violence
She is:
Daughter of a magician and a monster, a never-should-have-been, a girl birthed bloody under a gibbous moon. She nursed on milk that never tasted right on the tongue and cut herself on her mother’s sharp bones.
(Mother dressed like a sword, sharpened every angle until nothing soft was left.)
She’s black like her mother but the resemblance ends there: she is not so sharp, not so angled.
She’s black like her father but the resemblance ends there: spikes don’t trail down her spine, she is more horse than alien.
She is:
A child born under foul stars, who one day spoke bones out from the earth and made them dance about her. A thing her mother watched quietly until she made the skull spin about, made it stare dead-on at her mother and made its mouth open as if to howl.
She brings forth the dead, first just bones – small ones – and then larger ones, until she can assemble entire skeletons. Corpses aren’t far behind. She grows stronger every day.
And that’s not all – her mind wanders idly from her body and jumps into others. She does this to her father and finds his mind strange and foreign.
(When she attacks her mother in her father’s body, no one finds it amusing, but she still has the taste of a smile in her mouth.)
She is:
A girl cast out, because mother tired quickly of her antics and the clack of bones.
(It didn’t take mother much to shatter the bones, turn them to powder, but Violence could always find more. In a land so old, there was no shortage of bones.)
And the castaways and cast-offs have a way of wandering, which is what she does now. She looks normal, today, no bones follow her, even though she can feel them in the earth, calling to her.
Nothing unfolds, a boy flickering in and out of sight, indistinct as a candle-flame. She smells a bit of blood – too fresh to be of much interest to her – and traces it back to the boy.
(It’s not an unfamiliar smell, or a particularly unpleasant one. But she only cares for flesh when she inhabits her father, sits in the skin and thinks hunt. In her normal state, she prefers things already dead.)
“What are you doing?” she asks idly, eyeing him with a mild curiosity.
I'd stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
