To a strange night of stone - Bruise

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

The sun crests the bony spine of the valley’s pocked cliffs, their own shadows cross the land like long, violent bruises in the dust. (At this hour, their kingdom looks most like a monster—serpent-thing, encircling them like a mother does a nest; hulking and breathing dust like a dragon does fire.) Pollock has not slept. His eyes are heavy-lidded and sunken looking, but his lips are bright and red—taut in a grim, sated straight line. 

He moves with a stilted, deliberate gait. He limps. Of course he does. He had paid for everything they now enjoy—what had come free for his sons was exacted from a dark, cold place at a cost to the gift-giver.

It was a price he was happy to pay, time and time again.
It is a gait that should usher in horror like the limp ramble of an undead, for it means he has been busy.

(He had stood over her, for some time, making sense of the art he had created.

The sanguine lines he painted across her jawline and cheek; for a few moments, he enjoyed the way the colours seeped from her like a river flooded with melt, being pumped—right-to-left, right-to-left—from the fissures he traced in the canvas, brown and black.
Until that primary organ had failed and it slowed to a gurgle like the paltry stream that feeds Pangea;
He inspected the masterful rearrangement of her features; he had rotated and pushed and forced until what was left was an abstraction of Ohio.

He is not gentle, though sometimes when all is still, he draws smaller, more delicate strokes across their skin with his lip and pronged toes.

He had tipped his head back, inhaling deeply, the air somehow seemed fresher in her wake—like being back in the earthy tomb he once lorded over. 
He breathed and thought of Sinew, the sea and then, Bruise.)

He goes straight for his son. Hunts him down like the hound he has always been, searching the air for his familiar scent, and perhaps whatever plaything he might have dragged down into his den.
It is dawn and princes are known to laze-about, but his is an industrious one, and he will surely stir, if he is not already awake and hungry.
“Bruise,” he grunts, eyeing the young man with those stern, black eyes.

His forehead is lathered with drying blood, almost too thick to see the wide, white strip between his eyes. Down his nose it drips, gooey and glistening, in patterns of splattering and dragging; some has spilled over his jaw to his throat and down his sweaty chest—around the edges, it is beginning to grow rusty-dark and flaky. His horns, too, are sodden, bits of skin and matter hang on the rough ridges. “Let’s go,” he expects him to follow, turning his back to the rising sun and setting off first to the west, where the sea meets stone.

the gift-giver

@[bruise]

[bruise]

I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin
(and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)

The sun has not yet crested when Bruise awakens, the slumber falling from him as dust falls from rising giants. He yawns, cracking his jaw, and rises, lifting his lithe body from the earth. Pangea is still this early in the day, but never quiet—not to he who listens. It is truly a dead thing, but it teems with noises, with the most delicious and guttural of sounds, the Fear that sings through the air, a constant humming. Bruise tilts a heavy-horned head, one sooty ear flicking forward as he catches wind of the cries, the moans, the unheard noises that create a cacophony of misery, screams of a land that’d never truly wished to be born.

Bruise does not love Pangea, will never love anything truly—

But, he appreciates her. He appreciates her death-like beauty, the poison that Carnage first injected into her veins with fang and claw, the venom that Pollock now cultivates as eagerly as any doting gardener. He appreciates the freedom and the sorrow—he appreciates the curdling of her beneath the winter son, the thin, watery light never quote warming her innards. He appreciates these things, even now, as he stands there, cursing the bite in the air and the frozen ground beneath his cloven feet. Even now.

When his father arrives, Bruise quickly shifts, giving the goat-stallion his full attention. Pollock was, after all, the only thing truly worthy of it. His flat eyes wash over the pale gold man’s face, watching the gore that drips from it, falling upon the grey earth and splattering, with fascination. He does not bother to hide his curiosity, his hunger, that open thing that takes over his sharply angled face. This is art, truly. This is the thing he has so longed to create, this thing he labors for, this thing that he dreams of—

This is it.

Bruise inhales sharply but just nods, stomach rolling with anticipation.

The sun paints the sky with the colors of her birth, but Bruise pays no mind.

The true beauty was yet to be seen.

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

This, too, is part of the ritual. A ritual nobody has ever witnessed before.
It is a quiet, solemn, consecrate affair.

