radiates and chills the room, chasing the shadows that follow after him. For all he looks like a dimmed flame, he is not light.

Not anymore.

“Yes,” he finally says. “I believe I am.” He opens cat gold eyes to look at her. “But I am also a start.”

She pauses, thinking of what to ask next.

“Would you like to know the trick?” he asks.

“No,” she says, because she knows his trick, the flames of one stroked to world-burning to bring him to life again. A dangerous trick, because if one doesn’t know how to do it…

He shrugs.

“Pity,” he says, closing his eyes, fading to shadow again. “It’s a good trick.”

She thinks of worship and emotion and devotion laid at his feet, mourning and tears spilled in his name, for him, and how one is never truly dead until no one remembers–and he, he has nine realms that can’t forget.

“It is,” she says, “if you can do it.”

“There is that.”

The last she sees of him is a smile, beautiful and beatific, then the shadows are only shadows again.