Pollock

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

Growing. Building. He watched, from high up – from a tower of sun-bleached sandstone and sour air – as it came back to life, fed by the bittercold water of faraway melts and inseminated by the easement of Carnage’s passing by. 

Watched it take breaths, like a drowned man does after being pulled from water. Heaving, laborious breaths.

But breathe it does.

Grow it does.

He sees the seedlings for what they are. Treasonous, insidious reminders. In truth, he has always appreciated the finer things – colour and light; fecundity and the damp, dull smell of soil. He grew up in the arms of a forest, presided over a court of moss and bone-white birch trees.

Fed it. Kept it beautiful.

(Betrayal is a bitter wine.)

These, though, are soft, newborn things. Sowed into the cushion of a reanimating womb, some budding thrones from their green skin – Beqanna’s stalwart paladins – well-suited to the waste of their upbringing.

Some, of course, are defenseless.

Fodder for the wretched.

He finds himself marching her perimeters, more often than not. Drawn to the saltwater at her western flank, because it so reminds him of the Beach. And the Beach so reminds him of how unfair the world can be.

And that burns in his gut like coal in a furnace.

He traces the unsteady steps of that damaged land, smelling the air for finer things to play with. But Pangea is big and (more often than not) empty. And so he gravitates back into her center to watch as tender, green things pierce the packed, scorched earth of his kingdom.

His eyes drift closed, and he imagines her arterial river run red. Imagines bones, not from things felled by Carnage’s wrath, but of jewel-skinned maidens and… paradise.

‘I have two things that might interest you.’ He blinks open, turning those dark, prying eyes to Harmonia. “Only two?” Doubtful. Pollock shifts his body to face her square, the cursed, once-wounded, muscles in his haunches and shoulders growling viciously. He remembers her offer, had fed on the idea. Power craves power. 

Ever corrupting, so it is said.

“What is it?” he examines her and finds her to be a puzzle still. He likes puzzles, so long as they yield in time. She does not feel yielding. She feels rumbling and deceptive.

POLLOCK
the gift giver

@[Harmonia]