It wasn’t a nice feeling to be trapped in your mind, to be suffocated by your own weakness and choke on your own breath. The world to Theron was still so very dark. He could hardly feel anything of the outside worlds, his feelings and thoughts consud by the pain shredding his abdon, splintering his mind, and rupturing his soul.
The aching agony felt so eternal, one flash of severed thought and mory after another coming to mind, as though he was forced into the dream he dreamt every ti he closed his eyes, but only so much worse...
Because this ti, he couldn’t get up.
It always ca every night without fail... his bubbly little sister trying to get him to co with them, his mother’s gentle but expectant smile, his father’s wink as his tacit promise to get them off his back.
And then ca the rain, the heart-rending realization that sothing was wrong, the way that sa heart pounded out of his chest as he ran as fast as his legs would allow him, only to get there only just in ti to watch them all die once again.
But this ti the dream had more than just that. It continued past that point, continued past the indifferent and then suddenly cheerful glance of that man who hung in the skies, continued past those vindictive, provoking words...
He saw himself rush after the man in the first bout of fury he had ever felt in his life. He felt the aches in his knees as his legs gave out from under him, pumping too fast for a mortal without the slightest hint of cultivation.
Then he watched himself dig through the rubble, peeling his nailed back against rough rocks and sweeping layers of ash that could have very well been the remnants of his family.
He rembered his hair standing on end as the field of electricity and the probing might of the Tribulation Clouds above seed unsatisfied as it looked for another victim to smite and relieve its fury.
And then he rembered his body collapsing from exhaustion, and how for the first ti the rain pelting from above didn’t give him the sa peace it normally did.
That was when he felt the other side of the rain. Not the calming rhythm he felt on the other side of a window, but that chilling cold that seeped deep into the depths of his bones.
A dichotomy that he had grown familiar with, comfortable with, even, one that he had grown to like. As though a victim being forced to accept his new reality as what he deserved, or the best he could have, he embraced it.
He beca Rain. The tears of the Heavens no longer had to be behind a window to comfort him. It could soak him through, peeling through his robes and moistening his skin, leeching away the heat of his blood and the embrace of his warm mories.
He killed without a thought, severed life with a breath. He didn’t relish in it, but only because he didn’t feel a thing.
It was what gave him grounding, what gave him control, what gave him power.
That was what this world was built on, wasn’t it? It was what decided who could do what and to whom. It was why the Seijin could massacre entire villages of people without a thought or care, why his life had been turned upside down.
So why couldn’t he beco that person? Why couldn’t he be that reaper that did as he pleased? Why should he care about what happens to the rest of the world while he made those that deserved pain suffer?
If soone wanted revenge for his actions, they were free to co. If they could prove themselves more powerful, then they would deserve it, no? At that point, maybe he would embrace death.
What sort of life was this to live, anyway?
A constant striving for revenge, facing the perpetual rage of the Heavens...
And then the dream would start all over again, forcing him through it one more ti. And then another. And then another.
Each ti, Theron found the last gaze of his father becoming more real, more etched in his consciousness.
He rembered sitting in Dean Pennel’s office, forming that final look with his Water Mana. But he knew that it had been far from perfect even then. With the picture becoming clearer and clearer now, it felt like it was even further from perfect than he had thought.
There was no hidden secret in his father’s gaze, nor so hidden ssage, not outside of what he already knew.
It was just those shades of emotions he knew all too well. Regret, sadness, apology...
A mix of three complex emotions that practically poured out toward him in an instant, the look of a father who knew he wasn’t strong enough to protect his family, a father who knew he would now be leaving his little boy all alone without a palm to hold up the skies for him.
A heart-wrenching look.
But as it beca clearer, Theron saw one more thing, an emotion that he hadn’t seen before because the others were too powerful, and this one was far too subtle.
No... it wasn’t just that either.
It was also an emotion that he rarely, if ever, felt up until that point, but an emotion he had been becoming more familiar with over the last year, one that was creeping into his psyche more and more in ways that he still didn’t fully understand...
Pride.
Mixed in with the other complexities, his father had been looking at him with...
Pride.
As though he knew that his progeny would at least survive in this world, that even though he wouldn’t have soone to hold up the skies for him, that he would be able to do it himself...
And then he saw his mother’s last gaze as though it was bursting through a curtain itself.
It was a look he rembered... the sa look she had worn when she saw those words...
"Have you ever seen a lion shave his mane?"
Theron’s eyes snapped open, the first thing to slap him coming from the howling, chilling winds of the abyss he was suspended within.
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