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It would have been an unimaginably pitiful sight, were anyone there to see it. Silence, utter and oppressive, lay in a heavy fog over the courtyard. Not a breath of wind dared to rustle the scraggled, high-altitude grasses and weeds growing amongst the crosses and pillars of rock that stood like phantoms, stretching their heads solemnly toward a grey and pitiless heaven. With a mixture of pity and disapproval, the stones eyed the only living figure that yet remained to disturb the stillness, daring him to make his sobs rise above the silence. A young gryphon sat distraught, his brow pressed against a stone marker at the head of a freshly dug grave. Tears left stark stains of moisture where they ran down his cheeks and across the face of the gravestone. The clouds above were dark with unfallen rain, threatening to join in the bereft tearshed, but they restrained their deluge, as though not wanting to add to the child's misery. In the distance, thunder gave a long rumbling lament.

As though the noise of the thunder had unstopped his voice, the child began to mutter something rhythmic and unintelligible, his speech broken by sobs at first, but gaining smoothness and confidence as he continued. Slowly, his voice rose in volume, and a breeze suddenly began to moan through the graveyard, contributing its tuneless song to his somber chant. Steadily louder, both became, and the wind through the grasses and rocky crags made it seem as though every stick and stone were joining in with feverish wailing to his elegy of lamentation. He lifted his head, eyes closed to the world, and his chant continued to grow in strength and power until his voice rang out like fey thunder, now laced with unearthly words of a language that no mortal was ever meant to hear. The wind whipped itself into a roiling fury, tearing at the ground with veracity and carrying dirt and debris into an ever-rising cyclone as it swirled about him.

Tears streamed freely now from his shut eyes, but they were tears of mingled love and hate, and the reaction between the two powers caused the droplets to leave glowing marks in strange figures where they passed over his cheeks. Some, in which the love had won out, were light blue, patterning themselves like spreading frost; but where the hate overcame the love, dark scarlet scars burned painful trails of evil looking runes. His chant grew distorted, fell words of powerful anger leaving his mouth amidst passionate sounds of pain and loss to dance and intertwine with each other in brilliant flashes of orange and green. No longer needing the tears to carry them, the glowing marks spread down his neck and shoulders and froze and seared his flesh and plumage wherever they touched, causing him unimaginable agony of body and mind. Yet still, he did not cease his incantations.

Words of pain mixed with his speech, flickering in the air as streaks of crimson. He moved one step back, flinching, and his whole body became locked with tension as he strained, trying desperately to stop his chant; but the words would not be stopped, and they continued to flow from him like a raging torrent. His eyes opened, and more tears, this time of fearful hopelessness, traced their patterns numbingly across his features, leaving gray trails of dead, crumbling skin and feathers in their wake. At last, he succeeded in silencing himself, but the words that he had already spoken continued to swirl wildly, unbridled, unyielding, blinding him as they buffeted his already broken form. A low moan escaped his beak, but it was ripped away by the shrieking wind and drowned by the monstrous roar of thunder.

One drop of rain fell, and another. Then the sky shattered with another deafening peal of thunder and the rain poured down with such thickness that it was as though the sea were being emptied out from the sky. His moan rose to a scream of agony as his scars continued to grow, carving out their paths with increasingly calculated cruelty through each passing moment. He slumped writhing to the ground, flailing blindly in torment. His cries rapidly weakened while the marks of hatred and hopelessness crisscrossed his form like hellish nets of hideous symbols, sapping his strength and strangling the already sickly lines of love that struggled to save him. All the while, the clamor of the wind, rain, and thunder intensified... greater and greater and greater until it shook the very foundations of the earth with loudness far higher than a thousand times deafening.

