There were more of them now and they crowded into the living room, out the door until they were spilling into the hall. They pressed their ears to the wall to catch his voice, paint and sweat bonding until they melt into the structure and shout his metaphors back to him. The blind reverence has coaxed the twinkle in his eyes to shine brighter, brighter until it has changed them from black to the mossy green of a river bed.
He is constructed of grand pillars, touching the clouds while below him sprawling plains are baked soft, shaped and folded by his artisan hands. He teases the dough of the world until it is something he remembers, something he can understand in the empty marrow of his bones, the sounds of religious chanting and wild boars squealing as there are stuck again, again by his spears. It pours from his bones and into his blood, circulating about his body with a harsh, filling passion the river god, Cephissus, trapping and seducing the nymph, Leriope, and that is how his story begins that has been retold in a million myths, and will be told in a million more. But he is not a myth. When the poisonous cadence of Narcissus's honeysuckle voice blooms in the slick warmth of his throat he swallows deeply, willing the flaxen hue of his hair to return to the darkness of his birth.
His mother catches him laying in the cool soil in the backyard, the curse of a universe that is not fully his weighing down he sat, sinew and illuminating flaxen hair rising again as the petals of a mere flower and beckoning him back into the soil marked with the runes of resurrection in a tongue that he did not know, but that lived in the very meat of him; him. Time has etched itself in her face and he can see none of himself in his mother, not anymore. His hand is a caress on her stomach as he wills her blood to break past the flesh. The minute sound of a cocoon forced open and his lips, dagger-thin and tasting of conquest, snarl when the grass is stained red - the blood of a beast.
She called to the seers and they called back – his history was his curse. The open mouths of prophets, wide and massive and naked as a gash in the earth. They recount the stories of Narcissus, his past. Of arrogance and indifference that settles on his brow like the jewel of a crown; a spurned nymph and a voice whispering back from the empty spaces between breaths; a man who knew himself and suffered for this. He was born from a loveless union – the gods were in love with Love, but the bows of Eros were never coated with the gold stain of ichor; thus it was the mortals who must take on the heart of it - and was never gifted with the ability to feel such things. The boy listens to them and his eyebrows sit on his face a fraction too high.
His beauty was an ugly scar and it seared his image into the vitreous gel of their eyes until all he saw reflected back was his own image. Their warnings roll off him like a cool stream of water and his laugh is that of rain, beating down on them with a cruel rhythm. The gods are long dead, the last of them replaced by a man with tanned skin and a promise of salvation. The thin lines under the eyes of the prophets are full of dust and spices. When he strikes with serpentine quickness and harshly kisses the nearest one, he forces their eyes open with harsh nips and whispers in a language branded into the very meat of him. His image has been branded into the whites of their eyes, so when he reaches out to kiss one of them, Narcissus urges their eyes open and stares into his own reflection.