violence
She’s lived in the mind of monsters; sat pretty in her sire’s feral frothing mind, where all thoughts were condensed into their most basic forms: hunt and kill and meat. Mother had never let Violence into her mind, she’d knocked against it like a battering ram, but could feel mother closing herself, locking the doors of her mind, of her utmost self.
(She wonders at what’s in there, inside the shadowy magician’s mind – her mother, the night-creature made of sharp angles and a cold smile, who Violence despises and loves all at once.)
She does think of going into this girl’s mind, tasting the blood on her lips, feeling the flickering flames of madness that danced in her eyes.
But when given a choice, she prefers the bones.
So she stays in her own mind, her bone-puppet beside her. She draws it up, tall, until it almost floats off the ground.
“Thirsty,” she repeats. Her only experience with hunting was the feasting, tearing into them with her father’s voracious jaws. It had been messy and strange, not altogether unpleasant, but not an experience she’d want to mimic herself. She prefers her dead things long-dead.
The woman regards the creature, asks after it, as if it were a permanent thing instead of a whim created as she walked, made piecemeal by the things that met their fates in the meadow.
“No…” she murmurs, “no, I don’t need it to hunt. It just keeps me company.”
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
