//------------------------------//
// A Return 
// Story: Mark of the Wyld 
// by DarkParable 
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Have you ever had a night where, once your eyes are closed and all is quiet, when your heart slows and mind begins to slip the fetters of the waking world to frolic amidst the great Aether of the cosmos, all you find instead is blackness? No, not a great terrible yawning Dark, capital D, Dark that threatens to devour you. Certainly no smothering shadowy expanse poised to strangle you with fear of the unknown and a deprivation of that most wondrous sense that is sight within its cold clutches... But a peaceful quiet darkness.

The sort, I would venture, that is what one should always hope to find. There are no monsters there, no great things of teeth and claws poised out of sight, waiting for the lost and hopeless to stagger into their tender embrace. Not the dangerous sort of shadows that hide tangled roots to trip you on the way... No no, the calm quiet peace of a dark room and a comfortable bed. The sort of dark that whispers softly to that most primal part of your mind "You can rest here... It is safe... Nothing can find you here... Nothing hurt you in my embrace..." That is the sort of darkness I mean, dear readers who certainly shouldn't exist. (I swear I'll find whoever's reading this journal, you know who you are, and deliver a vicious twatting to your nose for reading other people's private thoughts!)

It is that sort of dark, I think, that is the most frightening... You don't wish to leave it once you're there. I know I certainly didn't...





I awoke with a soft gasp and gentle start, body giving a faint jerk as awareness came back to me with a jarring suddenness, ripping me away from that deep and quiet dark and it's insidious peace. I... I am not ashamed to admit I cried then, when the shock of waking had left me and I realized two things. One, that I was in fact still kicking, despite knowing I had died there on the gallows. And two, that death was a true peace, one denied to me due to my nature as a death knight... As the undead. I might court that peaceful black again, but it would never truly hold me. Not for long... Not as closely tied to the aspect of Frost as I was. So, no... It doesn't shame me to admit that I bawled my glowing blue little eyes out for a good solid hour, relief, confusion, and grief at what I'd lost hammering me down into broken sobbing. By the time I finally stopped, the moon had risen and its gentle glow coaxed me from my bed.

Now... I say bed, but... As I took stock, looking around and trying to get my bearings I realize that to be a very generous thing to call bare stone. Ah, Colt's Breath... How I didn't miss you. How I didn't miss you at all. I sighed deeply when I realized where I was, pulling my cloak a little tighter around me and wondering how I'd gotten here. Last I remembered, I'd been a lovely decoration in a town square... Gods, I couldn't even remember where it was exactly. It all seemed so foggy and distant, almost unimportant balanced against the fact that I had indeed survived... Somehow... If one could call dying and living once more surviving in any real truth.

I gazed about, taking it all in, the aftermath of my old handiwork, a town gone to ruins because of me. The half rotted platform in the center of the square, the still slightly rust colored patch of dirt and rock where I'd... I shook my head, hard, ears and mane flopping about with the violence of that motion. Slapping my palms to my cheeks to give myself a little jolt in effort to refocus, I heaved a heavy echoing sigh. Ahh, reverb... I needed to be away from here, away from thinking on what I'd done, even if it had seemed justified at the time... Sort of. And so, with nothing better to do and nowhere to go but elsewhere, I collected my axe from where it lay, picked a direction, and began to walk... I made it maybe twenty feet before I had to stop and stare down at my axe in confusion at to how it got there... I... Was pretty sure it had been taken from me, right? I certainly didn't have it on the gallows... And was that blood on the he-... No. Not thinking about it. NOT thinking about it!

Scurrying on as quick as my paws would take me, I tromped off, my cloak trailing behind me and my axe dripping a staggered line of fresh red that had no business being fresh still...