Nestled in your hollow shoulder - Sinew

[Pollock]

Dust and stone, a gorge nearly dried out and turbid.
It is theirs. Perhaps an ugly conquest, to some. To him, it is sweetened by the pillage and rape that it had taken to get her. She is a canvas, to his eye – an artist, though his hand would be small and inconsequential. He hasn’t the power to furrow her barren, grey soil. He can’t sow into her or change the make of her stoney skin. (The god-leader could, perhaps. He could make this thing from healthy tissue, surely he could wrought more brutal, twisted things from this earth.)

But he could paint her.
He could inlay gemstones into her crust and crags, make them glisten with slicks of bright red and blue brushstrokes, meaty and sumptuous.

He could make this place homely.

(Carnage had said build.
He is a carpenter. An architect.
The gift-giver can see scaffolding scaling her tall cliff faces. He can see the bones of something being erected, a home or a fortress or a prison of desert waste. It would become clear, as the magic and dust settles, what this is. Whether it had a purpose, auxiliary to the god flexing his might at the world.)

He has said to build, too. Told her it was the way forward when she came to him and asked.
Came to him, even when she could have loosed herself.
She is not his, that plains-wild thing. He knows that. Perhaps, knew it from the moment they met, brazen and stone-hearted – when she was young and he had eyes for… different qualities in her. Knew then, maybe, that she would not be kept.
He can accept that. (He can accept that to some degree. He can accept that grudgingly, sometimes angrily.) He had long neglected the idea that everything has to be his (he can hunger, that he will not quiet; what is a monster without hunger?) and even that everything could be his, even if he wanted it. He has watched them slip through his fingers like sand enough to know that some are crafty; powerful enough themselves that when they come together it will always be like iron on iron. A thunderous, raucous, violent thing.

So be it.
But still he dreams of that sleek, pinkish scar on her neck. It incites something wakeful and eager in him; greedy and envious. Last they met, and been alone, they had been rudely interrupted. He hadn’t been able to probe her like he wanted to, so he sets across the wastes to find her, red and white, because though she is not a possession, he is what he is. Hungry.

@[sinew]

[sinew]

Breaths are helds;
The mists are ripped apart by great clawing hands that cleave them in two and pull up from the terrible mess of the earth’s hot fiery innards, a mess of land and ruin that the dark god gifts them with.

Sinew takes her first step across the desolation of the badland, and she smiles.
(Behind her, are two small shadows - one dark green fading to purple, the other bay with glowing points like a collection of stars that drown out the darkness of the night - that trudge diligently along.)

She comes, because he is here - goat-god, even though he has been dehorned and normal-footed. To her, he is still godlike in his mission and his look, glares and glowers that make the heart palpitate in beats faster and frightened, except Sinew has never feared him. No, she respects the fearmonger and she trails after him, hungry for the feast of those that fall at his feet, ashamed and afraid.

The dark god is ignored, she has no quarrel with him though he brought about the downfall of her first beloved. Now, she lusts after the lewd trailing wing that catches all manner of dirt and bramble, and longs for the touch of those flesh-fed lips that just might pick at her own flesh like a vulture in search of a free feast. Pollock, fearsome and fetching, has earned himself this wild ambition that trails dutifully after him, like the twin foals trail after her.

Build, bids the godking.
Build, she does in the festering sore that is her own womb.
(Burnt, in her rush to come forth, had burned that foal-home clean with her fiery wings. Time has healed it, but the scars remain, thick and fierce and Sinew agonizes over the life she carries - it hurts, but pain is its own reward and though she has yet to thicken through the girth, she knows they grow from the tiny but mighty seeds of her and Pollock’s fleshy pact.)

Iron on iron, she bends still to his will.
Sinew gravitates towards him, despite her inexplicable determination to be no one’s kept thing - no one’s pet.

(she has one of those, the mammoth-horse that hides now, all horse and no mammoth because the mountain is an angry mother of a thing to them and has stolen her pet’s best and hideous attributes)

Still, she trails him because he is a bastion of power and fright in her eyes. She respects those that command fear, that feed off of it, and she basks in their aftermath of destruction and terror. It feeds her, quiets the dark that clamors in her flesh and makes the blood churn that much faster. She hungers, and hunger calls to hunger much like blood does. He hungers too, she can feel it in the way he hunts her across the back of the savage wastes and she turns to him, red and white, a slyness hanging about the curve of her mouth as she breathes his name aloud - “Pollock.”

