god called in sick today

[Harmonia]

She laughs.

What has he done? What had THEY done? Joining their collective voices, their faces, throwing everything together into a pot to watch it boil. God magic, devils pride, violence - a dash of this, a pinch of that. It bubbled and boiled until at last it couldn't help but rise to a feverish pitch. Harmonia watched with the rest of the group as Carnage shot down the Fairy and his own magic, a hot sick mess of filth, turned the forest below into a wasteland. A valley.

Absolute carnage.

Harmonia doesn't mind, she found Beqanna's temperate landscape to be hellish and foul. Everything was perfect and picturesque - a french coffee shop, a baby in swaddling clothes. This was the true nature of the world, black and stark and grotesque.

Surgery doesn't know any better. The fog on his mind has lifted entirely now, and he can see...but what does he see? He still only knows to follow his mother, heel to toe, across the landscape of Beqanna to this wasteland. Up a mountain. Down a crag. Into the festering dirt pot of a land. Is this where I'm to live, he thinks.
He thinks about leaving.
He eyes his mother quietly, considering.
He'll stay - for now.
Maybe he'll leave tomorrow.

HARMONIA

the pied piper

[Pollock]

Take. Take. Take.

(It had been a blessed thing to see.)

Because when they take, they take all.

It is how the mighty survive.

And what Carnage took had fouled instantly. Spectacularly. It had withered in his hands, spread like grey scabs, scaling down the skin of stone like some grotesque disease. And they fell, bloody and spent, with thunder and a roar of dust, those canyons of gold, milk and honey had collapsed and all the things that had once grown there, 

—they died, too.

(They take and they rearrange. Her land is furrowed with the scars of the mighty – old and new alike.)

There is something poetic about it, he thinks, as he picks his way through the nothingness left behind for them. A dead valley and decomposing cliff, crusted with that god-magic. That he should take her beautiful, newly birthed thing and damage it so. Beyond recognition. Beyond resuscitation. So utter barren and sterile.

They will always rise, and find their place.

A forest needs a wolf.

A child’s room needs a bed monster.

Beqanna needs its boogeymen.

(“Could use trees,” he had muttered to Bruise as they winded down the craggy path to the gorge below.

No matter, perhaps he could ask. Even dead and naked things would suit his needs.

He is a simple man.)

He recognizes her – gold for gold; the searing fury burning both their throats raw – from the meeting, where Carnage had summoned them and they came in rows like sheep. He’s not used to being the flock anymore, but he’ll play. The gift giver is not stupid. Never has been. He has been a worm in mud, a boy, a wretch and a demigod of Fear. But not stupid. He’d have been snuffed out long ago if that were the case.

He knows to go to the trough and follow the hand, if need be.

And their situation calls for need.

“It sure is something, isn’t it?” his voice is gravel and many subtle things besides. Like her, he does not see the ugliness. Just land. Hard rock and dried riverbed. He finds beauty in his forest, to be sure. And in flanks and lathered shoulder blades. 

This is another kind of beauty, the brushstrokes rugged and ghoulish. 

He lets his unwelcomed wings settle at his side. “Your name?” he eyes her with those black-brown eyes, tastes something powerful on her. But they are all (mostly all) disarmed things now – pale and vulnerable. He gives the boy at her side a glance, but he scents something alike weakness on him (like a carnivore is supposed to smell fear, with slaver moistening his lip). He knows what it’s like to ensnare younger minds, though he has always had to do it the old fashioned way.

“I’m Pollock.”

[Harmonia]

Harmonia does not love the land, but it will do. She watches the crumbling waste expand for as far as the eye could see, and for a minute she is less angry. Her situation - a naked rat in a lab, stripped of everything she is and was - seemed less dire. The lack of magic in her bones was just a dull ache now, pounding with every step, but no longer tearing her limb from limb. What a welcome change, she thinks, but what an unwelcome reminder.

The Wasteland, however, gave her hope.

She hears the flutter of wings and turns a green eye, calm and cool, to the beast that approaches. Everything is tall compared to her, everything is large compared to her. Lithe, small, sinewy - she once used it to pretend so many things. Pretend to be dumb, pretend to be empty, pretend to be useless. It kept her alive.
She doesn't need parlor tricks anymore.

"Harmonia," she says, her voice young despite the shadow in her eyes. She follows his gaze across the land, the corners of her mouth twitching. "It will do," she begins, pausing at the end of that sentence. "It's already served its main purpose."

HARMONIA

the pied piper

[Pollock]

Anger must relent, eventually. His had ceded to bitterness ‒ a colder thing ‒ so many years ago.
The gift giver has sobered again, and perhaps the satisfaction of this place had helped. But not completely, because just like hunger, he needs these things stoking away in his gut. He needs anger, in measure, because it inspires something in him that quiet acrimony cannot. So he lets it yield to purpose, acidic and commanding.

And the two come together like perfect halves of a whole ‒ breeding and mutating, quick as a virus.
Anger and purpose.

But hope? A curious thing for the gift giver. A long-buried and dangerous thing. It had left his equation many years and universes ago. Left in mud and snow and in the iced heart that Christmas ornament had punctured and filled with blacker stuff. Still, he can appreciate that this barren land is hope, to some. Or ambition. Purposeful and dogged, pock-marked and ugly, but perhaps proud because it is, after all, a monument of dust and desire.

There is a strangeness to her. A endlessness and agelessness. “Hm. What do you think was it’s purpose then?” He might say it’s purpose was to break the thief's back. He is a simple and single-minded thing. Bone cracks and violence. Or perhaps it was meant to be a fortress, a deep and walled lair. For what? He can only imagine the dark god has his reasons and purpose, kept behind tight lips.
(Gods play games. It's what they do.)
He turns his dark eyes to the young man at her side and considers him. Perhaps timid and unsure... he knows these things, both as lamb and wolf ‒ has felt and devoured them. Has grown a taste. “And you, how do you like it here?”

(Or, perhaps, it was just a home.
And what a household this is.)