SOMETIMES SHE WONDERED IF SHE WOULD SNAP.
Another Dark
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He felt familiar sometimes, in the kind of way that wouldn’t let her go. Kadrin would stare at him, unblinking, trying to puzzle it out as he stared right back at her with his strange eyes. They were a light, pale brown, a startling shade really, with a slim sliver of blue circling the iris. And even at such a young age, she swore there was something in them, lurking underneath the primal instincts that informed his every action.
The way he stared back at her with those eyes only felt like confirmation of it, as if he were searching her as much as she searched him and came away with about as many answers.
She’d given up her peace for those eyes.
No, it was more than that.
Those eyes actively stole her peace. They taunted her. They held within them something she should recognize. Yet recognition refused to come to her. She dismissed it at first, sure she’d either forget there was something familiar at all or that she’d remember in time, but it only continued to eat at her more and more.
It was something her mind couldn’t settle on. That much she knew. Perhaps it was also why she couldn’t figure it out. Because she wanted to pluck those eyes out of his head and pop them between her fingers like grapes, yet didn’t dare touch them for being too precious.
She wanted to destroy them and forget that they ever existed.
She didn’t want to know what familiarity they held, and the idea that they held power over her enraged her.
Yet she desperately wanted to protect them.
She wanted them to give their secrets up to her.
She wanted to know why she — a demoness capable of little more than anger and contempt — cried the first time she saw them.
Sometimes she succumbed to overwhelming fits of rage and destruction.
Sometimes she’d look up to find hours had passed and she felt something disturbingly close to fondness for him.
She hadn’t expected that. To feel kindly towards him in any measure beyond perhaps an inkling of pride in what she had created. To her knowledge, two demons as powerful as she and Jonathan had never successfully produced a child. It wasn’t surprising, given their kind’s territorial nature and instinctive hatred for each other. This child had come close to destruction more than once due to his parents’ tempers. It’d been a struggle to contain themselves long enough for his birth, so of course other demons, powerful or weak, would experience similar troubles attempting to parent a child. And it was immediately obvious just how strong this one was, already capable of wielding both halves that made it up, even if only through sheer accident and without self-control.
Yes, a certain amount of pride made sense. Even despising him, to a degree, as they were both demons, and he surely already despised his creators as well. Anything more was excess, and the fact that she held even a small portion of that excess baffled her. It reminded her of the rage and the urge to pluck his eyes and that she couldn’t bring herself to — a spiral she could not escape.
Sometimes she wondered if she would snap.
Which way she would lean toward.
If his life would be forfeit.
Or if…
No.
There would be no if.
The sound of sudden giggles had her refocusing her wandering attention in time to watch him shove his tiny pink toes in his mouth with an inane grin.
Rolling her eyes, she nudged his foot out of his mouth with two fingers, to which he responded by huffing at her, a shower of bright sparks voicing his displeasure for him. Narrowing her eyes, a simple thought had a jagged swath of darkness looming menacingly above him and snuffing out the sparks he’d created.
But rather than wail in fear as any other baby might have, his eyes went wide, and his tiny fists reached up, trying to grab at the darkness. After several attempts, she let it lower within his reach, then snorted when he managed to grab ahold of the shadow and promptly shoved it in his mouth where his foot had been minutes prior.
Such a feat should have been impossible, as she’d left the shadows intangible, but it seemed he had control enough over the abilities he’d inherited from her to do so for himself. All for the purpose of filling his mouth with darkness.
I suppose I wouldn’t have been the same. It needed time to grow in me.
The thought struck as quickly as lightning and was gone just as fast, leaving her with a certainty that tasted like tarnished pennies that she’d been visited by something significant. But with the same dissonance she experienced when looking at her son, she simultaneously groped for the fleeting thought—and with something close to desperation, threw up the darkness to wield against the invasion.
It didn’t occur to her that she’d also plunged the room into shadow darker than night until the sound of delighted giggles drew her attention. Her eyes returned to his and their maddening blue ring as he laughed into the darkness, at home in a smothering miasma few beings had the ability to pierce and no creature she’d met felt comfortable with.
Indecipherably, the knowledge that there was now another like her — another belonging to the dark — felt like a weight in her chest.
