makai
Makai knew dreams.
Fevered dreams where all he saw was bodies of strangers flayed open before him and his own face drenched in their blood. Fevered dreams where his buckskin brother, dark knight that he was, stood over him with an expression wrought with fury and pain and regret. Fevered dreams where all he felt was the battering hooves of his own blood breaking him open, and he could do nothing to stop—do nothing to overpower the soldier raining down on him. Fevered dreams where he felt his life spill out of him even as his brother sobbed his apologies. Fevered dreams where they all lay in the sand and the blood and it was all broken—all broken because that is all their family was ever destined to be. Broken. Dying. Dead.
Makai knew bloodlust.
He knew bloodlust that bubbled and simmered in his veins until it was all that you felt. He knew bloodlust that choked out all reason so that you were just a hellhound waiting to be released. He knew bloodlust that took control until vision became hazy and your mind slipped into the background of an animalistic, feral need to kill. He knew a bloodlust that brought him to ruin before and would do so again.
He knows Malis. Knows the innermost workings of her mind because they are his mind. Knows the demons that haunt her because they have haunted him in this life and the past—and would haunt him in his next, he was sure of it. He closes his eyes as she explains her story, and he groans a little, the sound dark as it uncorked from his throat. “Malis,” he finally says, his words throaty and thick with emotion. “I, I,” but he cuts off, shaking his head, pressing into the edge of her horn and almost wishing that it would just finish the job and cut his throat. It was more than he deserved. “I did this to you,” he confesses.
Stepping back a little, he watched her with haunted eyes, the color as black as soot. “All of this,” he says quietly, taking a deep breath into diseased, creaking lungs. “It’s my fault.” He couldn’t blame Atrox for this, although he wished that he could. He couldn’t blame Magnus or Twinge—and he certainly couldn’t place any blame on Oksana. Everything that Malis was saying came from his own personal fountain of disease, and he knew it. “You aren’t alone in this.” Although it may be better for her if she was.
you're the fire and the flood
and I'll always feel you in my blood
