and lord, I fashion dark gods too;
He never knows what they’ll do when he frees them.
The ones he has for a short time move on, grow moss over their scars, if they can. He becomes naught but a name, a memory, something sleeping in their subconscious. And that’s okay, for they are all just names to him, dull memories and sharp tangs of blood on the tongue.
The ones he keeps for longer, the ones he pours his craftsmanship into – they are more interesting, set alight on Beqanna (for they all flock back to the motherland, pulled like magnets). Cordis still won’t speak his name. Perse speaks little but his name.
And now, this boy.
He is absent while the corpses are piled like cordwood, bones cracked brittle and blood soaking the earth. He does not let himself be proud – they are all failures, in the end, and he has no doubt this boy will fail him too – but he does smile, a sick little grimace of his terribly sensuous mouth.
He comes, when the killing is done (not the old king, though, that coward had run, had not sacrificed himself for his kingdom, and good riddance to him as the war sputtered and fizzled out quick as it had come). He comes as a horse, his normal, terribly plain form. It is what he prefers, when all is said and done, does not need trickery and monstrosity – he is terrible enough like this.
The meadow does not welcome the god from the machine, instead seems to groan beneath him, but he moves onward, to the killing field, to the boy who stands, sides heaving.
I did it for you.
Such glorious words, the climax of what he strives for – to turn their will to his, not by force, but by conviction. To let them make a choice, and have them choose him, every time.
“Tarnished,” he says. A fitting name. The boy is stained, ruined,
(beautiful)
and ever so willing to please.
He surveys the waste before him, and nods, once.
“Good,” he says. He almost means it. The boy is trying, and that’s more than he can say for so many.
He is trying.
****
And somewhere, a silver mare watches. She is not present to the affair, where god meets monster over a field of ruin, but she sees it, vivid as daylight. She is unused to visions, her magic still a strange and fickle thing despite the years.
A brand on her hip burns, hot.
Seeing Him again – even in vision – is hard enough, the ache on her hip is hard enough, but worse still is the thing before Him. The one who did the killing, who offered the still-warm bodies like a prize to the dark god. Who calls him master.
The woman isn’t aware she’s shaking, and whether it’s in fear or fury, she can’t say.
There is a girl, says a voice, sing-song, a girl who’s dead and not-dead.
The voice sounds like Him, but she listens. She can’t help but listen.
Who would win, do you think? The girl’s like this boy – malleable, but powerful.
A laugh, from somewhere, from everywhere, and then the laugh turns to crows, a whole murder of them, blacking out the sky.
c a r n a g e
he wanted to respond D: