violence
She hasn’t heard from her parents.
As far as knows, they remain on the mountain – remain powerful. Or perhaps they crossed that invisible threshold, and her father is a horse now rather than an alien (could he even survive, like that? she wonders, but does not dwell); and her mother some useless, ugly thing rather than the magic-sharpened witch she had been.
She misses Charnel, misses that vessel, the body available to her, strong and strange. Charnel’s watery eyes and meekness, the way she had bent to Violence’s will, had opened her mind, let in the possession.
Now, there is nothing – now she does not miss them because they can offer nothing to her. Violence is stupidly powerless, only a horn on her head, a mindless weapon (and she has already used it, sliced open a girl’s face for the way she looked at her).
She’s come here because bitterness is a smoldering fuel, and she is not the begging kind. So when the impotent gray and his sick magic promised things, she stood by. She walked herself into the dust land he gave them.
She doesn’t mind the barrenness of it – rather likes it, really, as she has always been a woman who prefers dead things. She doesn’t mind the lies, because she lies quite often, herself.
She keeps her distance form him, though. She knows the stories.
So her sights settle instead on a boy, coltish but growing, and she strides over. Her eyes are hard, and flat, and she shines like obsidian against the wretched gray backdrop of their home.
“Hello,” she says, “my name is Violence.”
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
