Peace cannot be attained for others despite attempts at such a thing, That was the credo that filled the mind of the father, his hands was stained with the deep runny mud of flesh and gore, his eyes had seen the face of the Heavens and it’s golden walls was painted with the red of a mountain of corpses to herald and venerate some distant deity that unfairly decides for the rest of the world.

  He opens his lips, his teeth chewed on the rounded edges of the ceramic bottle held in his grip, he can remember the runny redness that stains the gaps between his teeth and makes his gums ache with falsely remembered experiences, all meshing and fusing into one abominable prostitute he can’t get away from fucking for another night and deciding.

  ‘I’ll do better tomorrow’.

  He won’t do better tomorrow, but a kind lie is kinder than accepting he will never change, better to try, better to speak, than it is to accept the easily casual words of damnation, that was the way he was, the way he just is, and that “way” sometimes irritates people, ‘I’ll try again tomorrow’, those were the words on his lips when he looks down until he sees the bottom of his bottle.

  Right.

  He gets up with a shamble, No time to spend wasting away at the Communal with the rest of the drunkard’s–

  “Ay…Runas, Ya goin’ somewhere?”

  “Yes”

  His response was dry.

  “I am, indeed, going somewhere”

  The drunkards ughed, A nose runny red and infmed like a marring pox upon the face of a burned out wastrel, The man ughs, His spit flew with alcohol and the pungent stench of something bitter and foul, He takes another sip and belted out.

  “Go hang’ with that ‘reak a’ yours then!”

  He stiffens, His hands cocks into his wrist instinctually at the degradation, the jeering, before he loosens his hands and his elbows stretches downward as he cocks a loose nod and began walking away from the Communal, stepping up the stone, stepping past the drunkards snoring off the drinking from the morning, He curls his cloak around his pectorals.

  His fingers was far too scarred for his liking, He had always covered them with a leather glove for this reason, but a gnce told him it was gone, He would grimace, if he still felt decency left, so he wraps loose rags for now, twilling it between his fingers and feeling the coarse fabric.

  Yesterday was…odd, off, He watched the man from a nearby alley as he entered His house, Carmen was outside, and inside, fretted and worrying in that manner of hers that he was endeared with, that manner that left him with his ears sore but his eyes filled with a little more life, His wife had always been the one to fill his day with energy after…

  After the Reaches, at least, Those days won’t ever quite fade but he has always made do and will make do with it, either here, or there, He has always made do, always will, even if it wasn’t the proudest of his moments, but necessity has a habit of making you do things you wouldn’t normally commit.

  The Reaches had always been rather…ominous, in that manner.

  He shakes his head.

  His shoulder was pushed back, He twist his neck to look at who bumped into him, A errand boy curls back and scampers away, A crate of items held in a hug, He turns back and began walking.

  His House.

  Their House.

  There was a significance here he wouldn’t expect others to get, A House was, permanent, in a way that objects wasn’t, A house was more significant, In a way that wagons can scarcely compare to, A house was a fixture in a person’s life in a way that dwellings just isn’t and can’t be, A house was far more than a simple residence they were inside, A house was a pce where your heart and mind dwells.

  A house was something you can’t describe with words unless you are find with butchering your intent, and he was only sometimes willing to do so, he steps forward, he steps inside.

  “Welcome back”

  “I’m gd to be here”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Drinking”

  “Again?”

  A amused wry noise came from Carmen’s lips, half-way between a ugh and a sigh.

  “You’ll die with a bottle on your lip someday”

  Spoken like a curse, delivered like a joke, the soft cocking of her head in a quick succession was all the tell he needed to know what she meant.

  “I hope I’ll die staring at the clouds then”

  “I hope so too, Did you see them yet?”

  “I have”

  “What should we do?”

  “Our daughter?”

  Motions was all they needed, He had grown familiar with her tic’s, as she had grown with his, It was a nguage between the two of them communicated in familiar aged pastures and the motions that carved divots down the rivers of time in pleasant falling streams.

  “She’s strange”

  He didn’t refute her.

  “I…I don’t feel qualified to raise her”

  “None of us are born parent’s”

  He offers, It doesn’t seem to work.

  “But I don’t feel like I’m doing enough”

  This comment has been persistent for as long as their daughter has been alive now, He swivels his wrist in a somewhat off-ish motion, A shrug made with only his arms jerking the hands in a oval circle.

  “At least you’re there”

  “That isn’t comforting given your history”

  He resist the urge to make a amused exhale at that comment, and trudges past his wife towards his daughter, Anne, fiddling, pying, loosely juggling the wooden doll she must have gotten from Emily and judging by the cute wiggles of her tentacle horns, she must be quite pleased.

  He wonders if she will lose that tic as she grows up, He wonders many times, when he was drunk, and half-whimsical, if his daughter really was born five years ago when it felt like merely yesterday when he held her in his arms and stared down the pale nubs of flesh around her temples.

  The sign of her lineage that he will never bear.

  The sign of her mother’s lips in the way her cheeks curved, the curvature of her nose, the ftness of her temples, the length of her arms, the unnatural proportions of a still-growing toddler, He cocks his head down at her, A scarred face staring, shadowed by the sunlight leering from behind him.

  A small childish face, with baby fat, stares back up at his, eyes that gleams with a intelligence too keen beyond any child that was normal.

  “Have your mother been well?”

  He asks, despite knowing the welts upon her wrist was certainly not from accidents, but questions were questions for a reason.

  “Yes”

  “That’s good”

  “How has it been?”

  “I’ve decided to make wooden dolls”

  “Is that so?”

  He made a mental note to himself, She made a somewhat off smile that was two shades off from what a toddler smile should be, A child did not smile in such a knowing soft manner, a child’s smile was unruly, unrestrained and wide in ways that stretched outward like a blossoming tree, not the aged weary expression of someone that had fun the second time around.

  “Dad”

  A term of endearment, His mind readjust.

  “Yes?”

  “What is Magic?”

  “I don’t know”

  His daughter seems boggle-eyed for the first time since he’s seen her, He cocks his head, staring down, two pairs of dull greys between bangs of brownish bck, he stares for a long while, savoring the fact that his daughter has, for the first time in years, been surprised by something, even if that something was the fact her father did not knew what magic was.

  She went silent.

  “...”

  Open, close.

  Furrowing of her brows, scrunching them together to meet in the center of her head.

  He wonders if he can watch her walk away from here to that faraway prison people call a academy? He’s not sure, nor will he be right now.

  He held his hand and caress her hair.

  "I love you"