violence
Her mother would hate it here.
Not because the land is a disaster, gray and barren (a mimicry of the wasteland where a battle once took place under an eclipse, a story Violence knows pieces of, a story she does not care for because it does not involve her). Not because the land was created in defiance.
No, her mother would hate the creator – the king (the god? some god). For he is what - who - she was raised to despise, he is the thing her mentor once fought, a long and complicated tale.
(And he is her mother’s sire, too. Violence’s grandsire. A complicated, interwoven, foolish story.)
The fact her mother would despise it so is what drives Violence to stay. She has never been one for community – she found the friendship she needed in the bones, in her glorious menagerie creatures- but with that gone, she has been adrift. And her wanderings had led to this strange gathering, had led to an idle pledge, had led to her watching, wide-eyed, as a wasteland was ripped forth from the land that had taken away so much.
She hears him screaming with the effort of creation, and she hopes it hurts Beqanna more, to have something taken like something, a land violated.
She herself likes it, she is a woman who is accustomed to dead things. It’s almost comforting, in a way. She is learning to breathe dust (it makes her voice raspier, stranger. She likes it. She likes to be strange).
Bored, she wanders in dried riverbeds, admires the few twisted, awful plants that struggle to grow. She smiles, she herself a twisted, awful thing.
(A land full of metaphors, really. Fitting, so fitting.)
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
