[mature] and the blood just spills and spills; ROUND II

[feast]

<center><link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Halant|Kristi" rel="stylesheet"><link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Cormorant+SC|IM+Fell+Great+Primer+SC" rel="stylesheet"><div style="width: 550px; background: url('http://i.imgur.com/dA69zKb.png'); padding-top: 10px; background-position: top; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-color: #0b0b0d; border-radius: 300px 300px 0px 0px;box-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #000000;"><center><div style="font-family: 'Cormorant SC', serif; font-size: 40px; color: #2e2d29; line-height:30pt; padding-top: 40px; padding-right: 110px; align:center; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #e0dcce;">feast.</div><div style="font-family: Times; color: #acacac; font-size: 12px; padding-top: 5px; padding-bottom: 2px; line-height: 10pt; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 220px; letter-spacing: .5px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #e0dcce;"><i>death inspires me,</i></div><div style="font-family: Times; color: #acacac; font-size: 12px; padding-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 10px; line-height: 10pt; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 90px; letter-spacing: .5px; text-shadow: 0px 0px 20px #e0dcce;"><i>like a dog inspires a rabbit.</i></div><div style="width: 500px; margin-top: 280px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-right: 10px; padding: 10px;  font-family: Times; letter-spacing: 0px; color: #777776; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 140%; text-align: justify; border-radius: 0px 0px;"><center><div style="width: 500px; border-bottom: 1px solid #0c0c0e; margin-top: 5px; margin-bottom: 10px; box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px #e0dcce;"></div></center>The son has never forgiven the father for losing hold of the kingdom the dark god had given them. It is what he has to dwell on as he finds himself imprisoned after that first step beyond the bone and into the lair. He does not find this captivity particularly distressing at first - there is food, there is water, as if they are not meant to wither away, yet. Something - no, someone, wants them just strong enough to contend with the sound of screams in the air and the smell of others nearby just as captive as he is. Neither bothers him at the moment because the others are not important nor are the screams that should make his mind break beneath the constant song of pain and torture. That is a certain food of its own kind that Feast well, feasts on.  

He licks his lips, listening to the crescendo of moans that rise into a crashing cacophony of screaming that he closes his black eyes to in bliss. His chin seems to tilt up and back, leaving his throat rather vulnerable as his lips part in breathless anticipation of the next death knell to sound through that cavernous lair. The feeble wing stirs at his side, bent and awkward, tries to give one fruitless flap then settles itself back against his side and the stone floor it spills out onto. His father would love this, he thinks, compelled into thinking of the Krampus and how he thrived on fear.

“Yes, he would have loved this but I’d break him just as I will you.”

Comes the words from the dark god’s mouth and Feast blinks stupidly in the lowlight of the god’s lair. Break him? But he came to obey! Except he does not take a knee in subservience and he begins to feel a terrible weight on his back driving him down nonetheless as the laws of gravity bend to the dark god’s will. The dark god knows his thoughts and Feast ends up taking a knee, forced to it regardless and his head is forced into a position of ritualistic offering that bares his goat-horned head for slaughter. At least, he thinks it is slaughter but it is not - not yet.

It is sacrifice, perhaps, as the dark god comes closer and without touch of hoof or tooth, brands his mark into Feast’s flesh in such a manner as to always be a painful and searing reminder of his time spent there.

It is a beast’s mark, as surely as if any claw or tooth had scarred him except it had the stink of magic for his burnt skin reeked of sulphur and something else, death.

He bears now, the dark god’s brand in the shape of a miniature horse’s hoof imprinted there as if such a tiny iron-hot hoof had been held to his throat until he given up his own scream to the multitude of those that rang out around him. It was a burnt sigil that could almost be mistaken for the letter “C” for the dark god’s name that he fumbled at shaping with his lips as he coughed and spluttered around the scent of his own burnt flesh. But the name was not his to say. “Something to remember me by…” laughed the dark god before he vanished, or sauntered off - neither mattered how he came to leave Feast there alone in the screaming dark of his own cell with his hot ruined throat. Better an ounce of flesh than something else, he thought as his only consolation to the terrible visit.

Which after what seemed like an hour or an eternity because they are the same to him in that place - meaningless, time held in suspension, in a god’s grip - had passed, he began to balk at giving up much more of himself to the dark god and his odd summons to come and be transformed. It filled him with a sense of failure as if he could hear his father’s hollow kingly command now to kill him seeing no value in a son that could not hold his own against the dark god and he began to seethe with dread, recoiling in horror at the failure that deadened his limbs and made the food and water tasteless in his mouth. Feast began to feel madness reaching fingers into his brain, stabbing tentacles of ire that turned cold and hard in his mouth as if a bit had been fitted between his teeth.

