Obscurity

She withered in his broad arms.

The creature had never been one to grieve over loss. He had lost so much in his life that it had sprung forth a torturous cycle; over and over and over again he watched the ones he held dear dissipate. With wisdom, he found that he could teach his bodice, his mentality, to adapt. And adapted he had. He'd adapted to walking the cluttered hallways of his small apartment alone, and he'd adapted to forgetting their faces where they lingered in his cranial membrane. But as he adapted to forget them, he had adapted to remember her. He cared for her precariously, watching as violent tears shredded the porcelain of her plump, rosy cheeks. He would whisper to her in the late night, soothing her back to slumber, and held her thick tendrils, completing circular movements methodically until it made him weary. He thought finally he could have something that would stay, something that would be his.

His howls pierced the evening air with a distinct clarity.

Aesthetic, white gloves gripped the golden areas of his flourished skin; whether to balance him, calm him, or attack him, he was unsure. As their tendrils drifted over the smooth of his skin, they left porcelain imprints that dissolved silently into his skin, absorbed much too easily. The ghosts lingered towards her, hovering hesitantly over her faded cranium, reluctant to interrupt the wolf as he sank toward the tiles.

One of them was brave enough to act, and the prying tendrils gently lifted the carcass from the ghoul's tendons. Away from that which she knew. He howled, a guttural sound manifesting from the crook of his hollowed chest, bursting mournfully from the thick of his throat and pushing through the slip of his parted, pink lips, piercing the air, crystallized in time. Air escaped him, and as the sobs racketed his lithe bodice, he found that he suffered through the desparity of his emotions. He released her, eventually, his reluctant tendrils unwrapping gingerly from her porcelain skin, pressing his gentle lips to the curve of her forehead, imagining that it was into slumber she dissipated, not death.

They left him to mourn, and mourn he did. He settled into a sprawled position on the iced tiles, tendrils curled to his chest. They pierced his ethereal skin, and what was once beautiful, was stained maroon. Veins, delicate patterns traced into his paling skin. Vehement tears streaked the rose of his flustered cheeks, and as he curled, his carcass shaking violently from the audible sobs, he dissipated. And as he lingered, he recognized himself less and less. It was at this point that he lost himself.

It was at this point that he lost his humanity.