ORIGIN

Many times, Aza'zel had visited the site upon which his bones and blood had been dashed for what should have been the last time.

The site from where his pelt was taken and skinned by his own son, worn so proudly as he stood over the empty kingdom that his father had left for him.

The place that his other son had spent so long haunted by as he peered over the verge and calculated over and over again just how many seconds his father had to change his mind about that end; to spread those broad wings of his and soar yet again.

The cliff that the son who'd come after him would come to a fearful reverence about, until at last that second son faced the grief and guilt and hurt that his father had burdened him with so; and again, and again as Aza'zel returned to him on glimmering wings and absolved him with finality of all that burden. To hear at last from his own beak that it was never Eythan's fault nearly broke the boy all over again, impostor or not.

... it was one of few places of sentiment that was easy to recall the whereabouts of. It was haunted, but it was remembered.

But, his old beginning, before Giggle had Wished him returned?

That had taken time to recover for himself. Giggle wouldn't know it, he knew.

Aza'zel spent too many of his idle days making dusty rounds about Canis. Picking through the bones crumbling and new, witnessing the final moments of a few before at least giving up the ghost (hah!) on remembering kinder things for them. Pacing the Chambers and flitting loose from its halls with nothing to show, even though he can so keenly see the wall and the bare floor beneath and—

It's when he finally steps along the full loop of the Circuit that he knows. That an inkling of something meanders up from his gizzard and settles hard at the back of his throat: Fluttering black feathers, black-and-red breasted— (a distant Remedy, though that isn't it, she was after M███ W█████)— and a raucous voice so-dearly-missed— and that he picks up into a trotting pace, wings half-spread and flapping to hold him steady as he comes to it.

The shattered chrysalis is scarcely half his size, a deep red spattered with black. Not a loose shard has remained after all the time gone by without him, but still he knows that this empty shell was once his.

Or, no— This is mine. A memory of his own finding, however insignificant it is now.

He is no longer bound to this stone, nor to the bones and pelt watching from up on high. Auré carries the former in his stead; Giggle still counsels the latter.

Yet, this faint reverie of falling onto his fresh little face— (and he chuckles as it comes to him)— still feels significant enough for him to be drawn to it. Was it ever the bones that he was truly bound to, or was it the memory that they and life carried long after him?

Aza'zel settles before the broken shell with a sigh and holds his wings close. He finds himself... uncertain in his reverence of it.

And there, Aza'zel sits for a time. There, he finds himself floating adrift on the reverie which had brought him home.

Black-feathers was loud, unashamed to be coming so close and begging for tithes from those gathered around this spot. (What was his name? And hers..?) Loud, and as persistent as the wind beneath Aza'zel's own wing— always underfoot, always a spectacle. Picking at bones and shiny things and tolerating an endless series of childish pranks. Bones cast in his direction with but a gust, paces hurried and rushed just to frighten him; always a smile and always a laugh: "KRAK! KRAK! KRAK!"

Their daughter had the same laugh, full-chested and bright. Liora. Oh, Krakarak... Both so similar, both so long-gone like he had been.

This is mine, is a thought that alights again in his mind, a quiet pressure heaving at the corners of it. This mourning of memory and the "what was" and the "what will now never be again".

Carni returns to mind. Shimmering-white feathers in contrast to Liora's. Gentler, quieter in his dignity. The one who had come before him had struck him across the face for reaching toward her without hesitation, and when she'd fallen (and he had been unable to save her and the Bonebound all saw it, her gem had borne that same slice. When Eythan killed her— him— a second time, he said, the marks had still been there. His claws had given them more. Neither had deserved their deaths.

Aza'zel's chest seizes, feathers rustling as he tries to breathe. Breathe. Breathe—.

Eythan. A low hum across Pisces, summoning forth he who would be exiled in one life, exiled in another. Asking alliance that would outlast M███ W█████. Did Remedy ever regret as much as Eythan did? Aza'zel turns to look, but there is only the fog of Tunnel K— Where is she now—

I've lost so much time to this.

Ashtoreth, who sings a song that he can't quite recall the words to and harbors a sadness for what time she missed too; who suffers silence and the knowing what he desecration he had done to Mau even if Ker-ber-os had told him better. Tahlia who he barely knows— This is mine. Mourning. Regret. Grieving. All at once.

Giggle couldn't have possibly known the depths of this. It hurts.

The lammergeier slumps to the floor, beak meeting the floor with a short huff. There is no air left to breathe, not when it is so thoroughly choked-out by the sulfuric taste of regret, not when there is such a pressure on his body and lungs that he might implode from both it and heartache.

This grief is mine.

Aza'zel crumbles onto the floor, starved for air with eyes watering out of their sockets. He's there, reliving those heartaches all at once, feeling the wind beneath his wings for each one; the press of one mind against another. Walking among tormented dreams that are and aren't his. A ghost taking flight, there until he isn't.

There, until he isn't.

He is here, gasping and wheezing and choking on the coppery tang in his abused, dry throat. Unable to run from his own long, long shadow, piled upon him all at once and suffocating him with remembrance and the ghost lingering within.

There, until he isn't, and there is another chrysalis to join his first.