[Pollock]

He eyes the things that follow her, and something savage stirs – a hydra, with many lips. A base, ignoble barbarity that holds kingdom in his lizard brain. They crowd at her hips
(– his hips; their hips, rhythmic and feral; that had been the sweetest dominion, as damp and spent, he had planted a flag and more in the smooth earth between thighs)
—they make her motherly, and that too is his, not theirs.

(of course, he loathes the maternity just as much as he glories in the fertility rites
he can shoulder the inconsistencies, he buries them in separate tombs in the name of separate gods)

The hallowed smears of cells in the scalded lining of her body arouse something else entirely in him. Queer reflexs he has never felt before, because always he has 
Furrowed. 
Sowed. 
And then left.
It is not a paternal awakening, but a provocation of something much purer and animal – selfishness, aggressive preservation; a brutal instinct to spill their other-blood and free her hips for him and his labours.

(He does not know they are god-made, but god or worm, they are hostile usurpers.)

He likes the way she says his name – with just enough want to feed the prideful part of his nature. For a second it draws his black eyes from them to her and his stomach gurgles its craving shamelessly. She is not the only one to ever weaponize his name, or her wily, female ways, nor the first. But her tongue contains a singular power.
(Like iron on iron. He hopes she never grasps the enormity of herself – the way she says his name and the way she comes to him even though he is naked. 
That would be a dangerous revelation.
He would take little pleasure....) 

“Sinew,” he curls around her, separating them from her with his body for a moment and in that moment he imagines all the ways he could make that severance final. (The lizard licks out, with forked tongue, tasting the warmth from their skin on the dry air.) He will let them stay, if he must. If it means she will stay, deferential and wild-willed, all at once. Even if he suspects she might never be His (not in the way he knew his other things to be – Thyndra, Astri, the nameless girl of pale purple – those baptized in the ultimate nature of their own blood), he still thinks he holds those cards, like Pale Death, in his bony hands.
That is enough for him, for now.

He runs his lips and teeth over the dusty places in between the mounds of her belly and haunch, testing the skin pulled taut over her ribs (beneath, the joint fruits of their exertion dig deep into the hostile wastes of her womb and they grow). It is a greeting that holds all the tensity of sensuality and violence unified under one touch. It is the only way he knows skin – to wield it like a double edged sword; like a threat and with all the control. 
All the way around he works until he reaches the peeled scar on her neck and stops, standing side-by-side, examining it with hard, flat eyes. “Who?” he grunts, and the temper in his voice makes clear the wakefulness it has caused him.

[sinew]

ooc: I forewarn you - I don't know exactly what this is, only that it is long and all over the place but tada! Feast and Famine now exist! And they should totally have another next breeding season.

Sinew does not like the way he eyes her things;
These are pets, as their mother had been; mammoth-made and strange.
(They are just as strange and exotic; a flavor that Sinew is constantly drawn to - craves, even.)

Blasphemous, barbaric; but she tolerates his boiling stare, even if it is for the mere sake of their earthy exertions. He sowed dark seeds in the burnt soil of her uterus, and she felt those seeds take shape and begin to grow, even then, she knew.

Greatness.
Damnation.

She knew;
She knew.

He eyes her things and she can almost see the bloodlust rise in him. It is a dark tide that overthrows the goat-grump shadow of his face. She bares her teeth at him in warning; lacking a tolerance for threats towards them - they are hers’, part of her collection, and she sends the odd pair off with a whistle and a jerking motion of her head that they’ve come to understand all too well. (Nips and snorts usually follow if they are slow to obey her, so they obey and are gone before they further rouse her ire.)

She calms, barely.
Attentive once more to him, as he spins her name from his lips like a chant she cannot ignore.

Sinew leans into him - into teeth and tension. The sensual violence of him has instilled a dark craving in her. If only he knew… it too, is a kind of power and one that he holds over her head, as much as his name in her mouth is powerful too. He finds the scar and peels back from her, like skin from tendon and bone, and she almost feels a physical hurt from the separation of their bodies. Her black, black eyes find his, matching stare for stare and steel for steel. Some measure of contempt hurls itself through her blood and her spit until she chokes it back down - “Tarnished,” the name is scratched out of her throat, like a birch split open by winter. She feels split open by the admission, and is slow to stitch herself back together for the lust and loathing is apparent in her face.

