violence
There is little so terrifying as a blank slate. A surface wiped clean, free of poetry or mathematics. A promise – of things said; or a taunt – of things unsaid.
For her – child of magicians and monsters, a woman who has never been without these things – she feels the first thudding heartbeat of fear when the bones are ripped from her. She does not know why – she did not listen when the warning was decreed, for she is not the listening kind. She knows she now wields a horn, ink-black and honed sharp.
(She knows she would break it, would break everything, to have her bone-magic back.)
She is nothing, like this.
(She does not know how to act without the bones, without her monster-thing echoing every footfall.)
She sees a congregation, other horses stripped bare who cluster in a place that once held magic. So, she goes. She walks alone, and wonders if the ache will stop, if she will ever cease to feel like some vital organ has been torn from her.
She looks at none of them. They are all bare, like she is, but they are still nothing to her (arrogance was not stripped from her, though now, perhaps, it’s more foolish to wield – for she has nothing to back it up). She keeps her dark eyes straight forward, fixed on nothing.
“Give it back,” she says – demands – as if she were a voice that mattered, a voice that might be heard.
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
