Plaything in one's palm
The charcoal smudged his fingers, and he didn't care.
He was still afraid. The nightmare of Caius was a constant companion. The journey ahead was long and fraught with peril. But in the act of drawing the world as he saw it, with his own untethered hand, he found a tiny, fragile piece of himself that the gilded cage hadn't been able to touch. He was Liam Gray, a ghost with a sketchbook, and for the first time, that identity felt less like a prison and more like a blank page.