01-12-2016, 01:29 PM
He knows how to be unnoticeable.
When you grow up in a beast’s lair, you learn.
He is a well oiled machine, a supremely trained predator. He had grown full and mighty on the stalk; he had found something beyond the intimations of her maltreatment – himself, in that invisibility. He had been introduced to power there; and with it on him, like a king’s clock, he had found all manner of brutality on which to feast himself fat. It sated his aching rancor like nothing else could.
It seemed to him that he walked in a rift removed from everyone else. And in that passageway, Pollock could imagine himself with deliverance at his feet like pools of blood.
The broken boy became a bitter man. His transparency had made him wicked, but her milk had made him weak. And these things came together like tar and feathers to cover the golden inches of his body in cowardice and anger; hate, held in abeyance by the fear she let grow between his ribs from a childhood of sown seeds.
When it had been Phina’s time to go, it had not also been his time to take her, it seemed.
He had so wanted it to be theirs to share. Such a shame.
He knows how to be unnoticeable.
It is not enough to just be unseen, of course, when a predator is dealing with finely tuned prey. He must be unheard, stand downwind and be unscented. He had mastered all this quite fast.
So very fast, in that piney glade of darkness where he lay ungainly, shivering and alone, waiting for his mother to come back and snuggle around him and… in that press of utter darkness, he tucked his coltish body away in the rift and learned to protect himself. Fear is the wellspring of his newly birthed demi-godliness. He had not known it then, when it battered him like waves on a wharf, but it all made sense now.
Or parts of it made sense, and the rest was the undertow, working to unravel all that had been built overnight.
No sense in dwelling on it now.
He runs his tongue across his dark lips, and takes a few slow steps forward, cursing the drag of his wing in the dust. It is his only token of that shameful time; and worse still, the only thing that provokes much sound, if he is at his best and most cautious. It is like his calling card, one he begrudges fully – that uneasy, snake-belly shift of his tattered wingtip long the ground. He is a thing designed for chaos, imperfectly so, and as he looks upon the couple exchanging their asinine little pleasantries, he is stirred by that compulsion to discord. By the inborn animus.
He is close. Close enough for them to curse not having felt him there when they whisper of it later.
She seems happy.
He moves with sickening speed. Still wrapped in his anonymity, but the rapid pound of his feet disrupt that carefully manufactured quiet. It is no matter, he closes in on her too fast for her to react. Or for her near-blind companion, or scrawny, yearling whelp. He can consider this a little gift. A glimpse into the recesses of life. He’ll learn from this.
Pollock does not reveal himself until it is over. Until he squares his great, curved headgear into the pretty side of her skull.
Mass and velocity. It is a physics equation. But to him it is simply brutality.
There is a loud crack, the caving of bone; and the smell of blood. He inhales sharply, the thrill taking him a few strides more before he turns on the spot and moves in again. From behind the blind of his invisibility, he flickers into sight. Sweat dampens his golden neck and shoulders and haunches. His chest and ribs heave, and he looks the young stallion in the eye, a frenzied smile on his lips. Gross arrogance and adrenaline; he was a coward once, now he allows the boy to see him unhindered. He stays for as long as he can hold the shivering excitation of his body back.
Blood smears the curves of his great horns.
He does not look at her again. She may still be alive, in a clutched by braindeath sort of way. If she is, it is by the measures of oxygen still left in her, and that slow way a body can capitulate. Cell by cell.
That is, not for much longer. And he is gone, unseen and away, unconcerned with what comes next.
When you grow up in a beast’s lair, you learn.
He is a well oiled machine, a supremely trained predator. He had grown full and mighty on the stalk; he had found something beyond the intimations of her maltreatment – himself, in that invisibility. He had been introduced to power there; and with it on him, like a king’s clock, he had found all manner of brutality on which to feast himself fat. It sated his aching rancor like nothing else could.
It seemed to him that he walked in a rift removed from everyone else. And in that passageway, Pollock could imagine himself with deliverance at his feet like pools of blood.
The broken boy became a bitter man. His transparency had made him wicked, but her milk had made him weak. And these things came together like tar and feathers to cover the golden inches of his body in cowardice and anger; hate, held in abeyance by the fear she let grow between his ribs from a childhood of sown seeds.
When it had been Phina’s time to go, it had not also been his time to take her, it seemed.
He had so wanted it to be theirs to share. Such a shame.
He knows how to be unnoticeable.
It is not enough to just be unseen, of course, when a predator is dealing with finely tuned prey. He must be unheard, stand downwind and be unscented. He had mastered all this quite fast.
So very fast, in that piney glade of darkness where he lay ungainly, shivering and alone, waiting for his mother to come back and snuggle around him and… in that press of utter darkness, he tucked his coltish body away in the rift and learned to protect himself. Fear is the wellspring of his newly birthed demi-godliness. He had not known it then, when it battered him like waves on a wharf, but it all made sense now.
Or parts of it made sense, and the rest was the undertow, working to unravel all that had been built overnight.
No sense in dwelling on it now.
He runs his tongue across his dark lips, and takes a few slow steps forward, cursing the drag of his wing in the dust. It is his only token of that shameful time; and worse still, the only thing that provokes much sound, if he is at his best and most cautious. It is like his calling card, one he begrudges fully – that uneasy, snake-belly shift of his tattered wingtip long the ground. He is a thing designed for chaos, imperfectly so, and as he looks upon the couple exchanging their asinine little pleasantries, he is stirred by that compulsion to discord. By the inborn animus.
He is close. Close enough for them to curse not having felt him there when they whisper of it later.
She seems happy.
He moves with sickening speed. Still wrapped in his anonymity, but the rapid pound of his feet disrupt that carefully manufactured quiet. It is no matter, he closes in on her too fast for her to react. Or for her near-blind companion, or scrawny, yearling whelp. He can consider this a little gift. A glimpse into the recesses of life. He’ll learn from this.
Pollock does not reveal himself until it is over. Until he squares his great, curved headgear into the pretty side of her skull.
Mass and velocity. It is a physics equation. But to him it is simply brutality.
There is a loud crack, the caving of bone; and the smell of blood. He inhales sharply, the thrill taking him a few strides more before he turns on the spot and moves in again. From behind the blind of his invisibility, he flickers into sight. Sweat dampens his golden neck and shoulders and haunches. His chest and ribs heave, and he looks the young stallion in the eye, a frenzied smile on his lips. Gross arrogance and adrenaline; he was a coward once, now he allows the boy to see him unhindered. He stays for as long as he can hold the shivering excitation of his body back.
Blood smears the curves of his great horns.
He does not look at her again. She may still be alive, in a clutched by braindeath sort of way. If she is, it is by the measures of oxygen still left in her, and that slow way a body can capitulate. Cell by cell.
That is, not for much longer. And he is gone, unseen and away, unconcerned with what comes next.
![[Image: kkN1kfc.png]](http://i.imgur.com/kkN1kfc.png)