Red eyes shift like tides of the sea. Vast and everlasting. Of endless surfaces and a void-full of something.
Well, he's there, but not. He's solid, and then collapsing within his own body. His bones are dust and the paths between There and Not are his veins. But he's there, then not— a flicker and a calamity that rises up until it takes shape again.
Those bloody-but-not caverns in his skin, that was a crackling sort of surface that always broke off and stretched, just to be pieced together again. He is stillness and he is chaos, push and pull, creation and not-destruction. Pandora's box but a body.
(A chain.)
He shouldn't exist, is the truth, really. He is always something and the immeasurable darkness of the world beneath sol and the one that dominates everything above. Darkness before the aether and death before a dying star.
Tokoyami breathes out red smoke of ashen things— they're screaming— as he tilted his head to the side, curious and waiting.
(There's an old saying that birds had the ability to control time. That they had nostalgia, crisis, and dread in between the spaces of their feathers and the knowledge in their eyes.)
(They do it out of spite, they say, and perhaps that is the reason why he doesn't exist as the world wanted him to be. Shouldn't as opposed to the opportunity to breathe, and Doesn't-have-to-be as opposed to the thought of calling.)
Chaos, what hides beneath his palms. Death, what lies between his teeth. Darkness, everything that he was, and nothing that he isn't.
"Revelry in the dark, " he'd say, because he revels in the thought of the unknown, the unreachable. Something even the sun hides itself from. But he walks in between demon and death and something—
(And perhaps he had always been.)
Tokoyami sighs through his teeth, all daggers and sharpened hell-fire bones, and he looks at the world in wonder as his footsteps left inky marks on growing things. Smoldering and withering all at once— decay easily finding itself behind his heels.
(Later, a grey-haired man would wake up screaming. Later, he will look at his hands as his flesh Writhed and Leeched in between his bones. In a state of not-decay and not-living.)
(Later, he'd find black feathers prickling his skin like daggers. And, later—)
His laughter echoes as it bounced off the walls of reality and back to his inky endless lungs. His domain resides Somewhere, in between spaces and spaces, inside where hollowness is insanity, and he smiles—
Tokoyami Fumikage exists in a way something shouldn't, in all it's simplicity (in all it's difficult states of being Not), and in all it's devastation that wakes from his touch. Everything is left shaking as he treads through civilization, even if he was younger than eternity but older than destruction. Even if his nails claw and drag and tear as his teeth rent flesh in all his unholy glory. Black-fire crown above his head with unseen (just like all of him, and not just the 'rest') horns dipped in living tar.
Call him a Monster, maybe— call him Demon or Abomination or Horror or Beast— because no matter what you'd call he would always be Something that no human words can describe. Even by the hiss of beasts or the song of insects.
"Revelry in the dark. " He'd say, terrible and everything-breaking-down all at once, his voice carried over by tides and winds and earthquakes, and the world shivers because it knows that being a plaything of Something ought to bring Armageddon on it's life.
So Tokoyami Fumikage— and the names that he was— smiles as he cracked his neck and spun the Sun and the Moon at his heels, and dragging them up to his oblivion.
"Revelry in the dark. "