“He marked me,” she begins.
“And I liked it.” she ends.

Pollock, she knows, will not like this.
He though, has marked her in other ways, more so than Tarnished ever had.

Greatness.
Damnation.

His spawn grows.
She fattens up prettily;
A plump roast of pregnancy that often stays away - from him, from all of them.

Time, ravenous, comes --
The birth is not easy, it never is.

She goes to the Mountain.
For some reason, they should be born there;
So she has a taste of their true selves.

Out comes the first colt:
He is big - bigger than she imagined, a gluttonous thing that she rips the birth sac back from so that he can take in a greedy suck of air.
Oh he is breathtaking! Even in his smear of birth fluids and blood, he is a thing to behold! From the tips of his tiny goat horns down to the devilishly darling cloven feet. Like his sire before him, he has but one beautiful broken nub of a wing that hangs limp and darling from the right side of his body.
(All he has in common with Sinew, is that like her, he is an overo.)

Then comes the second colt:
Big too, but somehow smaller - or maybe skinnier, she cannot decide. Like the brother before him, she rips the sac from his nostrils and he takes in a greedy suck of air.
He too, is just as breathtaking! Wet, without a shiver, she beholds him. He is Pollock in miniature from the palomino skin to the broken nub of a wing on the left side. However, he is a pure throwback to her sire, Infection - it is the undead appearance that makes her realize this, and too, the tiny fangs from the mouth that opens in a baby yawn. (Rattlesnake, she thinks, fawning over those tiny perfect sharp teeth in his perfect hellish mouth.)
She does not know yet, that he can will himself invisible. He may not even know it yet.

Up on the Mountain, she nurses them.
Knows that Pollock shall not be far from her in hopes of laying eyes upon the bountiful fruits of their union. (Already she plots ahead to the next, his seed - her loins, how much hell can they bring to earth?) Pride holds fast to her face; adoration, too.
She thought Burnt had been a gift - still is, but nothing like these too.

“Feast and Famine,” she names them, satisfaction thick on her tongue as they turn their heads as one to her.

Time, still ravenous, passes --
They have matured and she allows them no more milk, which makes them sullen boys.
They try her patience and pick at her motherly nature like a bad scab that itches; she snaps her teeth at them, shoos them ahead of her, as they clamor back towards the familiar slab of crude earth that is their residence. “Behave,” she reminds them, not having to say the threat of how their father is king now of that eyesore of earth they call home. They listen, snickering and smirking, plotting small ways to disobey her because she loves them too much to really chastise them (though they are familiar with her teeth and hooves, and how quick they are to dole out punishment to either of them).

“Pollock,” she beckons, unmindful of the way that she can conjure him up like smoke. The power she has over him is lost in the power their sons have over her - whatever those hellish brats desire, they get, and she feeds them the very things they ask for; stories, promises,

Greatness.
Damnation.

[Pollock]

He watches as she sends them off; like faithful pets, they oblige her instantly. He grunts, deep from his throat, in approval – entertains her warning teeth only because he knows they will be the same grim, flat weapons when she mothers.
He watches them, with feral eyes and hungry thoughts, until they are well away from her hips – casting impossibly large and strange shadows in the dust.

He would allow them to stay, indeed, if she could not be peaceably parted from them.
He is not a cruel man. There are a few to whom he offers some moderation.

But,
He would not tolerate their crowding. They could join the ruck of this damnable place, for all he cared;
—they will feast at different carcasses than his own; they will eat last.

These are feral, savage instincts for which he does not apologize. The same barbaric grunts and mouths he offers her now, borne of the same impetus to possess. Catalyzing similar ire when she speaks that name and then her truths.

First: Tarnished. A name he does not know. A face he would not recognize, not even when it still wore skin and moisture and expression. A death grip, from which he took a land for only a second, lorded over a hovel of trees and a disparate band of squaws.
Tarnished – from whom he took a daughter and left only blood.
Tarnished – who could do things he could not.

Then: I liked it.
She is right. He likes it even less. Tarnished be damned, he isn’t here now, is he? Wherever the whoreson is, he had lost, as far as Pollock could tell, this prize at least. There is victory there. It satiates him. He is simple.
But this? It bites. It rankles him and he snorts his disapproval. “Did you, now?” he grunts, through his teeth, his mind never leaving that mark, even as he watches her face. That mark on his thing, which to him looks beyond out of place – but hostile. Worse still is the want that accompanies that blasted name – Tarnished and that war song – I liked it. Want and revulsion – he knows this combination and the way it burns like acid in the mouth. He knows the kind of creature that foments that reaction.

