He’s been curled among the bramble and cobwebs while Beqanna’s rosy peace reigns (while his heart beats for the wilderness of chaos, he can understand the need for balance and thus he allows them their gentle moments). He spends his days crunching squirrel heads beneath his hooves and occasionally ruining a small forest by the swirl of his sandstorms. His destructive streak never dies (always lingering behind his eyes and under the scarred, white-streaked patterns of his skin) but he forces the flames to quiet themselves while the pure-of-heart laugh and dance in the sunshine.

But the need for balance is a powerful thing. There cannot be growth without rain or thunder to water the soil. And he can feel the unsettling of their happiness (he is born from that disturbance, in fact); it draws him out of the shadows to linger on the edges of their gatherings. His mind is frothing with the desire for fresh, true blood (not the thin, slick fluids from the rabbits and squirrels or the faux, magicked fluids he crafts in his own imagination). It has been too long since he has hunted — truly hunted — and saliva pools in his mouth at the prospects.

He can smell them (with their fresh-faced cleanliness and pure souls and hints of prey-instinct fear) and it draws him from the shadows. It would be easy to snatch them off the trail and call that the end, but it’s been too long and he craves their torture. So instead he pulls himself into their line of vision, a bruise-eyed stranger standing on the trail with a pleasant smile and high cheekbones.

“Not sneaky enough.” His tenor voice is light and friendly, dancing with the song of a gentle knight. Mischief is his forte, but it pairs nicely with his mastery in the art of masking his true identity. “My tree-friend could hear you, and she doesn’t even have ears.” He crafts an illusion to their senses (shadowy, slippery fingers sliding between the crevices of their brains) and it is a beautiful, cheery one. A tree-horse, with birch-bark for a body and willow-wisps for hair. It’s eyes are made of Queen Anne’s lace, blossoming before their very (ill-perceiving) eyes.

The tree-horse steps forward, a bubbling laugh on her mouth sounding akin to a water’s trickle sliding across pebbles. “Where are you two from?” Her words are as gentle as a breeze whispering through summer leaves. The trickster steps alongside his tree-friend, mismatched eyes glancing between the two sisters. The eldest smells of weakness and anxiety while the younger smells of fresh excitement and unrooted worry. Perfect.

It’s a tightrope they walk upon (he to decide when his moment of strike will be, them to decide when their moment of ending will be) and he feels the careful danger of it curl in his belly like a smoke-dragon. He craves it (chaos, that is) like a drug to his veins, and his arms would be speckled and bruised with many needle-points had it actually been a drug. They are the chess pieces in his movements now, and he’s been in the Meadow long enough to hear of Beqanna’s political climate (of shifting rulers and evil stirring in the west and tense, biting words) and work out a way at which he can further prod at the potential earthquake.

The older can sense him (he hadn’t covered himself up well enough, apparently) and the shadows he brings, but he hardly pays that a mind. She’s exhausted and, therefore, a likely target. But then the little girl is bawling (sobbing and begging and whimpering and he fucking loves it) and he pushes his tendrils deeper into the elder’s mind, all the way down to her heels. It should feel like she’s falling now, and if she were to look down there might be a sandpit beneath her feet (sinking and pulling and dragging her closer to the innards of the earth).

He has more important things to deal with, like the (now confirmed) princess. His bruised eyes narrow in on her, eyelids half-closing to scan over her young body with a frightening sort of calculation. Beside him, the tree-horse disappears into a thin mist so quickly that she might’ve been their imagination in the first place. “The Brotherhood, hmm?” His voice has changed (no longer sweet and sugary, but laced with a syrupy malice and firecracker excitement) as his eyes latch onto her darling little face.

Before she might be able to spring away (and with her protective sister firmly held in the clutches of his faux-quicksand) he springs from his position, ears pinning into his silver mane and allowing a bitter snarl to tear from his mouth. He whisks together a quick, wide sandstorm to block her path, pushing it wider and wider until it encircles the three of them. “Now I can work in peace,” he mutters, more a thought to himself than to them.

