jamie
from the destruction, out of the flame
He does not have to wonder about the cause of the differences in them. The things they had endured together had been strange and painful and frightening. He does not need to ask why she only communicates by injecting her words directly into his head. Or why she stands before him only semi-solid. He does not need to ask why because he knows. Because they both came back changed. Neither of them emerged from the Afterlife the same as they had gone in.
They have learned things about themselves.
More importantly, she has learned things about him.
She will help him make this his home. Starting now. She will start with a gift. He blinks those freakish yellow eyes and turns his peculiar head in the direction of the parting fog. The figure that shuffles toward them is old, weary. Sick. He thinks briefly of the blue roan stallion he’d encountered in the forest some years ago. How he had thought to kill him and then, for reasons he did not understand, had stopped just short.
The reaper. The part he keeps hidden. She knows what he is capable of. And he believes her. He lets himself believe this, too. It is not a fantasy for him. It is the answer he has been searching for. The thing he has been hiding from. She had seen it in him and he had seen it in himself when they had torn his flesh from his bones. And they had been him.
He listens to her but he does not drag his gaze away from the crippled old stallion standing before them. He feels nothing. He does not feel the same sorrow he’d felt when he’d failed to kill Balto in the forest. He feels no grief. No remorse. This old stallion will die and it will be his fault and he will feel nothing.
“How many did you take?” he asks from someplace far away. The tone distant, as if distracted.
you need a villain, give me a name
@[Beyza]