your skin is new in seven years

It's only three years after the fall of Torna that the first stubble, brownish-gray just like his caramel-colored hair, starts to poke through. It should be affirming, because as far as he knows it's not strictly impossible for a Blade to have facial hair, and he never did before, because...because, but he can't help the fear coming first.

Blades don't age. They don't grow up, they don't grow old, they look precisely the same as they were designed within every single solitary second of their lives, which aren't their own to begin with. Amalthus owned my immortality, and thus he owned my mortality as well. It was his to take. It was mine to protect. I have lost it. It is my fault.

He wonders, is he the first Blade ever to experience this phenomenon? Will he be the last? Oh, by the Architect, he hopes he'll be the last. Wishing this upon even the worst of enemies was far too cruel. Amalthus had moved on to Blade Eaters and other assorted Titan weaponry, as he'd gathered from the remnants of Spessia, so maybe...

Yes. He's a fluke. Not that his body specifically was giving out before others' would have, but that this truly wasn't meant to be done. Blades are pure. Blades are powerful. You can introduce Blade to human, but you cannot introduce human to Blade. That's some poetry on the exit from the Core, probably, but he doesn't care to consider it. In a way, it's embarrassing, to think of that time.

A centuries-long learning experience, you, the Blade that was, will be. Will have? Will be. The first lesson is today: he unsheathes a dagger and considers whether or not its ether-slicked blade will be sharp enough to scrape the hairs back down to invisibility. Endless time on his hands though he may have, he lacks the positively virtuous patience it would take to pick them out one by one, follicle by follicle, time and again until the very roots are dead - that is, if they're even alive to begin with.

The precipitous persistence...what does it mean? How many times has he asked himself this question? Are Blades alive? Is anything alive that can't die? Is anything dead that never lived? What does it mean to live? Is it the over-spanning struggle to accept love, and to give it all the same? Is it the formation of independent opinions, the cultivation of uniqueness in one's own self?

Oh, and come to think of it...all this talk of he, and him, and his - it's better than she, and her, and hers, for sure, but what's his name? Where's his residual impression of the self? That's the only thing a Blade knows. Some days it feels like it's the only thing he doesn't know.

Hah. So there it is. There it is. The meaning of life might be sentience, awareness, agency. Does he want it back? Of course he does. It's all he's ever wanted. But then again...eh. He'll probably remember it eventually. Probably.

Absentmindedly, he rubs at the corner and edge of his jaw, rustling up a decision. The interruption, then, of his most consistent idle habit by way of this alien feeling is so disconcerting that he very nearly makes a wild wave of the dagger in order to stop it bodily. Away, away, away.

After he's stewed enough in intrusive urges, he gets up the gumption and takes the knife to his face, and is no less than horrified when he finds that it comes away with real grayish-bluish-reddish blood glistening - well, no, it's not quite that shiny - over the flat.

Immediately, he had wanted to get rid of it. Hadn't stopped to check a mirror and see if it even looked half bad - and that, well, that could just be because he hates the sight of his own face proper too much. The circles in which he traveled weren't much on mirrors anyway - or personal grooming, for that matter.

Is organicity the key to life? Of all the ways he'd like to be able to change, to ebb and to flow and to sprawl out into specialization here and there, this isn't one. Cutting himself shaving? Welcome to manhood - humanhood, that is. Aren't you glad you're here?

Half of him wants to try again the next day, to excel at this as he does with all other uses of his weapons. The other half of him knows it's not worth it. And which halves were those? He'll never know. It's been seven years. He is not the same man he once was. He never will be again.