Black Eyes #1

So, yep. My first [part of a]story on this site. Doesn't have a name yet, and neither does my MC, so if you have suggestions for either, comment down below or on my wall, please!

I hope you like it...

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A boy is on the flat stone floor of a roof now, somewhere about a day’s walk out of the city if he heads east. He molds himself against the corner of the building against a cement pipe that, if he looks up, strains smoke into a painted, smoggy sky to drift. He knows it’ll go out into grey soon, all of it into soft nothingness. But it’s a beautiful thing, to see all of those colors blurred together. 

His eyes are ruined, but the colors remain, the shapes they belong to muffled and unimportant.

That’s a single thing he loves about the city… sunsets. Because where he comes from, it’s hard to see the colors at dusk. They layered too subtly into each other, reaching his eyes in muddy, bruised shades, except for a couple times a year during the wet season, when the almost-rain billowed every direction, if only for a few days.                                                                                                                              

But the wonderful thing about where he came from is that the stars were bright, bright all night long, and the moon was luminous in the sky, even if it was just a thin smile on some nights.                   And here, he’s afraid that the stars have gone out, and he knows no one to tell him otherwise.      

He falls asleep soon, when the last bit of pink escapes behind the horizon, and he dreams of fireflies and candlelight and yellow flowers.

----

There’s a shift between sleep and wakefulness that is just like dawn. In the beginning, it’s dark, dark, unknowable, and, incredibly, that first peak of light appears and everything suddenly makes sense, in some way or another. Everything is under control.                                                                        

The sliver of the boy’s last dream tugged away from his words and memory until nothing remained, and he was once again thrust into the world, suddenly aware of the faint red that stained his eyelids. He blinked a couple times to adjust to the light, and sighed. So disappointing.

It is always like this, in Rynth. Everything browned, greyed, muted. And the sky, a opaque bright white.

He doesn’t have anything with him except what he carries on his body- clothes, a matchbox and a couple of coins, sewn loosely into his pocket, and a small stone knife concealed in his sleeve -just in case.

He walks to the edge of the the building he had slept on, where there's a low dark balcony that gives a safe, clear contrast with the color of the sky, and puts his hand on the cement, pressing there hard, concentrating.                                    

A map in his head spreads out before him- one he can’t see, but feel, like a woodcarving under his fingers, unfurling and pulsing with the energy of the city.                                                                      

It used to be so disorienting for him, he remembers. All the people and birds and stray animals everywhere, that it was hard for him to feel in front of him without being distracted by the sheer amount of movement and life, of chaos, the chaos that felt as if his brain were being pulled apart in all four corners of the world. For a long time, before he adjusted, it felt as if he really were truly and utterly blind.

He climbs down the building, carefully picking out a pathway through the network of pipes that cling to the wall like metal vines.