Audemus Dawnspark

The night is wine: sky; drink; the sangria blossom of a bruise (hematoma) in the crook of his arm (cubital fossa) that leaves no secret about how he’s decided to spend his night. The ugly bleed of immediate color spreads at the same pace that the colors in the sides of his vision seep and waver. He laughs it away, says his vein (cephalic) rolled, and gets a sympathetic nod of ‘been there’ in return. He knows it is a lie: that he’s drunk, he’s trembling, he’s out of practice but not so much so that he had any trouble locating the stashed away needle injection kit beneath a false floorboard.

It was easy to invite her in, and even easier to strip her bare. These are familiar motions but now done in open-eyed slumber. The...

His sleep had been short-lived, and what little he had managed was fitful, the cocktail of drugs and alcohol leaving his system leaving him in a decidedly wakeful state. It is not difficult to untwine his own restless limbs from the sprawl of pale, forever ones, but he does it slowly nonetheless — breath hitched, mindful of the slightest stir. Nothing. He wonders if it is a credit to his stealthiness or merely luck, helped along by a circadian rhythm that is not his — but is.

He gravitates towards the largest bookshelf in this space, overburdened and cluttered with an eclectic mix: stolen books, a forgotten spore cultivar that has likely become its own ecosystem, the bleached lower mandible of a dragon. His interest lies in...