kill your darlings :: axyl

[pogue]

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Ines falls, and with her a piece of him goes too.

Axyl feels it rip from his chest, severed heart strings and dying soul clattering to the ground with the rip of a cannon. It splits the clouds and claws its way over the  howling winds and the sound of something decisive snapping from the mounts behind him. He stands, motionless and forgotten, the victor of a battle he never should have had to fight, running from his own sins and straight into another.

New day, new ghost- the shadows dance around him across the stones and rocks, stained permanent with red and ichor.

He stands next to her body for what feels like an eternity and then some, the winds of the arena carving at his flesh and pulling him piece by piece into the choice he made, numbness spreading up from his legs and resting heavy at the front of his mind. It's a solace for a moment, the way the tingling in his cheeks and the void of the arena swallows him whole, snuffing out any light and putting him halfway into his own coffin. Easier- to think, to exist, to not have to rationalize the fact that he killed an innocent person, her body strewn across the ground in crimson, her cannon still slicing into his ears. Over and over and again and again and-

Somewhere behind him bones crunch, the final howl of a beast not his own interrupts the makeshift funeral. It's every instinct within him not to turn around, to fight the urge to look at what he's done, to move forward from the wake of his own destruction without a second thought.

Second to none, his urge to never listen to anything good- not even himself, wins out. He turns to the second fight and, above the howl of the winds, listens to Bennie let out one final and feral roar. A victory, a condemning, what the beast is doing is unthinkable, white fur now matted with red and black and the guts of something innocent. His stomach flips, skin crawls, heart sinks into nothingness. On the rocks he heaves up the contents of his own body, bile and spit and blood mixed into something sinister, curling his fingers into the rocks just to feel something, realizing things are too far gone to ever pull back. Always were.

Fight your ghosts, kill your darlings.

The weight of what he has to do dawns on him like a rising sun, heat and flares melting his skin into nothing, set alight with a new kind of fury. He stumbles over with his own demons, clutching the bat in his hands, Ines's blood staining the shore with the permanence of his own decision. Bennie is preoccupied with something of a victory meal, wrapped up in a sickness that was impossible to beat, gnashing fangs and pawing at himself, whimpers and whine of the damned.

How fitting, the last thing he sees is the mark of his own shadow: bat raised in resolution, heart no longer faltering, too far gone for his own good. Always was.

[Axyl kills Bennie :: more actions in maint]