He knows the kind of hold.

His lip curls and he steps forwards in somber silence, passing to stand neck-by-neck, examining that smooth, pink symbol of how vast the world really is. How many of them stand, behemoths of marble and sweat, and how many of them fall.
He touches the place around it but does not lay a lip where fur will not grow.
And then he lets her go.

He lets her go as long as she needs, but not as far. He keeps an eye on her as much as he can.
Of course he does.

Until one day, she sneaks past him and is gone. She is as animal as he – she nests.
He festers in it, becomes surly and unapproachable to all that dwell in their forsaken hellhole, as he waits. Because she will come back and if she does not – well, he’d have to go after her. She knew that. He offers her more time than, perhaps, he would offer most others. He offers this because she came when he was naked. She would come when he is King. And, because he hopes what she nestles with is something worth bringing back to him.

He stands on a cracked and desolate cliff, watching the waves break against the ocean-side of Pangea. It is where he comes, often, to think. Today, he is drawn away, as usual, by the desire to prowl his kingdom – prowl it for lost things, because he has not changed much; prowl it for official things, every once and a while, that crops up. Today, his duties let him pass through quickly, and as it is, he descends into the arid and cool valley just as they return. 
‘Pollock’ that name from those lips. He turns and moves towards then, giving them a hard, dour stare.

“Two,” he grunts, with some measure of felicitation in his voice, for the performance. He watches them, stern-eyed, and it might be for the best that they fall quiet as he does. “Boys,” he says simply. A preference, to be sure. 
He circles them, examining, first, the blotchy colt. He is their amalgam in colour, he notes, as he stops in front of him and looks down. He is, by far, the larger of the two, at least in the shapely way he has filled in. “Healthy,” he remarks, moving around and behind them to her other side.
The second, he finds, is gold. Smooth and solid as he is. But unlike his brother, he has not filled in. The giver’s lip curls, ever so slightly, as he gazes down at the boy. He is bonier than the first and something about him is sickly. 
“Could have left this one, he does not look like he will make it,” he turns away, his full attention on their mother now, “unless, he hides something from me. There is a foul wind on you lot – the mountain?”

[sinew]

Sinew knows that he gives her moderation; if only, because she lets him feed off her fearlessness. She is a meal for him that he reaches for like a starving man, because he cannot make her fear him. So she lets him eat his fill of her braveness until he goes off again, to haunt for those that do fear him. Even now, she can imagine how they quake in terror before his presence and something lusty and thick fills her throat and makes her smile devilishly back at him.

(She ignores the hungry look as the first pair of twins set off in the dust, their shadows large and strange. His appreciation of them will grow when they recover their true selves from the Mountain’s silence and stone.)

Her mouth remains fixed in that sly grin; she can taste his ire and triumph, both - how he hated the name she nearly crooned, and she loves his hate as much as she loves being his prize now. She knew she was a valuable thing, if only because she did not scare easily and she gave him sons from her pretty painted loins. He disapproves, and this is new because she needs neither his approval nor disapproval and it makes her smile all the more. “Yes,” she states boldly. “Jealous?” and she laughs, because she knows that he is and he isn’t - a small victory this, to make the goat-god envy that he left no visible marks on her, but does he not know that his brand has gone much deeper?

He touches her, and she is still beneath his explorations and revulsion of that scar on her neck. She can feel it inside him, the beast that slumbers and stirs, needs. “You need to feed,” she tells him, recognizing that it has been entirely too long since he last slaked his thirst for fear (or her boldness), and she encourages him to sup of the things that he denies himself. His beast is surely restored now that the crown of dust sits heavy and beautiful on his brow, how long has it been denied the pleasures of another staring in terror at the things he crafts for them out of air and imagination and deepest darkest whim?

But she snuck past him, sneaky as an animal and built her nest on the Mountain.
Built it, soiled it in blood and birth.
Brought them back down, to him - to their kingdom, to their birthright as base animals, not as goatlings and fanged colt-beasts.

