Father had stared at him with hard, black eyes when he presented himself—

He had been moderately hopeful that this would change things between them. There had been some optimism that the way his skin sloughed off his hips and neck and chest – scabbed off his lips, slowly revealing the gums and teeth behind them – would make him a more worthy son in Pollock’s eyes.

Which is strange, because why would it?

The horned king had looked down on him (always, it will feel like being looked down on – even when he is full grown and to his father’s height) glowering and passing judgement like the devil and his wasteful gates. It wasn’t that Pollock doesn’t appreciate the scent of decay, now and then.
(He does.)
It was that Famine was still the boy who had laid in wait in damp caves for death. It is that he is still weak and strange – he commands nothing but upturned noses and a volt of vultures that swoop low and land on his bony shoulders, picking at his back and pulling at the stringy meat from between his ribs. (He shakes them off, now, biting after their tail feathers.)

He commands no fear; he commands none of the confidence that Feast has. Father, it turns out, acknowledges only a select group of horses, and they have all done something to benefit him in some way or another; or they are monsters, broad-backed and iron-skinned, even more powerful than he.

‘What do I have to do?’
But, as always, his voice caught in his throat, bullied downward by the unblinking fury of his father’s presence.

Mother assures him he is not done – the gangrene is not the finale but the beginning of his reformation; he vaguely remembers the taste of blood mixed in with mother’s milk, drawn by fangs that had retreated back into his skull  – she assures him that there are ways father can be won over.

Cowering from him is not one of them.

Contrary as it may seem, he is beginning to feel better. Once on death’s threshold, Famine is starting to feel his once-weak heart quicken its pace – pushing the thick, spoiled blood through his veins and into the atrophied slabs of muscle. He feeds, and when he does his body does not grumbling with annoyance, trying to toss it back out again – he doesn’t pick up weight, though, he remains a skeleton cloaked in gold plains and swamps of exposed sinew, red-green, slimy and gleaming.

Famine uses  this newfound energy to leave – colt-legged and creeping – the dust bowl he had lingered in like Hade’s lip, to take him, life and all. He moves across the treacherous stone, the giving dust and past the cave he called mausoleum. He does not find the fresh, blooming air here to be a waft of beauty, like so many when they leave Pangea – he can smell his own stench more than anything.

But he knows there is significance here – he wanders past thin, white trees, examining their bark for the scraps his father left before he was king – this earthy damp was his father’s haunt once. Here, he might find clues as to what moves Pollock. His nostrils flare, sucking up the admixture of decay and rich soil, unbeknownst to him, closer to his father than he has ever been before.