[open] you were made to meet your maker, any

[gospel]

black ocean, cold and dark, i am the hungry shark

Feast on the weakness.

It is not hard to find.

Gospel is fueled by memory and, as she walks, she wonders if it was always meant to be this way. But the hunger twists wicked in the pit of her gut, kicks her vicious in the valley of her ribs. It is not a hunger for flesh now, however. It is merely a hunger for violence. It pulses at the base of her throat, throbs in all that empty space around her cold, cold heart. It buoys her. It leaves little time for dwelling on the concept of Fate.

She moves easy through the impenetrable darkness, the shadows and her breath her only companions as she travels. It is not a scent she follows but something else entirely. Intuition, perhaps. Something inherent, woven into the soft tissue of her reptilian brain. She knows where to go without ever having to ask direction.

She thinks of her mother. Her nopetiful mother. She plunges a tooth into the meat of her tongue to ferry her away from this train of thought. It will do her no good now. She can think only of the hunger, hissing and spitting at the very center of her. Her bitter want for vengeance. Oh, what a crippling thing it is! A fist wrapped tight around her windpipe. But this is a force she will not allow to crush her. She will not give the universe the satisfaction of knowing this was how it broke her.

The breaths are measured, stilted. She makes hardly any sound at all as she crosses the border. She knows that she will find what she is looking for her. What a spectacular thrill that courses heady through her veins, pollutes her bloodstream, softens the edges of her vision.

Feast on the weakness, Ghaul had said, snap the fragile spines. She can think of no one more fragile as she moves through the forest. And there, finally, the scent. Hadn’t she known she would find what she was looking for here? And oh, the viper’s grin that slinks slow across her lethal mouth as she smells it.

She corners it there in a clearing. And the figure turns to face her, blinks at her in the darkness. There is some flicker of recognition, she is certain of it. And why shouldn’t there be?

“You should have made yourself more difficult to find,” Gospel purrs and grins, still. She can taste the blood pooling on her tongue. She can feel it drip hot down her throat as she moves closer. And the figure does not move. It just goes on blinking at her, as if it had been expecting her. And shouldn’t it have? Shouldn’t it have known just as well as she had that this moment would come eventually?

And oh, how she has waited! Gospel, cutting her teeth on the thought of it. “Will you fight?” she asks but the figure does not respond. What a dumb thing it is, its mouth all sewn up tight, blinking.

Feast on the weakness.

“I always knew you were a fool,” she murmurs, measured as she ventures closer. And the figure does not move. It seems to tip back its head and invite her venom into its bloodstream. She plunges her fangs into the vein and the thing does not fight. There is one subtle jerk as the life leaves it and Gospel shakes her own fine head, shreds up everything she can reach before the figure collapses at her feet.

“There was never room for the both of us,” she says to the dead thing, licking the blood from her lips as she takes one short step away from it, “was there, sister?”

g o s p e l

[Sabbath]

SabbatH

i'll let you play the role. i'll be your animal.

Sleep is a rare bird, these days, and so she finds herself wandering the blackest depths of night. Her eyes glimmer with the moon’s reflection as she quietly follows her daughter from afar. Sabbath admires her beauty, the perfect curve of her jaw and sweet look in her eyes. She has hunted since Gospel was hardly even a thought in her sister’s mind, learned what it meant to taste weakness bleeding across her tongue and prayed at the altar of malevolence. The chase has been her temple since her birth.

But today her god turns its eyes from her as Gospel appears from the shadows. Slowly, Sabbath lifts her head as the scene plays out in slow motion for her. Will you fight? She leaves her hiding place far behind the girls as she rushes forward, her long strides carrying her swiftly and just in time to watch her firstborn fall dead on the ground. The rose gray woman lowers her head and presses a trembling kiss to Prayer’s cheek as she feels for a pulse.

“My baby, my sweet Prayer,” she begs in a quaking voice. But there is no reply.

Hadn’t it been enough, to not be loved in return? Hadn’t it been enough to watch Adna be the favorite again? Her tears spill hot down her cheeks when she finally lifts her head, fangs clenched tight as she looks to Gospel.

