The Dawnfire Family

A salt water sting flares across the dozens of tiny abrasions that pepper my hands as I wash the blood off. I welcome the sharp bite like a cherished memory. It reminds me that I’m alive.

It reminds me that they’re not.

My little box of belongings. The one I kept polished, the one I kept in good shape when I let everything else fall apart.

It was my heart, manifested.

The grungy old building smelled of booze, acrid smoke and the thrumming of the music that resonated through the walls. I felt my lips slide into a satisfied grin that I rarely allowed myself. The Cesspool was lively tonight.

      Cynrick was dreaming. The creature, Silent, was visiting him within the sacred canopy of his sleeping mind. She called it walking. When she abandoned the chains of the shared illusion of the physical for the eternal mist of the collective unconscious. That at least was what he theorized it was. He had no idea truly what she was doing to him, or how, just that she was there in his mind with him. They stood together on a ledge of cut granite, the edge of some half-crumbled temple built of memories. The landscape of his mind was a dismal and haunted ruin, ripped from the pages of a history lost to all but historians and grave-robbers. He was both. His dreaming world was unlike any of the others Silent had touched, a graveyard slowly sinking into a fetid swamp.

My body worked like a perfectly calibrated machine - easily as flawless and efficient as one of the many brilliant contraptions scattered around Cynrick’s workshop. My anger was channeled perfectly, humming through my veins like an electric current - the source of my strength and precision.

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat, "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
(Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 6) 

Have you ever felt that you were on the cusp of evolution, only to be violently ripped from it?

Felt that everything was going to change - the path was laid at last, and you had almost set foot upon it...only to be knocked on your ass?

Dereliction:

noun

1. deliberate or conscious neglect; negligence; delinquency:dereliction of duty.

2. the act of abandoning something.

That was what it had come down to. The Spider was abandoning her web.

Captivity really didn’t become her.

The cold iron of the shackles chafed her skin and the uncomfortable position she was bound in was making her muscles stiff.

Though at least now that fucking Whitedawn bitch wasn’t spewing questions at her. She was grateful for the solitude.