To glory in self like a new monster - any.

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

A privilege.

That in her counsel with the blinking night sky, she had always found open ears. That when she looked up she saw warmth in that cosmic dusting is endearing, but he would find her wistfulness is nauseating. They are distant, cold things, friends of hers because she can be intimate with them in ways nobody else can. But to him they are the naked brightness of a wasteplace, impossibly hot and probably long dead. They had offered him nothing in the way of comfort, and at night, he had been too preoccupied by his disquiet to dote on their poetry.
It would have been a pleasure if he could.

Once, he would have been afraid of her. In an older build of himself – without the horns and two-toed hooves, and the might of his manipulation. In a younger version of himself, her advance and boldness would have ground him to dust. He would have sought the refuge of his transparency long ago. Followed her in smoldering silence to a better place to strike, pooling her blood under her skin. Tender reminders of his compliancy and cowardice and danger – his anxious muttering to her face, and his vicious projection onto her body. Once. Like she is intimate with starlight, he is bosom buddies with fear. As she can manipulate her night light, so can he manipulate his brother, dread; now fear is his.
His own fear, and everyone else’s.

So as she presses forward into him, her impertinence elicits a swell of antipathy and rancor. But not fear; not anywhere but deep down, where the boy is still undergoing his death knell. Not that he is immune to fear. He can give it as easily as he breathes; he cannot shield himself from it. However, when one can wield dread like a blade, and one is as snug with it as he, the threshold becomes thicker. It takes much more than it used to, and in his delusions of grandeur, he gives her a crooked grin, willing her on.
“I bet you do.” Lirren does not scare him, not because she is incapable, but because instead she only loosens that powerful misogyny. And if the delicate tilt of her fine head, or the beacon of that magnificent teal, churns up anything other than hostility in him, he hates her all the more for finding a weakness.

He cannot conceal the crinkling of his nose, disgust. He tucks his head back towards his chest, because female touch is a loathsome thing to the golden stallion – first given to him in violence, then spreading like a virus until Phina had corrupted everything that could have been soft and pleasurable. Then the pressure of it comes to the top of his throat and he disappears from sight. Stepping back and away from her, rounding the curves of her body. Here he does not abhor touch, so long as it is at his discretion. He imagines she doesn’t feel the same. And so he does not touch her, though in his invisibility he tests a strike with his horns and a nip at her thigh. Stopping, his right shoulder to her left, he comes back into view, looking beyond into the mossy forest.

“Lirren.” He tastes it on his gravelly tongue. He looks to the side at her, and her challenge rustles the dark shard in his chest, the hot ember of power, gone to his head.

Her defiance is adorable and maddening.
Once he would have feared her, now he only wants to conquer her. And if he didn't know any better, he'd have to think that she wants it to. But maybe like darkness is known to chase out light, maybe light is made to search the darkness for something.


Pollock,
The gift-giver.

@[insane] let me know if it's okay to use his fear induction on her, since it is a powerplay, I didn't want to just do