Daddy, I'm alone, 'cause this house don't feel like home

When there's madness, when there's poison in your head When the sadness leaves you broken in your bed A feather idly traced the line of a scar against auburn hide. It felt slightly raised, but just slightly - it hadn't been deep, but the skin had parted red. It felt nice to actually touch it though, this testament to pain, and healing. His heart and soul that had been wounded plenty of times, and though those certainly ached just as fiercely, he could never truly see them, never touch them like he is now. It made them feel...less real. Iskra sighed steadily and pulled his wings in tighter to his sides. The motion jostled the necklace of bone against his chest. Absently he curled his chin in, whiskers just passing over the jagged tips, reminding him that Gaucho was still there. "I wish I'd met you," he whispered softly to it, lifting his head back up and stretching his neck out long and low. He was settling down for the night, adopting the Halcyon Flats as his home, because out of everything here, everything that was left anyway, they were the most like it. The collapsed shield on Iskra's back glinted in the fading light as the sunset's myriad of colors shifted among the sparse clouds. Dragon's Sun he had taken to calling it, another relic of his family, of his past, as most of the things he carried with him were. His trinkets were one of the ways he could still feel connected to it all, as if part of their past, of who carrier them or where they were made, lived on in them; bones instead of metal, memories instead of leather. "You'd know what to do," Iskra went on, his voice wavering faintly, though not with grief. His tear tracks had long since dried, his salt given back to the earth. Instead, it was worry that underlined Iskra's tone, and fear. It was the sound of the slow but constant retreat of Iskra's hope, and with it, his will. Movement at his side caused Iskra's head to turn slightly, teal gaze drifting across the golem that was awkwardly attempting to sit not far from him. The creature clasped a little piece of shining bone in its rudimentary hand, a large iron and copper hammer in its other. Squishy had been a gift from his brother, a memento of happier days, but as the Rift was apt to do, it had consumed him too, anything else joyous. Iskra sighed softly, turning back to look out across the flat expanse of desert. "She always said you did... they all did really - they loved you for it. You were strong and brave, and you probably could have beaten this place." A whale swooped in the horizon's line, its long call reaching Iskra with a distant whine of contentment. "She might have too if she were still here, but she'd left the same day you did, it just didn't look like it. You made her someone better - you had the power to do that. I can't imagine what losing that must have felt like..." Iskra blinked, thinking back on his mother's steady descent into grief, and then the fire water she turned to when tears weren't enough. He sighed loudly. "But that's why I wish I'd met you, because you were stronger, better, and I think I'd be too if I'd known you." Maybe then I wouldn't feel like this... Iskra I will hold you in the depths of your despair And it's all in the name of love

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@Odd