He sat on the creaking bed of the small room of the barracks. Typically a confined space would make him nervous, but he could sense people all around him with signatures pinging like soft chimes one after another as a soft reassures whispering, “It is fine. It is okay now. You are home. No one can reach you here.”

The surreal sheen still laid over everything like a glossimer scarf and no amount of pinching or shaking his head could remove the dreamlike disbelief in where he was now. Despite this, there was a raw ache over his entire body and a heavy lead in his bones. A century felt of a turbulent existent being thrown by whatever wavering wind, caustic causes, noble intentions, and emotional misdirections. A constant stumbling on the gravel of his own morals and drives up a never-ending mountain whose peak always changed. This wasn't something that was cleansed during his corruption and was still enbedded like gunmetal in his core. A disclaimer in all his actions that he could still fail. That despite his appearance and the siren's song of Chaos thudding in his starseed that he could still fall.

It didn't occur to him until now that it would be morning but he wasn't sure how long it had been since he got lost in the woods looking for Faustite to this very moment of sitting here now. He had walking dreamlike hoping to talk to the General despite his own failures but had resigned himself to a coward's death, one befitting a traitor and a moron, out in those winter woods. If by nature or the Queen, he had been prepared for death. As far as the world knew, he was. It came with a twist to his gut, a vice grip of guilt, that Hawa would be the one having to place a missing person's report in order to make it official that the man was gone. They would track his phone in the woods and assume the worst. The headline writing itself; Blind man lost in Destiny City wilderness. People with time and caring hearts looking for a heat signature and later a body they would never find. Only Hawa would know somehow, and the police would take the final text message as Toren committing suicide in the woods. Maybe Hawa would think that too. But then Hawa would be free of him once the case was closed. And of anyone else? The people he couldn't remember, he would leave their mind once the days and everyday grind wore away their memory. He was gone. They were gone. The lightness of being completely severed from it washed into his system like mint Listerine. Startling cold, cleansing but with a heated burn that wanted to scald his insides, jolting him whenever he thought about it too much.

He breathed out, running a tongue over the unusually prominent canines. He laid in the dark, body still exhausted from the corruption. Every so often his limbs would flinch, muscles spasming to the new muscle and joints of his rebirth. His tail would move across him, against the stiff, musty sheets, and remind him he wasn't what he was. Sweat still clung to his brow as he dealt with the feverish recovery of his body and he breathed deep into the dusty air of his new room.

Occasionally he'd flex the long-clawed fingers until the alien sensation met the threshold of his ability to take in much more and he'd go still. Head back against the pillow, all the more uncomfortable by the twitching ears atop his crown, he'd turn his head to look out across the dim room and listened to the strange jerky croak of a laugh. A pinched little giggle that disturbed the silence like a breath through dust. It went higher and more pitched as it climbed up and shuttered out, a old lawnmower sputtering and jerking to get going before taking off in a rusty clatter. The crescendo shook in his chest as the rolling heat melted down his face and dripped at the corners of his eyes. Body shaking he saw his vision become unfocused and blurred and laughed that the effect was artificial without any permanence. Not with his new eyes and the sprouting, twisting of his body like fresh clay solidifying now in the dark room of his new home.

When the laughter trickled to gasps and then to clenched teeth, the room went still again aside from the sound of the bed creaking as he dragged a arm across his face. The coarse fur strange against his skin but large enough to suffocate any more noises as he closed his eyes and took deep breaths. I smell different. He breathed in and tried to recall any animals to his memory but could only recollect the various strays he'd feed on patrols.

Stray.

To stray.

To wander away and leave home.

He had wandered too far from everything and had muddled himself in the filth till he was unrecognizable. He was a new man now. A new creature. Half. half. Like two pieces of a shell No one knew and come tomorrow, he'd find out what awaited him. What would be in order for his new life. What could he give today and the day after until all was given and forgiven. And what then of the stray that got picked up, washed off, and collared with a glimmering new tag?

What say you, my master?

Outside the small window he could see out into the broken rumble where the sky constantly rumbled with electric storms and rolling clouds. They had no advice. Their path had always been constant and true for as old as the Rift existed. It was faithful and reliable in instinct. He would need to fence himself. Leash those imperfections of man and youma. How daunting.

But they called. The pinging about. The ones who knew the right way of the world. The guidepost along the right path.

It's fine. You are okay now. The wind chimes echoed down the corridors.

It was time for a new life.



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