That was when he began to search his cell for a means to escape. He must succeed at that if nothing else! Then he can claim to be one of the few that escaped the dark god’s clutches though there was something cowardly in that, he felt or thought, unsure of which as he pressed his weight against a wall that seemed particularly weak enough to give beneath the constant push of his shape against it. Sure enough, that wall did crumble - did break, as the dark god promised Feast would, and he bared his teeth in a small show of triumph until it occurred to him that no guard came after the clatter of stones and bones had fallen to the stony floor. Hm… he thought, paused in his cautious step as he listened and thought even then, that the screams had died down just a little. That couldn’t be right though, but then, what was right here in the god’s own lair? Regardless, he may his way towards a frail offering of light that seemed to him a little like hope - not that Feast had ever tasted an ounce of hope in his life!

He should have known that light was nothing more than a new sense of betrayal.

For he found himself breaking from the lair into a land not unlike Pangea had been - a dry savage tit they had tried to milk existence from in their own way. Feast sighed, of course Hell would be like this. He had been spat out of his mother’s loins onto a similar wasteland though this earth was more scorched than just dry, as if a thousand suns had crashed upon it and burned. Feast raised his head to the hot air and sniffed, scent little to no water and definitely a lack of edible fare not that he thought of feeding himself at this moment. He wanted to know what kind of hardships he was up against and there was always other things than grass and water to attend to one’s needs - he’d survive as he must, even if he became no better than a carrion crow.

Directionless, he realizes he must pick a direction and set off in it. There are no markers to aid him in making a decision and he must use his best judgment. He spins in a tight circle and continues to sniff the air and detects a certain teasing thread of water that smells downright promising. Feast almost doesn’t trust it, not here. Something like the promise of pure blue water is too good to be true and he doesn’t expect it to be that easy. Nothing in Hell is ever easy. Nose up in the air, he follows the scent of water into the ravaged wastes that seems comparable to being on Mars - hot choking air, light that is no earthly light, and wind that blows as hot as any breath off an active volcano.

Feast feels as if he is being boiled alive the longer he walks.

Everything feels hot and tight, as if the skin begins to shrink around his bones. All he can think about now is that water and he is certain this is a special kind of Hell to torment those like him, keeping the very thing he thinks he needs just out of reach. Even his wing dragged in the dust, leaving feather after feather behind him.

He thinks he can feel his brain shriveling up inside his skull, not realizing that is really the light of this land as it blocked out by a beast bigger and blacker than the night itself. It is a giant boar with bloody tusks and when it stamps a hoof, the ground beneath his own cloven feet quakes in response and he feels that quake go all the way up his spine. Mother had told him stories about a beast like this. A dark god in its own right that she knew would come after her and be her downfall. When at last his eyes could move beyond the bloody tusks, he could see two smaller but still equally impressive tusks jutting out from the boar’s massive throat. From that tusked throat there came a strange whistling that Feast understood to be words inside his brain and he thought madness! This is madness!

“It is not madness,” said the boar.

“You shall not pass here.” and he shook his tusks in warning at Feast who backed up a step.

I must, he thought because water is that way and maybe, salvation of some kind. The boar shook with laughter so loud and great it came from way deep in his belly and whistled out of his tusked throat, stabbing right into Feast’s brain and driving him down to his knees. “So like your mother…” he heard the boar whistle-say to him and that more than anything gave Feast the strength to rise and shake his own pathetic goat-horns in attempt to show his prowess. He may never admit that his weakness would be his own bloodline - mother, twin brother, and little sister, but he did not have to admit it to the boar - it knew, and it savored the taste of his sudden righteousness as the fledgling stallion gained his feet and shook his sad little horns at the beast.

“I am the only thing that terrifies her in her dreams. The only thing that she knows will kill her one day.” it whistle-laughs, and maddens Feast further until he charges at the great beast. “Stupid!” it trumpets from its throat and swings it’s tusks at him, gouging the flesh from Feast’s bare left shoulder. Feast is underneath it now and not sure what to do as the boar tramples his big feet into the dirt and the ground behaves as if in an earthquake, heaving and upsetting his balance so that he rolls back out in front of the boar. Disoriented from the sudden upset, he climbs to his feet and shakes his horned head at the boar who does the same back to him in challenge. Feast charges and his goat horns lock with the boar’s gory tusks and he is severely throttled and dropped back to the earth on his now smarting rump as if he was no more than a fly swatted down.

