[open] I like your blood on my teeth just a little too much; open

[violence]

violence

 
It feels like death, here.
Fortunately, she likes things best when they’re dead. Violence is not bothered by the quiet, by the way her footfalls are overly loud, pounding the dry earth and leaving shadows in her wake. She is not bound to anyone, to anything, and so she looks for no lost souls, only ahead, into these seemingly endless paths that she walks.
The silence is broken with the clattering of bones – her dear puppet, an animated mishmash of things she has found and shaped into something vaguely equid, though there aren’t many equine bones to be found, in the thing. It is her most loved creation,
(And even it, occasionally, is damaged. Bones break so easily. But it is easy to remake, she builds and rebuilds it, her companion and her ship of Theseus, all in one.)
(Her son – filth of her loins – had not been so easy to bold, so pliable. He had broken her creation in anger, or stupidity. It had not been hard to leave him.)
And so this is what noise fills the meadow – the thud of her footfalls, the clatter of bones as the thing moves behind her. It feels, to her, like a kingdom.
 
Through this nomad kingdom she moves, her direction aimless, air stale in her lungs. She thinks, briefly, of speaking – of shouting something out, or maybe simply screaming – but for now, she is content with nothing louder than the endless music of the bones.
 

these violent delights bring violent ends

feeling bad from my COVID booster and ate an edible. now this.

[Nightlock]

— I'll break you a hundred different ways —

He remembers her.

He did not know this until he saw her, the black mare and her pet of bones, but when he sees her across the desolate meadow the realization hits him. He remembers her skeletal puppet, the unnerving way it had reminded him of himself when he looked at it—how he had wondered if someone could manipulate him just as easily in his skeletal state.

He has not thought of her since he last saw her, and so he is surprised at how quickly he recalls her name, Violence, but he supposes maybe that is because in a land such as this it is an easy name to remember. Everything in this land was tainted by violence in some way, at some point. It was interwoven into Beqanna’s history just as deeply as magic, the two so often working hand in hand to shape the land and its residents to their liking.

It would be unlikely that she should remember him, though. He is, just as he had been back then, unremarkable. Storm-cloud gray with his mother’s brown-black eyes, and feathered wings folded at his sides. He still, even all these years later, did not often venture into the common areas at night, keeping his skeletal form a secret from mostly everyone save for Wonder—the one thing that may have distinguished him from the rest.

He doesn’t know why he walks towards her.
He doesn’t even like companionship or conversation, but he is drawn to her by some unnamable force, as if she can control his skeleton, too.

“I remember you,” he says once he is close enough, but his gaze readily slides from her face to the animated bones next to her. “Well. I suppose it’s mostly that that I remember.”

— and I'll make you remember my face —

Nightlock

@violence