violence
She would not have remembered him, except –
Except he was the first with a power that mirrored her own. She remembers the game they’d played, when she was younger, drawing forth corpses and bones. What had come easy to her had been a burden to him, she recalls. It had been an interesting enough meeting, a moment to show off.
She would have kept walking past him, except –
Except he seems changed from the stranger she once met. More downtrodden. If asked, she couldn’t explain it – it was more like a scent. The smell of dejection. Of weakness. She has a knack for sensing these things, finding these broken things who see her as some kind of salvation rather than the monster she is.
(It’s how that boy had been, empty and broken, and he had let in because she made a promise that the hurt would go away. It was not a promise she kept.)
So she slows, stops. She is older now, filled out, a woman in her prime glinting black and terrible in the dappled sunlight that leaks between the branches. She searches her mind for his name, comes up with a fragment of it.
“Nymph,” she says, “you look sad.”
In truth, nothing much about his air speaks particularly of sadness, but something runs deep inside him, a vein of something she wants to tap, wants to explore and exploit. She arranges her face into one of concern, and steps just a bit closer.
Let me in, she thinks, but does not say. Oh, the things I could do to you.
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