She calls to him and he comes, all a-glower. Sinew cannot help the laugh that leaves her mouth, he looks so miserable! “Two,” she echoes, not acknowledging their sex though she has no preference for girls or boys, she is aware that he throws more sons than daughters - will have a bevy of cloven-footed and horned beasts at his beck and call. Her eyes though, never leave him as he begins to circle the colts, first one and then, the other. She thinks of predator and prey, and is of a mind to position herself appropriately if he thinks to harm a hair on either of the colts’ heads. Sinew will eat his flesh if he hurts their foals, their creepy perfect little colts (even the sickly one - Famine, she has seen the thing that he’ll become and Pollock will come to know his son’s true potential in time for the Mountain takes, it can give back and Sinew plots already at how to get those things back for them).

She moves to Famine, her lips touching his head in a mother’s quick burst of affection. It is true, she favors him more than Feast but that boy is large and hale and can take care of himself already. He creeps in to stand alongside his bonier brother, as their mother meets the giver’s eyes in a hard flat stare; “There is always more to them than meets the eye.” Pollock mentions the Mountain and Sinew rewards him with a wily look, “Yes, the Mountain.” How does she tell him that it was necessary to know the strange things she carried in her belly? Not once had they felt ordinary as they formed and grew in her womb.

“I had to know.”

[Pollock]

(‘Jealous?’ Yes. Avarice.
It knots and it grumbles—it is not like that creature, Anger; it is one of his liegeman. A lesser, aching instinct that he despises because it is weakness draped in green. In a perfect world, nothing was supposed to stay—everything was to be used, and then laid down; nobody was supposed to last, and so nothing was to be held onto. And yet, here he is, grinding his teeth over things like:
‘Tarnished’ and
‘I liked it…’

It had made itself a home in his head when she left, many rabbits dug a twisted warren in his brain; when he gets a quick glance at that scar again—that marked place—his eyes narrow)

‘There is always more to them than meets the eye.’
He makes a small grunting sound of concession in his throat as he watches her affectionate, motherly touches. (To this day, they repulse him.) He cannot deny that—not a universal truth, for some are meant to stay in the mud. But certainly he had been passed over for worm’s meal more than once in his life. Never quite as pathetic as this one, but all the same, a different creature entirely.
(The boy. The colt.
They’re dead.)

“So what are they then?” Bruise, too, had come to him naked but already knowing of his own potential. He stares at them, but of course he can see only the sad cloaks of feathers (cleaner now than his have been for years; that will change) falling from opposite shoulders: that one is on him. Pollock’s had been a source of great shame for him for so long, until he realized it was as necessary as the curved horns or the split hooves. It was a reminder of all his labours.

So, this is what they build. From brick and mortar (seed and soil) they build more leviathans—they build more predators, breathe them into an already strained ecosystem. Sinew—by some miracle, because she is burnt and he is too feral to know the difference—has given him two more Pangean princes…
(such a queer turn of events—father and king;
‘Mother—whore, pig, bitch—eat your heart out.’)
one day, of course, they will have no choice but to devour each other; one day they will come for him and together they will rend him limb from limb; he has seen it in his dreams, time and time again
—such is life.

“What have you called them?” The gift-giver takes a step closer, examining them again with those grim, black eyes—Famine stays silent. He sways on his feet, bolstered by the bodies of his mother and brother. He looks neither up nor down with his own flat, black eyes, but straight ahead, eyelids drooping.

[sinew]

(Can he not see that he has had a greater impact on her than Tarnished had? As great as an asteroid striking the earth?)

Sometimes, she says things just to get a rise out of him.
Sometimes, she flaunts that scar on her neck just to show him that he’s never marked her like that.

(Because he’s marked her in deeper ways, in ways that need no visible scar - in ways that imitate them on four matchstick legs and creepy grins. In ways, his marks have been left on her brain and her heart - he cannot make her fear him, but he can make her follow him to the ends of the earth.)

He grunts; she can tell that he loathes his jealous urges and her motherly affections towards the colts. For it, she rewards him with a toothy smile except that her teeth are blunt and do little more than pinch, painfully. (The colts know this, they could cry about it for hours but they’ve learned that tears earn them more bites. She’ll make them tough and hard, like leather left in the sun for too long.) Sinew can see something in the mean narrow look of him that despises her motherhood, though she is not the root cause of it - no, his mother is to blame, but her lack has shaped him into the gift-giver that he is (he cannot deny that - the lack of motherly love had made him great!). She does not begrudge him the distaste that is plain on his face - she ignores it.

