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

The tension between her and her mother could not go unmissed.
He had a mother once. She had been an unrepentant witch. But he has to give her credit.

Look what she had made;
She had made someone so beleaguer and spiteful that when it came to him, he wielded terror as naturally as Pale Death does his scythe. Because, when he had woken up on the forest floor, his chest full of black, odious pain, make no mistake—he had not hesitated. It had filled his dog-brain with a sense of hunt and kill; it had wrapped itself around him like a better mother’s clutch, and he was whole and grand and he set out to rend.

He felt those horns, heavy and spartan on his crude, unkind head, were more than just ornamentation—a Christmas star atop his skull. No. He knew what they were. He knew what they were meant for, that they were to be his paintbrushes; his world-breakers; his crown.

They had many things in common.

She has so much potential for malice, he can almost taste it. It is heady, magnetic—tormenting, because he can see that she is honeyed, and that will do her no good. He’d have to break that from her, piece by piece, or risk losing her altogether. “Ajatar,” he echoes back, in a gravelly, satisfied grunt, “it is good to finally meet you, more officially. I have been thinking about you.” Pollock cannot suppress a small, twinkling grin as she rolls her eyes at mention of Harmonia.

(This is a beloved pastime.
He loves unbinding the maternal, hooking a claw underneath the skin and picking it loose from the bones. It is a loathsome, insidious force, the mother. It is an anchor that weights; it is a pathogen that infects.)

“Hmm,” he growls, nodding his head gravely, “that is good. Such power....” He wonders how dangerous she becomes, now. Harmonia isn’t soft—she is deceptive and wicked, he thinks. He wonders if Ajatar has yet tasted that lick, one that could be so viciously barbed. “Me?” he tilts his heavy, rough head, there is a kind of mischief in his voice, mutating on his tongue because he cannot help but want to show her. “I can run faster than any normal horse; I can turn on a dime, leap down these cliffs as if they are mere stones,” his muscles tingle, he remembers the first time he felt their heat under his pelt. He remembers the first time he sampled on the fruits of that enhanced movement. 

“And I can coax fear from it’s hiding place in the mind. Just like that” He needs nothing to trigger it, they come to him like obedient soldiers, but like hounds, they bay and pace when left chained. “You needn’t worry, I have masterful control of it. And it is nothing compared to you.”

POLLOCK
the gift giver