10-08-2018, 05:56 PM
and lord, I fashion dark gods too;
He's long stopped caring about his children. They are too numerous, too stupid to matter. He’s tried, of course, groomed sons and daughters for greatness, placed them on thrones, given them kingdoms – but always, they disappoint. They fall in love, or question him, or die, and he has long ago learned they are not worth his time.
Still, he favors them over the horses who aren’t of his blood, as much as he favors anything. He no longer mentors, no longer takes them under wing, but he’ll poke, or prod, sometimes. Not always for the good – Warrick had not been, certainly, that had been entertainment, pure and simple.
He is not at the beach for the children. He is at the beach because he loves ruin. He is high off Pangea’s rising – that sick kingdom, sitting like a drowned scar on Beqanna – and he has not lit off for the territories, not yet. He lingers, savoring the victory, and he is curious about what Pangea can, or will, do to Beqanna.
He thinks Malis a corpse at first, dead on the sands, but then sees the things squirming out of her. He’s always found birth a bit distasteful, preferring his blood and viscera to denote death. When she raises her head, he remembers her, the parade of horns down her forehead. These are his children, then – he notes the stars, and smiles, mostly to himself. Marked, then. Good.
He scrambles for her name and cannot recall, so he plucks it from her mind - Malis.
Sounds like malice. Sounds like nothing.
The filly’s touched next, Atria, pretty and meaningless. The boy, then, but when the dark god touches his mind there’s no name, only an undercurrent of anger, a curious contempt bred in the womb.
The boy will fail, of course – they all do. Still. All things need a name.
He makes himself known, no longer the galaxy-strewn thing she’d coupled with, back to his usual gray. He regards all three of them, his two children and their bearer, and then locks eyes with the boy.
“Decimate,” he says to him, one word, and whether it’s a command or a name – or both – he lets the boy decide.
c a r n a g e
holler if you want this changed