violence
The stranger catches her by surprise, with a question on her (failed) creation. Violence looks up, the movement sharp yet graceless, locks eyes with the piebald mare, watches as she sniffs at the macabre art.
(Crumbled now, detritus, a misshapen pile of bones.)
She waits a beat, to see if the mare actually wants an answer, and perhaps to think of what it was going to be. A monster? Another bone-thing? A monument to all things dead?
Violence herself isn’t sure – it was a whim, and she has little explanation for these – but she’ll be damned if she admits as much to a stranger.
“A sculpture,” she says, then adds, “of my father.”
Her father - a strange, androgynous alien thing, her mother’s pet, with the monstrous body that her sisters inherited but she lacked.
(She can wake the dead, sure, but outside she’s so damn ordinary.)
To be clear, it was not – her father could not be recreated in bone, nor did she care enough for him to do so. Her parents are thought of with a mild disdain and resentment (though the resentment is carried more for her mother, a magician, who refused her, who scolded her, who punished her when she took control of her father or sisters, their weak bodies so open and easy to conquer).
She could ask the girl’s name, or offer her own. Instead, she poses a question.
“Do you like dead things?”
Sparkling conversationalist, she is not.
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
