A/N: This...is odd. It came to me one night in a fierce ramble and demanded to be posted. I suppose you could call it a companion piece to 'jumpers'. I don't know...
_________________________
The Prince of Air and Darkness.
_________________________
O for a voice like thunder and a tongue
To drown the throat of war!-When the senses
Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressed
Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
-William Blake
_________________________
I was thinking. About Dragoons.
About being a son of Bahamut, destroyer dragon, wyrm king. And not knowing. Not consciously, anyrate, just knowing, deep-down, a blood remembering...The indignity. Piloting some rattle-bag clumsy airship, as graceful as a goddamn RHINO, when you were once able to fly faster than light and cross galaxies in the blink of an eye.
The shame. Wearing a monkey-suit three hundred sizes too small. You were great once, great enough to send that upstart Sephiroth whimpering back to his alien mother like a beaten puppy. The lightning was the merest echo of your breath. Your tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky. You had *power* then, you had strength the likes of which no pitiful mortal could understand. You were a King.
The rage. Remember being ill, being struck down with fever? Remember how afterwards you couldn't even WALK without feeling dizzy? Weak as a new kitten, as a child? Like that, multiplied by a hundred. Groundbound. Tied by gravity, the least of all laws! Mere physical laws were putty in your claws, *once*, and now you curse the lowliest sparrow, for even it can escape the iron pull that drags masses to masses. A mere *bird* able to succeed, where a Prince of Bahamut's line cannot. Oh, the *shame*.
That is why you leap, and leap. Baying for the moon, for the reaches of space beyond, in the anger of one displaced from his homeland. Oh, but mark this, mark it well: if a thing is broken enough, then one day it will stay broken. The Sky will receive you, you will come into your own, and know at last why no true Dragoon ever died a natural death.
And the roots of the earth shake in foreboding, for it knows that when you become You and the stars are swept aside by Your tail, there is no force that can stand against You.
_________________________
The Prince of Air and Darkness.
_________________________
O for a voice like thunder and a tongue
To drown the throat of war!-When the senses
Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand? When the souls of the oppressed
Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
-William Blake
_________________________
I was thinking. About Dragoons.
About being a son of Bahamut, destroyer dragon, wyrm king. And not knowing. Not consciously, anyrate, just knowing, deep-down, a blood remembering...The indignity. Piloting some rattle-bag clumsy airship, as graceful as a goddamn RHINO, when you were once able to fly faster than light and cross galaxies in the blink of an eye.
The shame. Wearing a monkey-suit three hundred sizes too small. You were great once, great enough to send that upstart Sephiroth whimpering back to his alien mother like a beaten puppy. The lightning was the merest echo of your breath. Your tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky. You had *power* then, you had strength the likes of which no pitiful mortal could understand. You were a King.
The rage. Remember being ill, being struck down with fever? Remember how afterwards you couldn't even WALK without feeling dizzy? Weak as a new kitten, as a child? Like that, multiplied by a hundred. Groundbound. Tied by gravity, the least of all laws! Mere physical laws were putty in your claws, *once*, and now you curse the lowliest sparrow, for even it can escape the iron pull that drags masses to masses. A mere *bird* able to succeed, where a Prince of Bahamut's line cannot. Oh, the *shame*.
That is why you leap, and leap. Baying for the moon, for the reaches of space beyond, in the anger of one displaced from his homeland. Oh, but mark this, mark it well: if a thing is broken enough, then one day it will stay broken. The Sky will receive you, you will come into your own, and know at last why no true Dragoon ever died a natural death.
And the roots of the earth shake in foreboding, for it knows that when you become You and the stars are swept aside by Your tail, there is no force that can stand against You.