Feel the good cold stinging blood - Ajatar/Harmonia

[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

(‘That is the second order of interest.’)

For a moment, he had been horrified. Repulsed. His lip had curled as he jerked his chin in towards his chest; thought to spook from it because even the gift-giver has some sense of self preservation left in his lizard brain..
(‘Don’t be lazy, you insolent thing.’)
Everything about her was wrong.
Her eyes had been so wide – an innocent... and that made her all the more terrifying,

Oh.
But that only lasted a moment.

Everything about her was… fascinating.
He watched with a churning stomach as that golden skin boiled and raised in angry, raw disease – roiling, as if something were trying to claw its way out. He had released his neck and reached towards Harmonia, eyes glinting with the same queer craving that draws him towards maggots in their sheets of skin,

—then they burst.

He exhaled, pinching his nostrils shut to the smell that screamed: ‘death is here! the end is nigh…’. Too foul to countenance. More so than the grave rot, which he had sipped from so frequently that it had become something he could look forward to. (Something he missed.)
But to him, it sounded like silence. Like the eternal, perfect silence of a conquered world.
(Or a well-fed forest.)

He had barely been able to take him eyes off the girl.  “Interesting, indeed,” he had muttered, as his eyes dropped to the scales that had popped from her legs and littered the wasteland floor. “Interesting.”

And little more, for she had awoken ghosts. Stirred the silts of distraction.

(‘That is the second order of interest.’)
***

At night, when he does not dream of his mounds of dirt – those unceremonious cairns in the middle of some silent, well-fed forest – or of a hundred broad-backed titans clashing in the smoke, he dreams of pestilence. He is jolted awake by the phantoms of pain that crawl up his legs and across his eyes.
If they are good dreams, he sleeps soundly, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with this girl in a grey and conquered world. So perfectly silent. Today, he rises from his bed of sandstone well-rested and still harried to by the impulses of sleep. The gift-giver king sets off, across the gnarled and cruel landscape, singularly concerned.
Scenting like a hound.

He looks for the girl.

POLLOCK
the gift giver

@[Harmonia] @[Ajatar] - Whoever you want to send his way, either or both :] I just kind of imagine a bunch of time has gone by (where he was moping and distant/distracted) and so current timeline/age for Ajatar. He basically just muttered interesting, thanks for showing me, bye. and went to think on it. Didn't get Ajatar's name even, but is slightly obsessed.