Sweet Seduction

He liked the nights best.

It started with the sunset, predictable with its timing but unpredictable with the array of glorious, vibrant colors that would highlight the sky overheard and tint all the puffy white clouds some other shade. It was then that the hush would begin to fall, sweeping through the countryside on a slow trek to loll its inhabitants to sleep.

He liked how calm the nights were, the gentle but somehow dangerous shadows giving his well known home an other-worldly look. He used to like the fact that he had another world to escape into that was his own as a child, but now he needed it for his very survival.

Next came twilight. After the sun had fully set, there was a brief space of time where the blackness of night had yet to truly settle in. The air would grow cooler as everything around him would fade into a rich, dark blue.

It was at this time of the night that the best shadows came out, creating a whole other dimension for him to walk into. A whole other world without responsibility or duty, without cares or worries to tear at his heart strings. It was a place where he could just sit and rest without interruption.

He never let himself fall asleep, he had little need of that, and his dreams of late had become so dark and twisted that he no longer wished to torment his conscious with his actions from during the day or the days of his past. He did not regret any of what he had done, but his restless slumber was unrelenting in torturing him until he would break, terrifying him into submission.

This could not happen.

After the twilight came the earliest shades of black, not the endless pools of darkness no, that came later. First it was a blue-black, almost as if there was still some last lingering affects of the sun's warm rays, reluctant to leave and brighten up some other part of the world.

Then there was the gray-black, the almost fuzzy color that came when night truly made itself comfortable, enveloping everything around it in a dark frenzied haze. It was at this time that the stars would come out, gigantic white and blue orbs that appeared the size of a pin head to his naked eye.

He had always been fascinated by the stars, and the fact that there were so many of them, more than he would ever see and so far away. The moon too, which depending on the time of the month, would make herself known to him had always also been an object of great interest; her large cratered face sending rays of silver light down to the earth.

The moonbeams cast eerie rays that seemed to give any and all objects a translucent beauty and a kind of simple, elegant, grace that he tried to constantly copy in his behavior and attitude.

It had been so long since he had had the will to try and be like the moon, imitating her natural elegance the best way a man could, but a prisoner did not need elegance to survive, to stay sane. All a prisoner needed was some food and a will to live.

Soon the grey-black would begin to fall into an abyss, simply growing darker and darker with each passing second. And with each second he would be more drawn in by night's frightening and compelling beauty.

Every time a new night came, he found himself more entranced with it, the seduction of its dark secrets gently pulling on the threads of his mind, slowly driving him mad.

But no, this could not be. Lucius had simply always liked nights best.