violence
It’s not that she doesn’t know the stories.
She comes from his blood, yes, but she also comes from a line hell-bent on destroying him. But he has never mattered, he has always been something abstract, something indefinite – a name, but not an action. Not a living, breathing thing. More like a story. A fiction.
Yet he is here, now, in the gray and sullen flesh.
She is not the kind who pledges allegiance to anything. Or anyone. But she is angry, now, a woman scorned – a woman with powers stripped from her without warning, without a chance to fight back. So yes, she is angry – no, furious - and yes, she wants to punish the land – the goddess – who did this. Who robbed Violence of her most basic self, the self who knows the bones, the self who find necromancy as easy as breathing.
Hell hath no fury, they say. And maybe it’s right. Because this woman scorned comes up to him, joins the precarious contingent of misfits, the men and women with uneasy stares. She looks him in the eye – there is a certain familiarity to his features, for she is his granddaughter, after all – and nods, once.
“Take it,” she says, “take what she will not give.”
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
