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The full moon shone down brightly to where Morna slept, a nap from the afternoon stretched longer than intended. The night was hardly quiet. The wind rattled through the branches of trees and the animals that frequented the night had filled it with their raucous calls. Another sound, however, rose over all of those.

Morna's lip twitched upwards, baring fangs that glittered and shone. His head lashed to the side and back again, snapping at everything and nothing in particular. He could remember. He could remember everything so clearly and yet it was all warped. Blood. Blood had seeped it's way into every piece of recollection. It ran down in rivulets of his imagination until it seemed to pool at the very core of his consciousness. Or was that his unconsciousness? Dreaming or waking, it made no difference. The taste was in his mouth and rolling over his tongue, so familiar, achingly familiar. A taste cherished and reviled. It was making him sick. It was making him hungry, hungry to the core, it was making him-

Mornandum's eyes shot open and for a moment he was blinded. The moon shone so brightly it hurt his eyes. What gave it the right to see him like this? Like...

The hand that blocked the light was furless, had five digits, pale skin. Human. Or elfen. It made no difference. Human enough. He had transformed in his sleep, or was he still dreaming? How long had he been dreaming? It all seemed so far away... that he had been a dragonfly in the first place seemed so far away. He was human, no. Inhuman. Inhuman. Inhuman.

He sat up and wound a hand through his long dark hair for the sake of having something to grip as that word chanted through his mind. Inhuman.

The sound of foreign movement wrenched through Mornandum's mind. Someone. His head whipped in the direction that he had heard it from, eyes well used to darkness picking out the form of a canine. Small. Female. A young adult. Showing cautious behavior but not fearful. Animal. It was only an animal. Inhuman.

He stood then, straightening out his two legs beneath him while he watched her on her four. The moon behind him became eclipsed by the rising tendrils of darkness that spread behind him like wings. Did he recognize this... this creature? Did it even matter if he did?

A smile crept slowly across his face, twisting at the edges of his mouth in an expression that would be at home on neither an elf nor a dragonfly's face. He had one question and one question alone to ask.

"Do you believe in sin?"

"Do you now... Do you?" From his inhuman throat came an inhuman laugh. This human skin he wore had become too full of holes to ever be convincing again. He had been dreaming for too long. Or awake for too long. Or caught somewhere in between. Or maybe that's where he always had been and it was only with the moon shining down so brightly that he was able to see well enough to recognize it.

In a flash those thoughts were gone. He was in the present. Now. He had to focus at the tasks at hand, not let his mind endlessly meander upon endlessly tangled paths. Focus. That was what he needed. Focus. He focused in upon the creature's eyes. Amber eyes. Fearless eyes. What sin could possibly hide behind those flawless, beautiful, empty eyes?

"No... you don't." The words would have been a croon if croons could be filled with tension and malice.

"What do I believe?" He repeated her words and they hung for a moment there in his mind. What was it that he believed in anymore? In his youth it would have been an easy answer. He believed in nothing. In later days it would be knowledge that he believed him, that drove him to keep flying even when the sky above and the world below were as black as his own self. Later still another belief would find him. A false belief. A wrong belief. Wrong to think about even if the thoughts came unbidden to his mind.

And after all that, what did he believe in? His eyes rolled upwards to the moon that had illuminated too much already. Too much to be forgiven. No matter how much darkness he could pour out of himself he could never be able to stop the relentless, constant, fickle moon.

"I believe I'd destroy it, if I could. I believe that beautiful people, creatures, things, can wither and bleed and break and die." His entire torso now tilted backwards so he could look up at the moon that had taunted him his entire life by shattering the blackness of the perfect sky. He talked like he had forgotten that he was talking to anyone but himself, forgotten or cared so little that it didn't matter. "I believe..." he continued. "I believe in sin and believe that it is something that an animal like you can never know. There is nothing to steal if there is nothing to own. There is no one to murder if all that there is to kill..." His head dropped down, black eyes meeting Michiko's amber ones once more. "Is beasts like you."

"Yes." The word was long and drawn out, a hiss. "For are we not all animals in this forest? It isn't a sin to kill an animal... Just like it isn't a sin for an animal to kill."

Not a sin to kill other kinds, their own kind, any kind. Animals were faultless and simple and could revel at the blood in their mouth and not gag at the memory of the taste so familiar he still smelled it when he woke up and then it reminded him of the taste which reminded him of the smell which reminded him that all that was gone and that he was as animal as any of the creatures crawling along the ground that he had disdained his entire life.

Somewhere in that thought he had clenched his fists and now he could feel the first moisture of the blood drawn out by those delicately pointed fingernails. Blood on his claws. Sweetly familiar.

"Haven't you heard me?" Mornandum's grating laughter echoed off the trees that stood as silent sentinels over the meeting. "Animals can't sin. Even if they kill someone they... If some creature... person..." His voice was strangled by a harsh choke. The taste had filled his mouth again. The source was long gone but the taste... He couldn't get rid of it... Not even by biting his own flesh, teeth closing down on lip until his own blood dribbled down his chin and his throat. His own blood couldn't wash away the taste of another's.

He turned his face away from the moonlight, doubling over towards the ground. Another gag spat blood onto the ground. His own blood but the look was the same and it gave the moon somewhere to reflect from and strike his eyes even when they were averted.

"Go away..." He hissed to... to who? To the moon? To the animal that had come across him? To the fragments of memory that fragmented his mind?

Her words came to his mind as if through a thick haze. Somehow he was expecting to hear something else in this moment, something in a language that had never been spoken in Di'jai and probably never would be if the words didn't pass his own bloody lips. He couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand the clamor of his thoughts against each other, the silent roar of the moonlight, the voice that came from a race of creatures that never should have grown thought.

"I said... GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME!" Blood from his torn lip splattered leaves and forest-patterned fur. Darkness exploded off of him in waves, no longer looking like wings or any sort of form. They were made of only blackness, chaotic and thrashing.

"Who am I?" The darkness snapped back into his body and left the moonlight free to flood past him, through his raven-black hair. "Not human." His claws lengthened and grew strong, brittle points no longer. "Not elf." His teeth sharpened into a mouth of fangs. "I am darkness." Fur sprouted in rippling waves that erupted through human clothing.

"And death."

A terrible screech tore through the forest as wings tore from his back. He stood in true elder form, no magical darkness softening the blank frenzy from his eyes. He was what he was and that left him without a doubt. He remembered the last time he felt so himself and remembered how he had celebrated it.

He only wondered if a dragonfly would taste better than the humans had.