Easier to Run towards the Ashes

It's easier to run
Replacing this pain with something numb
It's so much easier to go
Than face all this pain here all alone
 
Dona was charming, skilled, and social. Of course she would find him.
 
The words, themselves, were benign - the lady had made an impact, he'd said, but it was the smirk. The smirk which caused the hunger inside his mind to roar to life, to declare his territory, his property, to see this other man driven before him like prey.
 
It made no sense, of course - he himself was slowly falling in love with a handful of people, but the comparison is where his mind stuck him.
 
Something has been taken from deep inside of me
A secret I've kept locked away
No one can ever see
Wounds so deep they never show
They never go away
Like moving pictures in my head
For years and years they've played
 
Dona wasn't broken.
 
He wasn't compelled to don a mask and armor and fly into the night hunting the monsters within the darkest of shadows. He could... simply... be himself. He could adventure and court and be social, knowing there was some kind of future. Dona was warm and charming and his smiles reached his eyes.
 
And his own was not. His smiles were a mask over the hunger that he was forcing back into the corners of his mind. His prey was about, somewhere in the darkness, and he forced his mind to realize it was not, in fact, this man sitting across from him who simply had the poor luck to be a better man than he.
 
You, who isolates yourself within despair
Reflecting only poisoned roots and gnarled branches twisting
Allowing vines to wrap your mind and lay it bare
With all your hope abandoned to this fiction you are living
You, who only sees a barren path ahead
No peaceful shade to offer only rended branches swaying
The quiet that you sought now suffocates instead
Forcing you to hear the very heart that you are breaking
 
"... she is in love with Cardinal, after all."
 
Of course she is. Even though the smiling man opposite him doesn't say it, something in his tone says he is too.
 
They deserve each other, he mused, these creatures of the light. Warm and kind and noble - the three of them would be happy together, once it was done.
 
You, a shadow of the life that you project
Your withered leaves bely this lonely visage you protect
And carved upon this vessel are the scars that you collect
A gallery of truths that would be better to forget
But you, a cinder of the fire that's yet to come
Will you just sit and mourn this fragile thing that you've become
 
The night called to him as it did not call to them. No matter the lies, no matter the false smiles and facades, they came from different worlds and they belonged together in a way he never would.
 
Unbidden, the spires of Parliament came to his mind - and the many nights he sat atop them, pondering the darkness of the distance to the ground. It waited for him, that final leap into the shadows of his life, and it would be there once his mission was done.
 
Could the lies that you believe
Be a fear of the unknown
If you don't know who you are
Then who is it you hate
All the lies that swallow you whole
Don't even know your name
Hey
Hey
Hey
Who is it you hate
Hey
Hey
Hey
Who is it you hate