burnt offerings; any

[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

(She dreams of touches in dark places.
He does too.)

(They could share that cup; that elixir.) He bends to darkness, as well. Because once, in a dreamlike place, he had grasped it in his fingers so hard that the skin had bruised and raised around it. He had been so hungry for it that he had grown careless. Greed is a funny thing – does funny things. The boy had reached for it as the north began to disintegrate, and it had broken his fall.
It had lodged itself between his ribs, hanging by his heart from a shoulder blade like an ornament.

It had become a part of him.
It had given him everything, and more.

(Except, when he dreams of touches, he does not wake up yearning for them. He wakes up mired in their welts and their indelibility. The soft and the hard. The barbs – their punctures and their kisses. Bones breaking and rebreaking. The sensation of falling…) They probably come together because she is wanting of him, more than anything. Though she may not know it. And if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone like him.
She likes to take liberties with her life. He likes the same thing. Luckily, today he finds himself sedate.

Tranquilized, you might say.

Obviously, he isn’t a monster.

He does answer to things higher than just his appetite from time to time! – self-service… he could play with this new toy called duty. Demian had done him a favour, after all. (That doesn’t mean they could never play, only that he must play nice, if she comes. And he can do that. He had found Tarnished’s things fun in the past.) 
He appraises her. Her youth and temerity. It all hides the things about her that he would hate. Does hate. (A hate for her sex that has been tempered, a bit, by the sheer weight of his aggrandizement – unsurprisingly, when he found he could bring them to their knees, he felt less threatened.)

He offers nothing for her withering glances, though he finds them amusing. Interesting. She is absent weakness, frailty. That, at least, soothes him. Those things do so rankle his nerves. “Hello.”

His dark eyes meet hers. They can promise so much to her, but instead they are flat and wicked. Maybe for her, the latter is promise enough. “You seem very… spirited. I’m here on behalf of the Valley. It could use that,” he smiles (a grim smile that he sometimes imagines stretching unnaturally down the side of his face, like a smile he had seen before, in that dreamlike place – like a crocodile). “I'm Pollock.”

POLLOCK
the gift giver and guardian