Was this the rain or his own tears streaming down his cheeks? He wasn’t sure.

A stretching, clawing chain of lightning out over the ocean reached for him, granting an indication of which… and even still he was uncertain.  The neon of the Emerald City glowed hauntingly beneath him as he knelt on the slanting roof of the arena.

He wondered how he got here.

The eventual crack of thunder made him shudder, frightful as he was of nature’s fury. An untamed ferocity that scared him almost as much as his own. It was then that he realized he was violently shaking, quivering under the unrelenting rain. At once he was there again, inside the structure he now found himself perched upon, the words of the mad silver woman stabbing at his head with thunderous malice. 

Each syllable bit him. Each venomous word slashed at him. Every sentence found its mark. He remembered his powerlessness, his paralysis, as she verbally dissected him. All over again, he felt that repressed, restrained fierceness once more.

He wanted to scream out. Fit to burst, he found he couldn’t. Her words, each one more vile than the one which preceded, somehow imprisoned him.

At once, he felt the sting of her SLAP across his face. 

His right shoulder throbbed and thrummed under the pounding deluge and his opposing hand reached up to massage out the discomfort with little effect. More than perhaps ever, he felt lost and broken. 

Despair, he knew it well.

Another roll of thunder halted his spiraling self pity, his eyes finding the soaked championship belt laid out before him. The proud pelican adorning its front plate looked back up at him judgmentally. Or was it concern that it wore on its noble face? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything.

“Get up,” the regal bird seemed to say. “Get up and FIGHT!”

He blinked back at it, raindrops(?) flying. Suddenly, the lively sound of the sodden, vibrant city around him rose up – it had been there all this time, he was certain, but he was by some means ignorant of it until now.

Absently reaching into and removing something from the pocket of his ragged blue jeans, the shirtless monster narrowed his glare at the tiny piece of frayed paper in his hands. His brow a twisted knot of every emotion, he sighed a groaning sigh, tension slowly releasing from every muscle in his barrel frame.

The small photo was torn, stained with age and clandestine passage, but he could still – even in the gloom of the night – make it out. The hard sheets of rain came again in waves… or was it more tears? Uncertainty gripped him.

“Get up,” the pelican might have squawked. “Fight!” Shoving the photo back in its place, his other hand wiped the rain away from his eyes, sweeping his long dark hair off of his face.

Finding his feet, the lightning and thunder came all at once, seemingly everywhere at once, lighting up the sky and filling the air with a cacophony of bellowing crashes.

As if to warn the world.

He shook off the chills with defiance, slinging the pink leather strap over his shoulder. A low growl rumbled out of him, a release all its own.

Corvo Alpha:
…fight.

More Propaganda | View Corvo Alpha's Biography