“Your sons,” she states plainly.
Feast is cloven-hoofed and has but the one wing on his right side.
Famine has but the one wing on his left side, for now.
“They are you divided into two parts - neither is wholly like you, but both have promised to be more than meets the eye. Especially him,” she nuzzles the top of Famine’s sad head, knowing that his father cannot see the things that she has seen on the Mountain. Fangs, the undead appearance, and the queer ability to disappear and reappear like magic incarnate - Pollock cannot see these things, but in time, they’ll make themselves apparent as the lopsidedness of their wings have. “They may not be able to induce fear like you but they will have other talents, other uses.” He is quiet, contemplative even, and she is gravid with pride (and the next in their bloodline) as she looks on.

Her lips touch the top of the first colt’s head - he is the larger, the more hale of the two.
“Feast.” for he is that, hunger and meat and he will be the end of many.

Her lips descend upon the second colt’s head - he is smaller, thinner, clearly sick but no less adored for it.
“Famine.” for he is as much that as his sibling is the fat meal on the table, he is scarce and malnourished in flesh only.

“Fitting, is it not?” she soothes the curls of growing mane trying to straggle down Famine’s neck.
It is clear that he is her favorite because he requires more attention whereas Feast does not, nor does he suffer because of it. That one even moves to his brother’s side beneath the grim black gaze of their father, as if in challenge of him in some small way. All of them know that Sinew would not allow the stallion to end the colt’s life - that is nature, but she is having none of it and they all know it, can see it in the wildness in her own bright black eyes (ripe in dream and fever, but she saw things in Time’s bowels that cannot be unseen and the single thing that she fears, still hunts - haunts - her).

[Pollock]

He is a brutish creature. He is not stupid, but is navigated by a cruder thing that rationality. Instinct—base, grim, ghastly things; he is guided by paranoia and power, by violence and by sex.

He might one day excise Tarnished from his mind, bury him somewhere deeper than the sand and brine his bone no doubt live in now. It is a slow process, slow, deliberate and painful, an exorcism, really, of the ghost; and she will make it all the harder. On purpose and unwittingly. 
He shall pace and grunt and curse, thinking of ways to brand her beyond the whelps they creature. If Tarnished had scarred her, inside and out, Pollock would need to match that somehow.

Somehow.
Somehow.
Somehow, Sinew has him agitated.

He places it out of his mind, vows to cover her again soon; hips are surely where he  rests his weary mind.
(He’ll play one-upmanship with a dead man til the day he dies.)

He follows her words, down the long, knobbly legs to the split toes—those things he had fought for, and does not covet but gives now, freely. To Bruise, to Feast (to the eldest seed, a stranger, somewhere beyond the sea). They will do him good here, he knows well enough himself. He grunts, content (in his own way) to let them show themselves. 

(It is a relief, in fact, that they do not wield fear.
The more he makes, the more he digs his own grave.)

“You will not tell me,” he mutters, gravelly and calm.
She keeps cards to her breast, enjoys the secret she shares with her bairn. He understands that.

Feast and Famine. She has a sense of humor.

“I will allow them to prove themselves.” He’d give her that (that and more), “you two” he grunts, turning his eyes to Feast and then Famine, “stay out of everyone’s way.” They are (even the sick one) among the safest in this land, even if it seems nobody is safe with him;
Protection comes to him naturally, except, like everything else, it is a mutant of the sweet thing it could be. Possessive.
“I cannot watch you all the time and this world is scary.” His breath quickens, his head dropping to their level (though, they are getting on in height, themselves), “understand?” He exhales, locking eyes with the bigger boy, holds those similarly sable eyes. His lip twitches, a hydra rears in his gut—

They twitch and scream, pulling savagely against their shackles.
They do not like to be held back.

He sends them for her, gently tugging on the feral cord in her brain—Fear. He cannot always be sure what he elicits. Sometimes, it is clumsy and indiscriminate: Fear for fear’s sake. Sometimes it is the fear of death—often it is the fear of death; the fear of him; the fear or being alone. He can find those things and play with them.

He does not point it, now. He lets it be gentle, feeling it rebel in her mind, for her defenses are extraordinary.
Like a good mother, she takes the brunt of what he’d otherwise give to these boys.

“Leave,” he grunts at them.