Meadow

Death had freed them.

Like the pale rider that had come crashing through locked doors and slipping like ink through the window frames, he had been released. Shackles untethered and bonds broken, he had fallen into the sea like the painted corpse before him, and he had disappeared into unknown lands.

To return was to rise up from the ashes, no longer boy and now man. Scarred and blinded, there is something changed, something broken that can never be repaired.

There was no loss in what had happened, and it had been a worthy, welcome change.

In the trees, hidden by skin and bark, the dark landscape little more than a speckle of white and black, he lingers. A single eye, watchful over the chatty clusters of strangers, blinks slowly as night turns to morning, sunlight beginning to trickle and a single, blood-red tear weeping from a puckered and white eye.

An ominous condition that keeps to the trees, watching quietly and waiting for nothing in particular, as if the world would open up and swallow the strangers whole. To his right, a direction that never existed except in sound alone, for want of a functioning eye, there is a presence that hangs on his flesh. Soundless and unseen, someone is watching as well- but not watching him.

Together in their silence, they watch together, their eyes pouring over the strangers for a time before finally, his black face turns, sightlessly looking for the stranger as he grunts quietly in greeting.