#the like. smallest dash of vanco whump

[revelisms]

He's not a religious man. 

Superstitious, perhaps; spiritual, hardly—but Fate has her ways: claw-tipped fingers blue and demure, weaving chance like a seamstress bobbins thread.

And maybe Vander, the Hound, Zaun, this child—maybe all of it exists as the needle; he, the tear in need of stitching.

A loose thread; a future yet to be sewn.

A patchwork parable: smoke and schemes.

They spoke of his mother like a sickly omen, and his father like a begone spirit, vanished.

They spoke of him like something intangible: a concept, a slip of a butchered tongue, a wash of light from a galaxy gated in smog. Yet his steps hold sound: heavy-footed heels, heel-to-steel-tipped-toe, a graceless carryover of the mines; his clothes hold scents: of the Lanes' sweet-soured stench, of tobacco and juniper leaf, of cedar oil and citrus and clove. 

In the churches, he splits the silence with every stride, and sinks into an empty pew, in an empty hall, incense pluming fragrant off glittering tile and gilded glass and a child's scribble tucked in his pocket, paper pinched half-minded beneath his thumb—and he does not pray.

No, he is not a religious man. 

To be anything near it would be to deny the blood-soaked earth on which he stood: the blood his roots have drank from, his branches have beared fruit from, that his people have devoured: stripped the leaves for their bedding, splintered the branches for their kindling, consumed with the careless abandon of a youth's first harvest—one who has forgotten to sew the next.

(Needle, or thread?)

Most days, he wills himself not to care.

Superstition begs differently.

He will wash his hands thrice, on the mornings the sun shines too cleanly, simmers through jade-paneled glass and sits like a pyre on his cave-chilled scales; he will turn the lamps down low, on the days the storms wash the streets clean; he will keep a gun at his back and a knife at his waist, on the days he feels safe enough, and a dozen more, on the ones he doesn't; he will eat alone, standing, hunched at the open draft of a night burned with neon, before he ever thinks to sit at the kitchen table.

Strange habits. Stranger beliefs.

They say the Sun's a devil of disease, don't you know? That the storms of Jan'ahrem's sleeves are the oldest gods of all. That one ought to wear a bullet for every Sump-layer they cross. That those buried within their bowls may just as soon be buried beneath the rubble.

A canary, they called him. An irony.

Sooner to squawk than to sing; a wingless creature slimed from the Pilt.

A manifest.

Needles and thread.

He sung only at an ivory cast of 88 keys, a girl at his knee and a set of knobby fingertips skipping beneath his own, as the words little girl blue slipped too quietly off the tongue.

He prayed only at the altar of Vander's knees.

In the churches, he leaves his tithes, and slithers off in a prowl of loping boots. Heel-to-toe thud-thudding, hands pocketed, wool sweeping. 

The streets greet their Unholy, their Deliverance, their Own with blind chaos, devouring. Countless lives lived; countless threads, stitched and unraveling.

From his breast pocket, he snaps open a gilded cigarette case, and walks on.

Tobacco weaves through the fibers of his coat.

silco / on prayers