“I should have smothered you when I had the chance. I should have torn you from your mother and ripped your jaw from your face!” she snarls as she rushes forward, fangs bared and careless of the repercussions. She snaps her jaws for anything she can reach with sour venom flinging from her tongue. She rips upward and then lunges her head down with that shattered horn, frantic to gore her niece.

“You will die nameless!”

And what would her parents think, to see her trying to destroy her sister’s child? Would Grandfather laugh and urge her on while her mother wept and begged her to stop? Even as these thoughts come flooding in, they do nothing to deter her from trying to taste Gospel’s throat. If there is no room for Prayer in this world then she will tear the entire world apart and rebuild it for her. She will make room and the world will kneel at her child’s feet as it begs for mercy and forgiveness.

But it will find none.

@[gospel]

[gospel]

black ocean, cold and dark, i am the hungry shark

Perhaps she should have known she was there.
Because her sister was a weak thing, the kind of soft, fragile thing that needed looking after.
Because it made sense that her mother should be close behind.

It coaxes a laugh out of her. A hollow, echoing thing. It swells and bursts across the surface of her tongue and when it explodes out of her mouth, it takes the girl’s blood with it. The mother kisses the daughter’s head and drags her tongue slow across the surface of her own teeth. How the girl’s existence had made her own mother ache. Gospel had seen it first hand, she had lived with the suffering. All for a fool! An ordinary man who did not deserve to occupy any piece of her mother’s mind or her heart. Were you to confront her about it, certainly Gospel would say that her aunt, too, was above him.

Gospel knows nothing of love. She is oblivious to the fissure cracks of heartbreak. She knows nothing of the rage that accompanies it. Her aunt turns to her, armed with all that anger, and it makes Gospel’s heart race. “You are a fool, too, Sabbath,” she murmurs in the space between the agony and the rage, “if you think that I have not done both of you a favor.” She grins then, feral. “Isn’t it better this way, aunt? To know that she died by the hand of someone who shared her blood?”

But there is no time left for talking. Because Sabbath lunges for her and Gospel delights in the heat of her breath and the teeth scramble for purchase. There is some small part of her that longs to tip back her find head, to expose her own vulnerable throat, to die in the half-melted snow beside her sister. Instead, she scrambles backward, gnashing her own teeth and rolling her own wild eyes.

She rears only in an attempt to slow her aunt’s progress, hissing as Sabbath’s venom sinks into the crux of her own elbow. It surges through her, turns her numb, and she snaps her own powerful jaw. She is no match for the older mare, certainly, but she has the folly of youth on her side.

“Haven’t we suffered enough?” she snaps, her sides heaving.

g o s p e l

[Sabbath]

SabbatH

i'll let you play the role. i'll be your animal.

Does Gospel know the curse that festers and burns in each of them, but never in Prayer? It gives them the gift of hunger that is never sated, even on the bones of the most holy to them. Sabbath, like her young niece, will never know satisfaction in any meal or any love that might find its way to her. The world could break itself open and offer her its core and it would never be enough to fill her belly. She knows, even as her fangs find the girl’s flesh, that her death will never fill the hole that Prayer’s has already formed.

When the girl speaks, she laughs and sends speckles of her blood back at her. It drips down her chin and she remembers what it means to take from another. Her tongue slithers from her lips and she licks it from her teeth.

“It will be better when you stop breathing. When I listen to Adna mourn your death, I can stop mourning Prayer,” she spits, sucking in a breath between her teeth when the girl’s fangs swipe down her cheek. It doesn’t take long for the muscles of her jaw to ache with Gospel’s venom but she forces it to keep snapping anyway.

“We have suffered enough when we’re fucking drowning in it!” Her voice is a roar of rage and her body is trembling with exhaustion but she continues just the same. Reign and Eucharist need her, she knows, but how can they be safe if she allows this child to live?

But finally she stops, chest heaving with gasping breaths as she watches her niece closely. She has given birth so recently that she struggles to maintain the sort of vigor she normally maintains. If she survives then Sabbath will hunt her again after her strength returns.

@[gospel]