SabbatH
i'll let you play the role. i'll be your animal.
She used to dream of being soft like her mother. Sabbath genuinely believed that her life wouldn’t always be like this, racked with hunger and trying to breathe around the lump of rage growing in her throat. But she saw what kindness did to Leliana and Adna. She saw the price of being gentle firsthand and she vowed to never be like them. Instead, she withdrew and curled around the lessons her father gave her when madness still dragged its ragged claws along his mind.
You’ll never love anyone the way you love the sound of bones breaking.
As a child, she told him he was wrong and that the love of her family would always prevail above the ravenous need for the hunt. She wasn’t calloused then. Her heart was raw and beating on her shoulder with a desperate need for company. (She’s still lonely, still empty, but she pushes it down.)
Sabbath grits her teeth to keep them from chattering as the winter cold tries to dig its fingers into the soft flesh of her skin. She wishes she could purge her slender body of such weakness. If only she could chew that mortality from the sinews of her muscles and spit it out like a cancer in the frozen dirt. But all her body seems to do is lose the vibrant red of her mother in favor of the dreary gray of her sire. She is neither, she tells herself as her breaths come in little puffs of hot air from her pale face. She swears that she will be stronger and more terrifying than either of them could ever hope to be.
Her sage green eyes narrow as she arrives at the river. It flows stubbornly despite the awful cold and somehow it feels kindred to her soul. She steps closer to the water’s edge and does her best to ignore the way it splashes up onto her slender ankles, snapping its frozen teeth into her skin all too eagerly.
Happy birthday to me, she thinks with a snort. She doesn’t remember being born here in the snow and the mud but it feels more like home than anything else. Sabbath runs her tongue across her teeth and lowers her head, wedging her slender horn between the larger river rocks. A slow inhale, an even slower exhale, and she twists her head with a jerk. The horn breaks with an awful snap that echoes off the nearby trees and for a moment she is blinded by the pain of it. She blinks to clear the stars from her vision and forces herself to breathe once more.
Chest still heaving with the aftershock, she can see the first third of that horn sticking out of its new little grave and she admires the jagged edge of it – but not for long. Once she regains some semblance of composure, she kicks the little ivory spiral into the river and watches it float off to who knows where. The serpent girl imagines her old self drifting right along with it.
You’ll never love anyone the way you love the sound of bones breaking.
As a child, she told him he was wrong and that the love of her family would always prevail above the ravenous need for the hunt. She wasn’t calloused then. Her heart was raw and beating on her shoulder with a desperate need for company. (She’s still lonely, still empty, but she pushes it down.)
Sabbath grits her teeth to keep them from chattering as the winter cold tries to dig its fingers into the soft flesh of her skin. She wishes she could purge her slender body of such weakness. If only she could chew that mortality from the sinews of her muscles and spit it out like a cancer in the frozen dirt. But all her body seems to do is lose the vibrant red of her mother in favor of the dreary gray of her sire. She is neither, she tells herself as her breaths come in little puffs of hot air from her pale face. She swears that she will be stronger and more terrifying than either of them could ever hope to be.
Her sage green eyes narrow as she arrives at the river. It flows stubbornly despite the awful cold and somehow it feels kindred to her soul. She steps closer to the water’s edge and does her best to ignore the way it splashes up onto her slender ankles, snapping its frozen teeth into her skin all too eagerly.
Happy birthday to me, she thinks with a snort. She doesn’t remember being born here in the snow and the mud but it feels more like home than anything else. Sabbath runs her tongue across her teeth and lowers her head, wedging her slender horn between the larger river rocks. A slow inhale, an even slower exhale, and she twists her head with a jerk. The horn breaks with an awful snap that echoes off the nearby trees and for a moment she is blinded by the pain of it. She blinks to clear the stars from her vision and forces herself to breathe once more.
Chest still heaving with the aftershock, she can see the first third of that horn sticking out of its new little grave and she admires the jagged edge of it – but not for long. Once she regains some semblance of composure, she kicks the little ivory spiral into the river and watches it float off to who knows where. The serpent girl imagines her old self drifting right along with it.
