It's quite common for children to ask if the clouds are alive. Understandable too. They dig their heels into the curve of the sky for all inquiring minds to see, leaving questionable footprints of fluff. They weep and drool down on the creatures below them, drops seeping into bones only to erode and stain. They call off the show eventually. Once the child forgets about them. That's when they move on, to con the youth of another land. Or inspire, if that's how you see it.
And that is how you'd see it, isn't it now? Only someone invested in this mortifying game of pretend would find the childlike wonder in looking up at the clouds on a hill too close to the sun. Only you still see the messy shapes.
The children are wrong, as they so often are, in the technical alone. Sure, the white they see in the sky may be funeral white, but I, I in my howling gray, am ruefully alive.
I bleed red that brightens the cozy brown of a town square, shaded cobblestone barely visible through the flooding translucent red. The impending stain and its eternal stick will squish against the wriggling toes of barefoot, scampering children. Lest their parents throw up their hands and upheave the roads, of course.
They won't, if they know what's good for them.
And they do. Only workers and their cleverness keep a town like that so put together. Only its heroics could keep the rival kingdom's festering cruelty at bay. No royal could, and certainly not you.
In the image of the hell you dangle right in front of their sniffing noses, I strike the air with the light of the pearly gates. It denies you the privilege of human comprehension, tugging the inflamed sky towards me.
No skin off your bared teeth anyhow. Why would any witnesses question me when just saying my name fills them with the terror of the lord and the dread of the devil?
...No, not you. You inspire no dread. Only companionship. How sickeningly human of you.
The thud of your father's blessed bible against your head makes for excellent thunder, in my all-knowing opinion. No match, however, for the torched screams of your mother on her deathbed, infected with the poison in your veins, howling from deep within me. Those who haven't taken shelter in the sturdy palace walls and the open arms of their queen and her favorite* daughter wonder in pure horror who that angel whistling in their ears is.
But you know. I give you no choice in the matter.
You curse me as garish as you pull your dear wolf-boy closer, his trembling claws digging into your skin as you shush his mortified whimpers. But that's not fair, now is it? Perhaps your ostentatious demonic persona wore itself out, melting into your skin, the oils seeping into your brain. Why else call the kettle stormy black now, of all times? Surely you must understand.
I've the right to be this. To be the biggest, most awful, most tragic storm in human history, as your king declared me.
You will tend to the shaken nerves of your friends in the wake of your absence, to the wounded and frightened animals of your forest domain. You will weep for it's dead. You will offer the wolf in your arms comfort and an even tighter embrace at the sight of his caped statue in the castle garden, one with the dirt and bloodier than his wolf form has ever rumored to be. You will caress his cheek and kiss his cheek in the closest thing to intimacy you know how to give.
You pretend to rule hell, to claim it as its dark overlord, or whatever corny nonsense you call yourself these days.
I am hell. Elusive, picky, and to you, inrulable.
