For just a while, there was a blessed comfort in being nothing. In being the dark, the night, the shadow, a thing not mortal but instead an idea, a concept, an essence so pure it could not be corrupted. That soothing cool darkness took Desine as his shadows flowed over the land, rolling like fog coming in off the sea, withering the grass, leaving insects and birds and small animals dead in their wake, shriveled blackened corpses with their life forces sucked out of them while larger beasts scattered into the brush in advance of that sickly, necrotic scent.
By the time Desine reformed just off the path to Shattrath, out of sight, he felt...not quite whole, no. But able to hold himself together long enough to walk through the gates and procure himself a room in the inn maintained by the Scryers. He'd left all his belongings in the bank's long-term storage facility in the upper tier of the city, thinking he would never be coming back for them. But now he found himself sitting numbly on the bed in his room with a pack clasped in his lap, trying to tell himself to go through such normal routines as bathing, changing, eating, sleeping. Things mortals needed to survive, to stay sane.
Things he could hardly bring himself to care about anymore.
He closed his eyes. A bitter sensation welled in the back of his throat and reached its hot, hateful fingers all the way down to the pit of his stomach to clutch tight. "I hate you," he whispered. His eyes burned, watery and hot. "I hate you. You left me here...y-you...you left me..."
No one answered. No one answered, because the one he spoke to was dead and never coming back.
He curled forward with a low, hurting whimper--a whimper that suddenly turned into a scream, raw and hoarse and frustrated, as he thrust the pack away from him, sending it spilling across the floor. Rage poured through his limbs like blood, fueling his movements as his hands raked across the dressers, the bed, the nightstand, ripping the covers from the mattress, tipping over the furniture with a violent crash, tearing the drapes from the walls, shattering the mirror into a thousand pieces that reflected back a thousand images of his scream.
"Why?" he sobbed, breathing roughly, hardly able to see for the bright, hot tears flooding his eyes, pouring down his face. "Why did you have to die? Why? I c-can't...I can't..." Amidst the ruin of his room, he sank down to his knees, crumpling as if his strings had been cut and bowing over his thighs, arms huddled against his chest. "I can't do this without you," he whispered. "I can't stand this alone...I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!" The litany trailed into a rough, broken sob, hitching and hoarse, ending in a quiet, shuddering whisper. "...I miss you..."
His sobs choked off into a frustrated, bitter sound as the door to his room suddenly slammed open, and the horrified innkeeper stared about at the ruin. "Sir! Are you all ri--oh by the Sunwell, what--you can't--!"
"I'll pay for it," Desine ground out wearily, fingers clenching into fists against his thighs, struggling with the urge to just...destroy it all. The room. The snooty, offended innkeeper. The entire city. He trembled with it, with the compulsion to vent his pain on someone else. That was the line he walked, every day. This thin border between monster and man. He closed his eyes, staring down at his fingers as they gathered up scrunched handfuls of his dirt-stained robe. "Get out," he whispered. The innkeeper started to protest--only to reel back as Desine's head snapped up in an inky lash of tangled hair, eyes flaring alien and bright and vicious, a row of sickle-like teeth bared on a snarl. "Get out!"
The man fled, leaving Desine alone with his misery.
Always alone.
Slowly, his hand crept into his pack, searching all the way to the bottom. When he touched soft-worn, old flannel, his breaths caught in his throat. Gingerly he pulled out a red and black plaid checkered shirt, enormous, well-worn, well-loved. For just a few moments he curled it against his chest, fingers knotting and snaring in it, as he breathed in the faint scent still clinging to it. Years old, but it still smelled of musk and woodsmoke and green fields, and his heart felt like it was bleeding as he buried his face in the weathered fabric and wept until he felt completely dry, and couldn't spare another drop without draining out the last of his soul.
Eventually, exhaustion overtook him. And with weary movements he stripped out of the robe, staring bitterly for long moments at the shadow-markings making stockings up his thighs, at the band of tattooed silver that coiled around his flesh like a brand of ownership. Then he wrapped himself in the flannel shirt, enormous and dwarfing him, clearly made for a much larger man. It enfolded him like arms that never would again, and he huddled in a tiny ball in the center of the destroyed bed and willed himself to sleep, if only so he might forget.
He dreamed dreams of fire and blood. Dreams of carnage and death, punishment and retribution, madness and screams. Familiar dreams; dreams in which he was others' nightmare, in which he drove them to madness before he took their lives to feed his endless hunger. Yet something about these dreams was different, not the familiar flavor of memory but the shadow of something...something else. Something that told him these dreams were connected to Sathyre, and for it he slept restlessly, troubled and fitful as a noisome child, whimpering and tossing in his sleep with the flannel shirt wrapped around him.
He woke exhausted. Exhausted and dully numb, rising with the dawn with that endless reminder that life went on. Life when on even when you felt stuck in one place, even when your world stopped, your clock broken at the one moment where everything shattered, and no one realized that you'd been left behind because they were too busy looking forward. Too busy living. And so he had to pretend to live, too. So he had to do ordinary things like bathing, like carefully packing Tahlaith's shirt away, like dressing in a fresh, clean robe--sleeveless white gossamer that trailed around his form like faerie wings, high-waisted and graceful, flowing scarves looping from the shoulders to his wrists. He had to be beautiful, after all. Ever the predator. Ever the seducer.
He looked at his reflection in the largest fragment of the mirror, and wondered why the man who looked back at him looked like nothing more than a lovely corpse.
He'd been so much happier when he'd accepted death.