He decides it would be much more delightful to let the younger watch her ever-protective, mature sister pass away before her eyes. So the trickster pushes a trick into the winged filly’s mind (filling her eyes with darkness and centering her feet firmly on the ground so she feels as though she cannot move) and then makes his way closer to her tender little body. His teeth reach out quickly (one bruised eye moving to look directly at the mare) and snap down on the beginning of her wing appendage. There’s the sensation of muscle and tendon shredding under his teeth, along with a dull thud that indicates the creak of bones, and then he’s certain she will never fly again. The same is done to the other side (shredding and thudding and creaking) and his fingers release her vision from the darkness and back to reality.

She could try to attack him, the yearling, but her wings will do her no good and his strength against hers is insurmountable. He laughs as he releases the mare from her sandpit, only to force another trickery across her mind. This time she is witnessing her worst nightmares (in whatever forms they might be) over and over again. His hope is to make her scream and wriggle and cry and beg for it to end, and he will not relinquish her mind from these terrors until she does.

When the mare is weak under the pressure of the hell playing through her mind (each time quicker and more intense than the last) he will attack. He does not take his time with this mare (there is too much at stake, too much muscle, too little time) and so her end is brutal but merciless (and before her little sister’s eyes). He beats her and crushes her and pounds her and cracks her until she is a pulpy, disintegrated, fleshy mess of blood and gut and muscle and bone (his bruised eyes reveal in the masterpiece he’s created, even while blood and bodily fluids are painted across his body).

But he’s been careful to avoid truly crushing her chest, treasuring the gem that lies within her ribcage. His nose rummages around the remains of her body until he finds his treasure (slathering his muzzle with blood in the process) and he carefully grabs it between his lips, pulling it from between membranes and ligaments and fatty tissue. He walks to where the younger might be (perhaps pressed against the sides of their sand-prison, perhaps launching her own attack upon his scarred shoulders, perhaps grounded to the floor by the horror of the murder) with her sister’s heart in his mouth, blood dripping a trail of red.

He says nothing (watching her with those eerily blue eyes) and stands for a moment, letting her examine if she wants to, before he calls forward another sandstorm to secure the unmoving heart until he might deliver it. Then he turns (bloodstained and relatively satisfied) to face her. “Don’t worry, little doe; I’ll be much more gentle with you.”

In hindsight, he is. He doesn’t beat her until her face is a distorted pulp of tissue and bone, but rather dances around her for a moment, pressing dainty kisses to her tender, child-soft parts (to her cheeks, to her shoulders, to the curve of her hip, to the slope of her neck, to her forehead) until she might be crying, if she isn’t already. A laugh bubbles from the depths of his chest as he places his final lingering touch, this one equipped with a nasty bite behind it (“A love-bite,” he thinks).

Although he is a nasty lover of chaos, he comes with his (as he sees them) tender sides. So before he spills her blood, the trickster pushes her mind into a fantasy, one where she is flying high in the sky (so high the air is thin and Beqanna spreads below her, but she can neither sense the air change or the level of her height) and the sun is setting in the distance. Her sister is there, gifted with her own wings, and the pair are pinwheeling through the sky while the trickster is, meanwhile, slowly pulling apart her limbs and inspecting them with a surgeon’s interest (he’s never taken apart a yearling, you see, and his curious mind desires to know where her differences might lie in contrast to an adult).

But she should be happy and free, careening through the sky at incredible skies. The trickster wonders if he almost hears a tender, childlike laugh drip from her lips when she is close to the edge of death, and it warms the stone of his heart. She passes on before he’s gotten very far, but he continues his work until he finds her own (slightly smaller, he notes) heart and wraps it carefully in a separate sandstorm.

He buries the girl (call it age, but he can’t leave her young body parts spread across the trail) just along the side of the trail, using his storms to first dig and hole and then fill it. He leaves one of the bones from her ribcage there, a few strands of her dark mane tied around the length of it, atop the pile of freshly-dug soil. Her sister, however — he could shit on her body and not care less, so he leaves her there (pulpy mess already being feasted on by the bodies of many tiny insects) and twists toward the forest in the west, two slender sandstorms weaving between his legs and around his body, their masses tinted shades of pink and deep red from the cargo they carry.