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[Arahim]

---

The cold winds of Cove carried the promise of an early Winter upon them, pronounced sharply, pointedly, by the late hour. Where Autumn's sun had burnt out long ago, mimicking the colors of it's mantle of fallen leaves.

Streaking the sky.

The Evening's drapery had fallen in cascades of soft, rippling velvet touching every hidden corner of the world's firmament. Spilling across Life as if from an upturned saucer, whispering secret canticle to the chosen souls awake enough to listen. Splayed in diaphanous embrace over everything, and all.

For one thing to live, oftimes one thing must die.

Summer to Winter.

Light to Dark.

Day to Dusk, Dusk to Night.

And in this Night, Christopher standing quietly at his side, Arahim felt alive.

[Arahim]

---

"I used to come here to hide," said Arahim quietly, uninterested in competing with the snarls and gusts of chill air, or the rhythmic lap of the ocean stretching out before them. The waters black, and uneasy.

The sky wore a thin silver sickle at Her throat. Stars wound tight, chaining the ornament in place.

A procession of deep purple clouds, thick and roiling. Somber. Creating a roof where there could never be one otherwise.

Dimming what little light fell from the gloaming.

Arahim knelt next to his son, Christopher's eyes never leaving what lay before him, and set a copper beaten lantern at his feet. It's light painting a spectral pallor upon him, and while wan in intensity, shone like a sun.

He pulled him close, setting his hands on his little shoulders, and followed his gaze to the sky. For long moments, father and son saw the same things through the same eyes.

Arahim tightened Christopher's coat around him, buttoning missed buttons, and careful not to distract the boy from his thoughts.

"When it becomes dark enough..." he said.

"You can see the stars." Christopher finished.

Standing, his hand lingering on Christopher's shoulder, Arahim slowly stepped away, leaving his son alone in the light.

[Arahim]

---

Before a painted foreground of sea reaching out to touch sky,
sprinkled with reflected white fires scattered over wave and spray,
the child stood still and silent.

His father,
his shadow.
The colors of his life cloaked in fecund nightsong,
untouched by the light which clung now to the small boy.

The world did not change around him.
The moon hung low,
the clouds adrift upon shade drawn weaves.

[Arahim]

---

A second voice had always twisted his essential nature.

Sometimes reproachful, sometimes elegiac.

Twenty years ago, there he would sit dimly remembered by her, or pehaps not even that.

Split lips and hungry.

A thready streak of child, and damaged. So unlike the boy in the light before him, standing where once he sat in dark.

She gave him name, and bore him life. She formed narrative around him like frost on stone, and so he was.

And was still.

He could not change that now, hateful though it was.

But for the child in front of him, for Christopher, he could show another way.