and lord, I fashion dark gods too;
It’s not like he hasn’t been defied before.
The dark god will admit to it, that they do not always bow and acquiesce as they should. The reasons vary – plain old stupidity to misguided notions of honor – but the end result is the same: he does not like to be defied.
(Doesn’t like to be beaten, either. And hadn’t this cunning little trick, this transmutation of his queen from one realm to another, been a victory? For the shaman had done what even he could not.)
More disgusting, is that she is weak – he’d thought her a magician, at least, but when he grabs her – wraps invisible manacles to her ankles, drags her to the ground, yanks her to him – his magic coils inside her mind, feeling her out, and he finds she’s something else, something weaker. A shaman. Oh, with some other nifty abilities, to be sure, but nothing he can’t do, nothing he hasn’t perfected a thousand times over. So why had she been able to do it? Why had the realm bent for her, and not him?
(The fact it’s because she sacrificed a part of herself never crosses his mind. He does not know the meaning of sacrifice; knows only how to take.)
He drags her forth, there in the meadow. He’d thought of taking her to his lair, but the lair is where he keeps pets, keeps those who pledge loyalty to him. This one is neither – he doesn’t want the slow pleasures of taking her apart, he wants swift and terrible punishment, he wants to hurt her for defying him. Wants to make an example of her.
The invisible manacles keep her from shifting forms, mute her powers down. Her eyes are large, wild, but there is a quiet strength to them that he doesn’t like, that he vows to see gone by the time he is done with her.
He could have killed her, of course. Quick or slow. But death is often a relief, he knows (having died himself a few times), and he doesn’t want that for her. He wants the hurt to live in the marrow of her bones, wants his name scrawled on her heart, wants her to be forced to live out a savage, ruined life.
So.
He flays her skin, burns her like kindling, leaves her charred and smoking. She doesn’t die – he doesn’t permit it – and that strength is still in her eye. He doesn’t like it. So he moves away from the physical – there is a threshold, he knows, where the body simply acknowledges no more, where pain plateaus (a phenomenon he has researched, time and again, in his lair, charting their screams, their pleas). Instead, he ravages her mind, picks out memories, finds a name: Drow.
Almost like the first part of drowning, and he files that away. He much prefers fire, but water has its place, too.
“Drow,” he says out loud, and she shrieks when he utters the prodigal son’s name. He says something else, then, a low and guttural incantation, and the boy appears before them. Confusion lives fleetingly on his face before being replaced by horror as he beholds his mother, and then, the god before them both. The dark god forces the boy to his knees, as if in supplication.
“Tell me,” he says to her, “convince me to let him go. Tell me what you would give up. What you would do.”
It’s always so much sweeter when they do it to themselves.
c a r n a g e
hmu if you want anything changed <33