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On occasion it didn’t matter where he was. He would be a stranger in strange lands, be among friends he hadn’t been around for a long time, or be a familiar face in a tavern or a store or in towns that happened to be a crossroad from where he wanted to go.
The habit to make himself scarce would start to rise up within him.
The king, and he was sure that it was the true king who became Odin and not false-king Cagnazzo but who knows how long that reign had been... At any rate, he would say that Kain enjoyed the shadows. And he would laugh because he knew that the lad wanted to be so much in the sky where the only shadows cast were clouds upon other clouds. If the lad wanted to, he can go up and up and there would only be sky and sun and moons to guide him, and are shadows any place for such pure scrutiny.
Scrutiny was all his father ever gave him.
It was his father, and never his mother who always sees him as he was and without the trappings that his father tried to shroud him in. There were times he wished that he would be so much a part of the shadows that Richard Highwind wouldn’t notice him, just find him acceptable. To be just enough.
His father never beat him like some other fathers, but who would want an icy statue for a father where all his accomplishments are emblazoned before him for all to see? There, upon his military dress, the dark blue that was almost black to signify the deep space from where the sky came, the fabric where military markings and insignia make their home on like planets rotating. On his left shoulder, silver scaling embroidery in the manner of a dragon’s own texture. On his right shoulder, gold fin-like piping to suggest the Baron navy, as weak as it would be now. Rows of multicolored bars to show achievements in the corps. A dragon’s head silver pin marked both sides of his collar.
During that time, there were many an occasion for his father to don the military dress. Prosperity was rising, and he feared that son Kain would grow soft.
He found his audience with Rosa and Cecil, as they were children and unafraid of things. The sheer presence of his father vanished alongside his body in who knows where. The lone dragon which was Richard’s steed mourned the loss when Kain found manner of difficulty to, and felt genuine sadness at last when mother came to the stables to tend to the dragon in its final days and said always that Kain was like Richard in his kindness.
Years go by and he felt he can be as determined as he can be, rose to heights higher than the parapets of Baron. In his focus to rise up and up, like the first airship to rise up from the hangar, he saw more and more the closeness of Cecil and Rosa. He saw more and more the attentions of the king upon his chosen heir.
Higher and higher, he’d leave behind everyone behind on the ground where they suffer and laugh and love and be sad. Higher and higher, until he was in other worlds where there were more people to know and more people to leave behind.
And when he reached his apex, he sighed, relieved, where he felt he can finally be himself.
And to his lasting horror, that he found himself by being alone.