He was there.
In the beginning. In the tearing, the blood, the screams, the darkness. A silent and empty witness to your birth – her death – your presentation to the heavens – her exile into anonymity. You weren't aware of him of course, you weren't aware of anything. You were a frail, mewling mess swaddled in rags and arms, taking your first breaths in a black and buried world. No thoughts, only the instinct to shriek and reach and feed. He watched you pass from your mother to your father to the uncaring gaze of the empty sky and he knew in those first few moments everything that would unfold. He watched and said nothing.
He would be here again, among dust-choked hallways and chambers forgotten by the living. He would step through the buried tombs and visit, bringing with him the thickest of storm clouds. But what are storm clouds when you have no sky?
He was there.
When your brother and sister abandoned you to your fate. You begged. You wailed. You would have given any of the nothing you had to be anyone else on that agonising night. Your father dragged you to a room that stank of blood and fear and he mutilated you. While you screamed, the creature who raised you turned you into a living embodiment of tradition, carved history into your flesh and felt nothing but duty.
And through it all, he watched in silence. A spectre in the sand, he observed the torture, unmoved. The only thing he might have felt was a glimmer of interest in your second birth. The pupating in your brain of a dark and hungry fiend, a beast that raged and yearned for release. When he walked away as your father put down the blades, he knew that the time was coming that you would finally meet.
As you lay bleeding on the slab, broken and hollow, you couldn't hope to know what the future held.
He was there.
On the day you breathed free air, rented at the price of disobedience, he watched and waited. Waited until you came through the crowd and saw him. He had known you for years, and it was the first time you had met, beneath a burning empty sky that somehow felt full of bleak, mournful clouds. His warnings came, cryptic and frightening, words that had waited years to be spilled out. He melted away into the sea of people after that and, a silent ghost once again, he watched you leave. He saw you tremble as you made the journey home, to slip underground and face your father's hands. Perfected through practice, he said nothing, just kept his eldritch eyes on you.
He was there.
When the last jets of your father's blood had calmed to lazy trickles, when the old man's heart couldn't beat out any more, he watched. Blood turned thick and tacky, drying and rusty on skin and clothes and dirt. It stained the gold in your shaking hand, and the patter of its droplets in the sand slowed to nothing. He spoke to you again, though his words were lost somewhere inside you. You were born in screaming and darkness underground, coated in your mother's blood. Now, screaming in the dark, your father's life still staining you, you were born again. If any words got through, they were being spoken to a frail and mewling mess that had no thoughts, only the instinct to shriek and reach and feed.
He left you there, ready to take your journey, your birth complete. He would watch you, but from the places you would never find him.
And on that day, far in the future, when you are ready to suck down your last few breaths, you can know this for certain. He is the whistling rush of air before you hit the ground. He is the burning in your throat before you drown. He is the silence before the drop of the hammer. Like the booted steps on a final prison march.
He will be there.