With unsettling suddenness, the cacophony ceased and left only exhausted silence and a gentle drizzle to muddy the ground around the still form of the gryphon, whose shallow breathing was the only sign that he yet lived. The lines of blue frost had all but been devoured by the hatred and the hopelessness, leaving him little more than a shimmering mass of charred skin and burnt plumage. A broken figure of charcoal and ashes, too empty to sob. Everything was raw, filled with a slow, gaping ache. Darkness smoldered in his chest; he gasped as it shunted his very soul aside. The displacement was bitterly cold, frigid, biting. He tried to fight it, to push the darkness back, but it lashed out with sudden acidic violence. A frozen dagger scythed through his heart, mind, and being, stabbing deep before it shattered. A thousand razor shards exploded into his veins and deeper. Eternities apart, his soul and body cried out hoarsely in unified pain. The struggle was brief, hopeless, pointless. Defeat brought the settling of pain, letting its flaring inferno burn down to a frigid smolder. He whimpered, but the sound did not reach his throat. He writhed, but his body was still. His eyes opened, a smooth, purposeful opening. Hellish darkness glowed where once had been the gleam of childish innocence.

"No..." he whispered hoarsely, though again the sound lost its way and never found his mouth. He tried to shudder at the vile expression of pleasure he could feel spreading over his features.

Yes.

"I don't... want..."

Ah, but you do... or you did. Whether you still desire it or not, you have called me, and I have come.

"No..."

Yes. I am here. I will stay. It has been a long time since I have had such a chance, and I do believe I like it. So, I am just going to take control for a while. You may watch... if you behave.

Futile and powerless, the idea of resistance only briefly flashed across his mind before incredible agony gouged viciously at his awareness. Lancing, terrible, frenzied with maddened glee, it cut deeper and colder and darker until the corners of his soul blackened with ice. He sensed an abrupt disconnect as the attack suddenly ended, and walls of emptiness barred him in and out, pressing down with the cruel weight of nothingness until he crumpled in surrender. Utterly bereft and drained even of the will to whimper, he picked at the frostbitten edges of his soul, which were blessedly numb. How long, he wondered tiredly, before the same numbness took the rest of him? How long before it brought his misery to an end? He longed for it with the last feeble remnants of his strength, yearned for his sorrow to finally be cut off. A haze began to fall over his perception as it relinquished its grasp on the ties that had bound it for so long to his physical senses. Had he but the strength left, he would have sighed in blissful release. The pain of his soul was still there, but there was a strange, cancerous pleasure in giving up.

Vaguely irrelevant and incredibly distant, so very far, far beyond his reach, his body turned away from a freshly dug grave with a vile grin smeared across it's face, its eyes glinting in wicked glee. Even through the haze that hung over his perceptions, the creature pressed that image upon his waking soul, that hideous malignance settled on his small form. But what did he care? The body wasn't his anymore, nor the life. There hadn't been anything left for him there anyway; naught but lonely suffering. Bitterness swelled, like bile, acrid, burning. He has no reason to love the world, no reason to care what he had unleashed upon it. The world had shown him no kindness, no mercy, no love. The world had ripped and torn at his heart and soul to tattered shreds. The only ones that had even seemed to care had left him there to mourn alone, left him comfortless in the cold and damp after they had buried the only friend and family he had left.

"Make them suffer," he thought, wondering if the creature could hear him, hoping it could. "I want them to suffer."

In a broken, sickly way, he was even grateful to the creature. The world had left his soul in painful tatters, gouged, gaping, filled with a raw, hollow aching. The creature had reached in and yanked the last living shreds from his chest, relieved him of the burden of living on without hope. It was a kindness, a gift. Soon the pain would end. He wouldn't have to hurt any more.

Slowly, the haze thickened to a fog, and the cold crept inward with welcomed fingers. The pain fell to a faint, buzzing tingle, and even that faded away beneath the deadening touch of the cold until dull blankness fully enveloped his consciousness, wrapping him up at long last in the darkling embrace of oblivion. Perversely, dementedly, as he sank into the empty torpor of un-being, gratefulness to the creature crossed his thoughts, not having time even to be shaped into words before he was finally lost to the all-devouring hunger of the void.

~~~