12-12-2015, 09:00 PM
KINGSLAY
If tranquility ever existed in this world, he quells it quickly, suffocates it like he suffocates everything else. Like he suffocated her.
He buries the quiet beneath the cacophonous echo of crackling heat and flames, buries it like he’d buried the words she spoke the last time that he saw her (before he turned his back). He can feel hunger stirring in his gut, and the flames along his back burn hotter for it. It’s as though there are landmines existing just below the surface of the golden yellow sand, because as he moves forwards explosions sound along the borders of the kingdom that he leaves in his wake like dust. It isn’t the only thing that follows him – above a watchful lone raven circles overhead, and it dives through the smoke and flames as though it is made of them (it is – he has straia to thank for it).
Every crack that splits the skies into halves, and every blast that shoots ash and smoke into the air (like the eruptions of magnificent volcanoes) sends monstrous glass sheets jutting out from the dunes in irregular angles, and they look just like the tongues of flames. They will survive this siege, even if he doesn’t. They will reflect the images of things he won’t ever say out loud.
‘I love you, Kingslay,’ she had said, and he had said nothing, stirred by the rustle in the leaves that meant something was living that he could end – because he wanted her in ways that he had never wanted before. He wants her alive. He wants her in the ways he isn’t supposed to want. He wants her in ways that don’t make sense, even with all the instinct that burns through his bones. He wants her cut open. He wants to watch the life pour out of her eyes. He wants to love her. He wants to know what that feels like. He wants to curl up in her innards.
He wants to know her. He wants to devour her.
“Etro,” he says, the first name he ever spoke.
He wants to find her.
That’s why he has come.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.