Observe;

He is silent as he walks with Bruise. His lame gait does not get in his way much and they make good use of those flexible, nimble feet as he guides them across Pangea’s gnarled, diseased crests and finally to the western edge where water laps far below. Normally, this would be undertaken at the Beach, the very place where he had attended her well-moistened corpse, having heard word from brothers that she was gone. Finally.

(She, who years ago Pollock had warned the then boy, Bruise, never to mention again—
This badgers old memories from their burrows, but not in the biting, savage way they had come a-knocking when his son had asked him what is mother had called him. No.

In a soft, gentler way. Memories that feel as warm as the blood that had found willing refuge on his face—the brine brings memories of absolution.)

He has spent many hours pacing this bluff, he has come to know it well. He eyes a perilously thin strip of sea spray soaked rock, a hard, bedraggled beach of sorts, laying uncovered by a low tide. This morning, the sea sits quiet and sun-soaked, refracting back the sun’s blinding eye.
“Watch your step,” he growls, and as usual, his tone reeks of begging for blood. Those rocks look hungry, too, and if they shall be fed today, so be it.

He lives to die.

The descent is threatening. 
Men like them, he knows, love a good threat. The rocks are sharp and slippery, grown thick with green slime near the bottom where the tide will rise and whisper of apocalypse to him. They make it. Of course they do. Men like them do not bow to mere fucking threats.

“Always wash,” he grunts, stepping out until the cold sea water nips wantingly at his legs. “The blood becomes ignoble, after a time.” He bends a single knee, bowing and pressing his face into the water, just enough for the sea to caress his forehead and bridge; it pools pink around his downturned face, taking from him their sins. All of them. His. hers. The darkness that, together, they made beautiful.
It is an offering. A baptism. A cleansing.

He sucks in air and pushes clear of the surface, sinking his heavy head down to the rock bottom, only the back curvature of his horns sticking out. He hold it there, bubbles rising slowly, the pink darkening and growing.

When it becomes unbearable, and the sea becomes too greedy, he pulls back, disrupting the quiet and sending sanguinary water cascading down his neck, chest and back. “You like to play with them,” he muses, breathing and blinking, righting to a stand, “like a cat does. And that’s fine.” The gift-giver turns, his golden skin still stained, “I do, too. But something more final must be done, soon.” He considers the young man, every inch is capable. Probably, every inch willing.

“You have something to prove to me,” he knows it might bite, hopes it might, because the ragged pull of his influence is the only thing (besides, of course, the fear) that he knows can... inspire. “Understand?” he waits, his skin twitching off the brine, “I have something to show you.” Back up the sea wall.

the gift-giver

[bruise]

I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin
(and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)

This is important, he thinks, following behind his father dutifully. He does not fear the rocks, the slippery path, the threat that stares up at them plain-faced and open. He has confidence in his own sure-footedness and an arrogance that comes from both power and youth. Perhaps, when he is older, he will stare upon the rocks and see his own morality. Perhaps he will stare upon them and will see his body breaking, bones shattering, flesh piercing. For now, he only sees something to be tamed, something to be conquered.

They come upon the shore, and Pollock provides instruction that he soaks in, internalizing it and filing it away. One day, he will not just tease the edges of art. One day, he will not just begin to mold the edges of the clay given to him; instead, he will dive into the belly of the beast and emerge a man, a master. He will have strewn the pieces aside, cast it asunder, and carve out the masterpiece that was just waiting—

Waiting for him.

He nods, dark eyes fever bright, watching as his father washed himself in the saltwater, as the ocean came and grabbed the gore from his forehead and nose and pulled it out to sea. He watched as the water turned pink around him, the foam of it discolored and beautiful—art. He can feel a rare excitement brewing in him, an understanding blossoming beneath the tide as his father emerges and turns to face him fully.

Silence continues to reign over them, Bruise just nodding. There was no need to answer him; he was not going to refute what his father knew and he didn’t need to agree to it. This was simply the truth of it, they both knew it. Bruise liked to test his boundaries, like to test new material. Some was soft and supple, like Rhae who easily molded; others were hard as steel and just as likely to cut him as he they. All had value. He just simply needed to learn them—to discover them—and that required what Pollock called play.

Still, the excitement grew within him, and he just nods in agreement.

“Yes,” he says, knowing there was a final step—one he looked forward to taking.

And then he just dips his head, following his father once more.