12-20-2015, 04:29 PM
KINGSLAY
He only hears the jarring ring of the chaos that he crafts. He doesn’t hear the quiet that settles in the space between explosions. He has never noticed the way the air can seem to stand still sometimes – the sound of nothing, the sound of warning, the sounds that light the desert now in overexposed white flashes like a beacon. If he had, maybe he could have seen the silent warning in her eyes. If he had, maybe he would have told her: ‘Yes.’
But it doesn’t end.
It can’t end. It won’t end until he has her. That’s the way that it works, an instinct bred into him so deep you’ll find it in his marrow; he does not stop – he is not made for it. There is nothing of his mother left inside of him. It died out along the river’s shore like she did, bled into the sand like the last warm pieces of her, his humanity. There is nothing left of him to acknowledge the goodbye she whispered in the meadow, when the hurt in her eyes was palpable and he still could not see it. It doesn’t end. It can’t end.
But it will never be right.
She knows it even if he never will. She doesn’t come first. She can’t come first. He isn’t made for it, and that truth runs as deep as his instinct. He is made from carnage, for carnage. He is made for the rattle of explosions that leave the sounds of flatlines in his ears. He is made for breaking bones, and burning flesh, and not for her. But he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop.
And it doesn’t make sense that there is nothing to burn and the flames rise so much higher. They feed off him like he is made of gasoline, and in his wake they whirl in helixes and leave glass spirals that reach out into a slate grey sky with sharp and glittering edges.
“Etro,” he says again, the syllables heavy like the smoke that stains the sky dark.
And as soon as the name falls from his tongue this second time, something else replaces it – the metallic taste of blood – because the sand suddenly is running red with it as a crumbling body falls into his path. A cough splatters blood that lands in droplets that bead and slide down his cheek. If he has harbored any resolve until this moment it is lost now as his head turns aslant, and hunger claws at his belly and threatens to open him up from the inside out.
She doesn’t come first. She can’t come first.
He isn’t made for it.
He is made for what follows. He is made to move toward the body, head aslant. He is made for the climb of temperature that will leave sweat beading and rolling off both of their bodies. He is made for the crack of lightening that splits the sky.
He is a reaper. He is death.
He is made for that.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.