Balor can no longer call himself young. Where once there was tender flesh and a fresh face, now there are pockmarks and deep scars left by the Scourge. There is a hardness in his once kind eyes. Eyes that thought the world of his mother. Eyes that once were innocent and saw only good.
Balor had never resented his father, even though he only really knew him in passing. Even though he only really knew him through his mother’s stories - through her heartache. Balor did not resent him, he simply did his best to fill the space he left in his mother’s soul.
He misses her. He sees her in the tangled shadows, and he smiles.
But she is a ghost now, and he is a beast.
------
For a time, the beast rests in fitful slumber.
In his dreams, the oceans pull at his feet. He drifts with the seafoam and castaways into utter desolation - deserts of salt water and scorching light.
Perhaps there is a rift somewhere between his dreamings and the reality he once knew, for when he wakes, all is unfamiliar.
This is not the Fief. he muses as he blinks salt and sea from his piercing blue eyes. His ears swivel to and fro to catch mumbling voices amidst the hush of lapping waves. He is drenched through and through, seaweed and sand clinging to twisted, heavy hair.
“Where am I?” he asks aloud.
Balor can no longer call himself young. Where once there was tender flesh and a fresh face, now there are pockmarks and deep scars left by the Scourge. There is a hardness in his once kind eyes. Eyes that thought the world of his mother. Eyes that once were innocent and saw only good.