Dusk

5/27/16
"We need you to," the others didn't say. But you saw it in their cold eyes, their hard smiles when you told them why you couldn't, shouldn't?

Sometimes, after you wash your claws off and pick up your mask, you wish they would do something awful, something, anything, to you. Then it would be so much easier, so much more right- justified- to say no. On worse days, when the boar won't just go and die already, you tell yourself that they would be the ones to do the awful things that run through your head, they would pierce your river flight through the heart and spread his guts and leave a note saying that a raptorik got him while you were away, and then you could throw down your war-flags and rush them in their obvious, raptorik haven't been sighted in weeks it didn't even take any food you liar, and you snap back from your reverie. Yes, it's a reverie now, it's just so much easier this way. And yet, when you face reality again, you know what you have been doing. It's unfair, it's fake, it's a lie you say after you do it yourself and then frame them, and it's imaginary. You can't judge them on what you think they'll do, because that's a witch trial: they're suspect, and thus they're guilty, and nothing has been learned.

It's not painful and it's not too hard to face and you're not bitter, you really aren't. There's just that empty feeling where your daydreams resided that you know you'll never fill up with real memories, not with what you are and what they saw.

The wind rushes past your sap-wet wings, chilling them through. It'll be worse when they dry with pebbles and twigs and dirt caught within them. Maybe Scorch will stay and help scrape it off with the ridged scales on her forearms, because the last time you left them like that, you could hardly fly to the arena the next day.