wear a necklace of rope, side by side with me; pollock

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray


‘When she was alive?’ He makes a contemplative sound in his throat.
No. Not when she had been alive. He had barely seen her at all. In fact, he cannot even remember what she had looked like with her face intact. He had not seen the eyes, like emeralds, until be had made them a terrible consistency and by then they were only blood and pulp in broken sockets.
He had watched her for some time, too. He had watched the way she moved, the way she spoke so cordially and had fed on the interminable darkness that had snapped like a twig and sent him off in blind chaos. The same thing that reaches for Malis even now, pushing clawed hands through his ribs, like iron bars – he cannot say for sure why they are stayed, enticingly short of raking her pretty, blue skin. Or, on the other hand, why he had felled the stranger mare in between airy little breaths and laughs.

It had not been because she bothered him.
He could have passed her by like a ghost and never seen her again.

It is a wild and strange thing, his dark magic piece. It is his (coveted and grabbed to break a fall as metallic mesh had fallen from beneath his feet and sent him tumbling through time and space, or dream and unconsciousness), but it is made of foreign, northern stuff.
It beats in the center of his chest, jingling like bells in his ears when he listens close enough; that shard of nastiness had transfixed him as a boy and impaled and adorned his ribs as a stallion.
But it is oddly subdued this evening. This moment. 
Maybe for the same reason he did not let his horns try at the solid surface of Lirren’s stars. (Maybe he knows the impossibility of her skin like he knew Lirren’s, somehow without even being told and spares himself the frustration.) She had got a taste of his gift, just enough to wet her tongue. But nothing more. It had stumped him even then. 

Another thing to irk him from sleep.

He had not liked the way he felt disarmed by that teal-pointed woman.
He does not like it now. By all accounts, both should be bruised. Changed. But he had let this one go at least once before. He had not even let her feel fear, maybe because unlike Lirren,
—unlike Elve…
he could tell she knew fear already and that was half the fun gone.

“No.” He finally says, “when she was alive she had been ordinary.” He looks over the deep blue and black of her face, features troubled by the unearthing of memories (some truths to dig for, in time), those dark studs. Down the curve of her neck and shoulders. Belly and haunch. A vulgar eye, sizing her up – he might even see that she is beautiful, if he could see beauty without first conquering it. He cannot know she detests her own skin, the indigo and the defiance to splitting, cracking and burning. He can imagine her fractured (he is a visionary; it would displease him to find her regenerated as if untouched, her bones back in their order – they would be an eternal tide, pushing and pulling) but better sees her as she is, but on her knees. Broken and his, differently than Hestia is.
“She had been prettiest just before the flies laid their eggs. That does not take long, I’m afraid.”

He nods, thinking of moving closer, still. To find her smell mingled with the rot, a bloom pushing up through the hearty feed of remains. “She smelled better once, too.” He keeps his features tight when she finally asks him. He can tell she suspects him the culprit – she would be a fool not to, and he suspects she is not foolish. “I hardly knew her. She might have been lovely,” his answer is casual, he does not need to dress it up; the flatness of it might be a blade through the guts to Hestia. Maybe even to her. But it is the truth.

“I’m not sure we managed to exchange names before. I’m Pollock.”


POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina’s