(no subject)
Becherd was ten years old. Ten years old, and still at the waists of his parents, who seem to never let him go anywhere for too long. His friends were always disappointed, always grumbling about parents, and behind his back, whispered, "Mama's boy."
But for all the time he was made to stay at home. He made paper airplanes and marveled at how far they could travel. Outside, his kites were always aloft, when the wind was barely a trickle of breeze.
His friends always invited him along when they wanted to fly their kites. Around him, even the heat wasn't so bad, for the air itself had to love him, because all of these phenomenons could not be natural.
A boy ten years old, with pale, bright-blue hair rimmed in white, and pale yellow eyes on the hazel side, shorter than most, and always so pale in parlor. He looked sick, almost. It was because of this his parents wanted them by his side, for he looked ready to always keel over at any second.
But he was always fine. He was healthy, perfect, and it was a mystery in itself, why he always looked two steps from death.
Pale boy of ten years old, whom the air seemed to favor. Becherd was special, some in his town decided, or it was only a fluke, thought others. A constant, ten year fluke. They couldn't completely decide amongst themselves, but it wasn't an immediate matter.
In he meantime, Becherd was happy. Or as happy as he could manage. He wasn't sad, or upset, or depressed, or mad. He woke up, looked outside, and simply accepted how the day looked.
But one day, he woke up, looked outside, and screamed.
The dark creatures hovering a few inches from his face, with their eerie yellow eyes much too unnatural, with shadow-black bodies and so... he was out of his bed screaming for his parents, and realized without much hope, that the air was full of screams in the dawning of the day, and his parents were already laying deathly still, one at the top of the stairs and one having rolled down the rest of the way.
He was running, he didn't know how, and he was still in his pajamas, with no shoes on, in the knee-high grass, going nowhere that a ten year old could deduce to go. Just that he needed to run.
They were behind him, the smaller ones that the grass could hide, and he was crying and screaming and so muddled in the mind he was on autodrive.
He was at the stream, and crossing it when they pounced. From the back, felling him forward, two or three for a ten year old boy. He was crashing face first into the ten inches of water and the rounded stones and he was thrashing every which way and he had to get them off--
The incredible sensation of a warm chill being removed from his body. And his mind was screaming, not his voice, calling the wind that loved him.
A sudden gale-force burst of air suddenly whipped millimeters from his back, pulling away the monsters and sweeping away the warm chill far away from the monsters' claws, and tiny slivers of breeze were slipping into his mouth and out, keeping him alive as he was rolled onto his back to float.
We can keep you alive. I can have you saved.
He cried from the far-away place he was falling into. save me
----
"Wake up, number one."
It didn't take much effort to wake up, and sit up, and it was gazing around the room, so lost and so empty and it was staring at...someone. Something, in pale blue. He moved, he spoke, and it was bedazzled.
"A success," the someone murmured blandly. "The wind named you Balxias."
A...name? For how quickly it felt empty, this knowledge of him existing, with a name, it filled him with not information, but only a great relief.
"...Balxias..." That was his voice! It sounded...wrong. Deeper, too hard versus something he was sure was supposed to be much softer.
A quick look in a mirror down the way would reveal an adult of mature age, and had no recognition that this was wrong, that he had been only ten years old.
And he never knew a world with his friends and family...had winked out of existence only a few months earlier.