Just one more log... just before strength gives out. Pull with what is left of willpower, to build a safe place, a place to hide away from the shadows which plagued the night. Wiping the sweat from His brow, His breaths coming fast and shallow as his silver eyes flicked about with nervous panic, he watched the dim hooded lantern's flame flicker and waver grinningly. Just a few inches away from him, at his side was a plain hatchet, crudely made with whetted iron and a sturdy branch that he had bound together with a bit of twine. At his left hip, a coiled black whip, at his right a gleaming rapier fit for a lord. His hands were shaking, and as a frigid wind but through his thin black clothes, He shuddered, refocusing his attention on the felled tree and the mishmash of logs which were built up in a semblance of a log cabin.

Blowing into His hands in a feeble attempt to stop their shaking, He glanced sparingly at the darkness, willing Himself to forget that the sun had already fallen and was now swallowed up by the impending wolf of night. No time to praise the sun now that that once radiant god had fallen prey to darkness' curse. Those within home and hearth would be laughing and dancing, drinking and making merry with their loved ones, with children sitting at their feet. The very thought of it was enough to make bile rise in the back of His throat, and with a wrenching twist in the pit of His stomach, he gagged, willing the sickness to leave him as swiftly as it had come. Alas, it was not to be, and instead His thin, pale fingers snaked up to his eye. He flinched and quickly pulled away as even his light touch inflicted a burning pain; pain which seared through his mind and induced a sharp ringing to echo in both his ears.

Clasping the thick, heavy log in both hands, bracing Himself to pull, He grit his teeth as he summoned what remained of will and attempted to fight against the slick mud which had gathered as a result of frantic, churning feet and the incessant downpour of a temperate rainfall. Inch by painful inch, the timber moved, but not fast enough, as He realized, as the nigh creatures began their prowl and the curious owl observed the handiwork of the thin, weak intruder. Oh, if magic would guide His hand and make good his weaknesses for just long enough to create a new home, now that his old one had been so wickedly torn from him as punishment for a crime which He did not comprehend.

Fire... the cross... jeers and calls of witch and devil.

Anger flared up within, the fire of the Mark blazing with Hell-inspired fury as His mind grew fuzzy and unsure. All that He could see were those who mocked Him, who had spit upon Him the colors that had spun and danced about Him as a maddening gypsy circus; He, the disfigured and wretched freak, the center ring of their twisted show. To be gawked at and stared upon, left with no privacy or without dignity, to be exiled for his abhorrent Mark, the Magic which had suddenly manifested itself without His knowledge or understanding, the Magic which had banished Him from the sanity which had once been found in the sheep's fold.

Retreating into the nearly completed wooden monument, a lone log cabin on the outskirts of a dreary woods, He brought his knees to his chest. How empty the work of His hands was. His white, corpse-like hands, bruised, battered, blistered, bleeding from trials experienced and yet to come. He truly was on his own, with nobody to guide him, with nobody to care for him in any capacity.

The creaking of the wood and the moaning of the wind against the feeble abode caused Him to reflect, to think of everything that had transpired and what had led to this point in his life. Had the been nothing that he could have done differently? Had he been doomed to this place form the start? A hermit and an outcast, the scapegoat of a people who feared what they could not understand? And what of their new leader, the radiant One who had ignited this change? What of him?

All He could do now was watch the rain as it hammered against the walls as if to destroy what He had created, as if to stir or attempt to wake the black-clad corpse now Entombed in a sepulcher of darkness, fear, and grief.