“If I had been God,
I would have rearranged the veins in the face to make them more
resistant to alcohol and less prone to aging” - Roger Waters
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1357 DR
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I would have rearranged the veins in the face to make them more
resistant to alcohol and less prone to aging” - Roger Waters
-----------
1357 DR
-----------
The years hadn’t made the figure in the mirror any easier to look at.
Rhaeg stared at the thing looking back at him in the Darius Estate’s bathroom mirror, giving him an unobscured look at everything he physically was, down to about his navel. Never any easier. What he saw was something not good enough to be human, not powerful enough to be orcen.
He started at his head.
Miraculously resistant to balding, the old man ran his thick fingers through his scalp, checking for lice or worse. Nothing but dry, grey hair - And dandruff. A fair amount of that. He shook his head and watched a flurry of flakes dust down past his shoulders.
He traced over various healed-over fractures and scars upon his head, strewn out like some chaotic delta upon an organic floodplain. A few faded, amateur stitches here; a sliver of bone cleft from his cheek there. Used and thoroughly abused.
Fingers gently pried open the rheumy, sagging right eyelid. Bloodshot sclera. Grey, dismal iris. Just the sight of his sight made Rhaeg want to yawn. Tired eyes befitting a tired old bastard. The hand wandered down to his jaw; something he’d considered a crime against his identity ever since… Luskan.
‘Home.’
Cursed with the mandibular prognathism that affected so many others sharing such a bloodline, he gently tapped a finger against one of the protruding lower teeth - Tusks, to many. Once sharp enough to pierce skin, time and weathering had reduced the things to rounded nubs.
Maybe he needed to shave, soon. Coarse, bristly grey hair contrasted with the pale green of his skin, and as hands wandered down a little farther, he found a tiny bit of humor out of how inelastic age had made his skin. He was able to pull a curtain of skin almost an inch away from his barrel-like neck, pinched between the thumb and forefinger.
As Rhaeg hunched his shoulders, he felt it -
Irritated, dry, cracked skin over the old Cat lashes vertically lining his upper spine.
A deluge of rusty fish-hooks, over and over…
Residual fear grasped at his stubbornly-beating heart. Those truly were some of the most terrifying times of his life, he’d thought.
But why did the scars still hurt so much?