violence
The bones have always been a constant.
She loves them; as much as she has or ever will love anything. It is her masterpiece, this craft, this menagerie of bones from a dozen different creatures. She touches it sometimes, gentle, the velvet of her lips on the white skull of a horse who lived and died long before Violence ever was; she’s traced the stag-horns she placed on its head, rearranged the crown of mouse skulls she encircled it with. The bones are hers, they have always been with her – making this creature had been easy as breathing. Like a thing meant to be.
And she doesn’t think of them, not overmuch, the way one does not think of breathing, when she is relocated – violently, by invisible hands – to a mountain that is crowded with other horses, packed like a slaughterhouse. She weaves through them, and the bones follow. She leaves the mountain as quickly as she came, while the earth still trembles with aftershocks.
(She does not know what transpired. She does not care. Let every kingdom fall and crumble.)
But when she walks down the mountain, past some invisible line, the bones do not follow. They crumble behind her, and for a moment she doesn’t realize it, unless she suddenly realizes she is empty, aching, missing.
She turns her head, and there they are, her bones, crumpled on the ground in a heap. She shakes her head, disbelieving, and tries to put them back together, but they don’t so much as twitch.
They are no longer her bones. Now, they are just bones. Just trash.
She tries to move back to the mountain, but invisible hands push her back. She is cast out.
She feels pressure in her forehead, and a horn, black as obsidian, sprouts from her. It’s sharp and terrible but she’d break it off in an instant to bring back the bones.
Instead, she cries out, a savage, hurting cry; furious without an entity to be furious at.
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
