violence
She scents brokenness like a wolf scents meat, with a savage sort of hunger. She almost resembles a wolf, her lips peeled back from her teeth in what may have been a smile. Beside her walks the bones, her constant companion, the menagerie of animal bones stitched together into her own wonderful creation. She loves it, as much as she loves anything. She loves it because it obeys, because it is a constant; it exists because of her.
The girl catches her eye – Violence is becoming adept at sensing a certain slump of the spine, a weakness in their eyes that beckons her, draws her in with their tragic magnetism; she senses them the way stones sense glass.
Rain has begun to fall, and she shakes her dark head. She doesn’t mind the rain, she supposes, but sometimes when it pours it interferes with her link to the bones, interferes with her constant search for new corpses to collect. She can’t awaken them all, but she takes select bones from the best things she finds, adds them to her creation. She has wolves and bears and bobcats, more teeth and claws than necessary, has crowned the thing’s skull with a pair of majestic deer horns.
Truly, a thing to behold.
She weaves towards the girl, and her lips are still peeled back. She is not as imposing as her mother or father – she lacks her mother’s magic-sharp features and her father’s alien form – but she does walk alongside a terrible creature of bone, and often that is enough to make their eyes widen, make them draw back from her.
“Hello,” she says, and her voice is soft, like she is a thing gentled, “what are you doing out here, alone in the rain?”
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