“Stupid!” comes the debilitating roar in his brain and he can barely keep his eyes open and his feet in motion as he charges once more beneath the boar’s broad chin. Feast angles his head just right to split the boar’s belly open with his sad little goat horns but they are sharp enough to do the trick. Entrails and darkness spill out of the boar and Feast collapses beneath the burden of them, hearing laughter whistling in his ears as the boar dissolves all around him. “Your mother will die this way.” comes the promise fading as the last hot steaming entrail falls off him but leaves him stinking of sulphuric offal as if he’d bathed in a lake of it. “Ew.” he mutters, taking stock of the injury to his shoulder that continues to ooze blood down his skin. He cannot think about that now, his brain stumbles back to the thought of water and what good it might do him so he climbs back to his feet and resumes his trek through the wastes.

One monster down.

One more to go.

He has no idea the dark god is keeping score or that his mother’s nightmare had somehow always been his own. The boar was not just Sinew’s death but Feast’s also, that some great dark mythological beast would fell him someday. Or perhaps the boar signified that their bloodline would end themselves. Was that not what his own father had told his mother at the time of their birth? It would be fitting then, that the next monster he should face would be his own disapproving father but it is not the Krampus himself that rises up out of the savage red light of the wastes - it is his older half-brother who tormented him mercilessly as a foal, whom he tried to laugh in the face of and show no fear to.

But that brother had made him fear him.

Once; once had been enough.

Feast narrows eyes upon the silver buckskin stallion, the name of which stops just shy of leaving his lips that curl up in a sneer. How he despises him! Because of how he was made to cower in fear and take his half-brother’s beating all for the sake of the blood they shared - Pollock’s blood. Bruise had beaten him mightily and made him bow to him as if Feast was no better than the dirt beneath Bruise’ own cloven feet. He can feel it now, that same hate bubbling up inside him as the Krampus-stallion smiles in a not so kind way towards him.

“We meet again.” is all Feast manages to choke out around the hate that fills him fit to burst. Bruise does not answer him, just grins that jeering leer of his that makes Feast hate him all the more. It is his hate that undoes him, makes the two stallions paw at the earth and arch their necks in displays of power. Feast thinks that this time, he can take his half-brother on, fear induction or not but it will be a battle of incontestable wills and Feast will suffer fear after fear being thrown at him and taken from him - siphoned from him, against his will.

They snort and scream and rise up against one another, boxing their forelegs together and battering their horns against one another’s heads. Bruise is more seasoned and drives Feast back and into a more preferred stance that leaves him vulnerable to attack but not from hoof, horn, or tooth. He strikes right into the very heart of Feast and seizes in an ironclad fist of fear that drives the breath from his lungs and sends him shivering to his knees. He lives through his mother’s death from the boar in her nightmares; the slow decay of his twin brother as he rots until he is nothing no more; and even foresees his own death from his father’s hooves at the moment he slid from his mother’s flanks - -

“NO!” he roars, shaking his head clear of these visions. He will not be made to cower again! He climbs to his feet and begins to berate Bruise with teeth and cloven feet until he has taken the same beating over again as he had when he was a weanling but this time, he fought back and he stomped his older half-brother into the dust until he was a crushed skull leaking out brains and all that fear induction. Feast is torn and bloodied, and might never know what exactly gave him strength except that he would not be taken so easily - not by the fear, he’d eat his fear as surely as if he could eat his own heart.

Eat his heart, and so Feast does. He rips into the tender exposed stomach with his cloven feet and buries his blunt equine teeth inside until he rips rib after rib out and reaches the heart. He gobbles it up, feeling it slide thick and wet down his throat and fills him up. This is what had to be done - eat the heart, eat the fear, never fear again. NEVER! Knowing that, he stumbled back from the corpse of Bruise and said nothing, scenting only the sweet tangible promise of water on the air.

He doesn’t know what he is supposed to have learned from either of this, other than that he will not cower before nightmares and brothers ever again. They are conquerable things and he is a conquering sort and it will take much more than that to break him. So he thinks as he drags himself at least to the lip of the oasis and takes one long sweet drink before sighing. Feast was tired but he dared not sleep here, dared not even taint the water with his blood and the offal of the boar that still clung to him like a second skin made of shadow. Instead he shook and did not know if it was from a new fear that would never leave him, or the exhaustion he felt or the aftermath of the adrenaline leaving him.<center><div style="width: 500px; border-bottom: 1px solid #0c0c0e; margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px; box-shadow: 0px 0px 10px #e0dcce;"></div></div></div></center>