By: Rael
He did it every night, had been doing it every night for as long as he could remember. It was a ritual so old he could no longer remember why he followed it still, or how it had begun.
And yet, every night, when darkness fell and the moon rose high; when the world around him fell silent, he would be there.
Head tilted back towards the intimacy of the sky, silent and unmoving as if he would drown in its infinite shadow. You looked into it and saw, not just its endless vastness, which was all the empty blue of a summer sky ever gave, but its indescribable depth, reaching to enfold you, drown you, and no one would ever know...
You could fix your eyes on a single point, and yet know that it stretched farther than you could ever see, or imagine, or dream.
Every night, he watched it and was reminded how truly small they were. Him. His family. The entirety of the human race. They could no more conquer that darkness than they could hope to comprehend it.
He watched it and he...
No, he would not lie. To himself least of all. You have spent more than ten years lying to yourself and look at what it brought you. Rage. Hate. Death, because every time he killed, a small part of him died along with his victim in small, vain payment for their life.
Defeat at the hands of a slacker who insisted on believing, against the odds, that no one who could see spirits could be truly evil. Rescue from his own family by said slacker and his friends. The insult would have almost been too much to bear, but Ren had brought it down on himself, and so he really had little choice but to (grimly, grouchily, irritably) live with it.
No. He would not lie to himself.
He stared into the darkness and feared it.
Feared its vastness, its depth; feared it because he could see no way of defeating it. Feared it because shrouded the world in a mask of its own making, hiding all, and Ren did not know how to tear that mask off.
A Tao, afraid of the dark! He shoved the thought grimly away. Yes, he feared it. And so night after night, he sought the deepest, darkest, most solitary places he could find and made himself face the night. He would be damned if he was going to give in to something so simple, primal. He sought his fear, his weakness, as if facing it could teach him to conquer it. It couldn't. But he learnt enough, to learn how to live with the fear. Hide it. Not even Jun, he thought, knew, and he suspected that she knew him better than anyone else... Or at least cared more than anyone else.
How did Yoh do it? He'd heard about Yoh's training... seven days and nights in complete darkness, alone... Could Ren have survived it? Maybe. Maybe Yoh just wasn't afaid of the dark; sometimes, he seemed too dense to know danger when it was screaming in his face and waving for attention.
He envied him that faith. That peace so deep, even the darkness drowned in it. Power came in many shapes, strength could mean a million things... What did it mean to him?
The clock, when he turned to glance at it, read 11.53. The Shaman Fight began tomorrow; he should probably get some sleep. As he turned from the window, moonlight washed across the room, bleaching it in shadow and paleness.
The dark was infinite; yet even it could not conquer the night.
For the night was neither light nor darkness... It was beautiful.
end
Notes: ... *prods ending* Um. Damn you, Ren, you uncooperative little brat.
Disclaimer: I don't own Ren or Shaman King. Steal and DIE, ask before archiving, all that jazz.
May 2002
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