[open] Fragile eggshell mind

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

They lived in seething wildness;

Great, cold copulations under blood moons. Lips red and moist with the juice of overripe fruit; overrun lust. Sweat-slick, angry-tongue, wanting-flesh. Bruised loins, bitten hips, mouth-marked breasts, swollen and sore and satisfied, wholly. Wind-dreaded hair, mud-caked necks. Abandon ‒ with enlightenment so far in the past, that he has been rendered base. Base, beyond what the rank smear of blood ‒ ritual; break, make, bleed, baptize; again ‒ had accomplished for so many, many years. Lizard-brained and primal, like a man of caves and rocks and newly lit fire, with nothing but satiation on his mind. 
She completed him. She built, just as he had instructed. Jawlines and throats, together, apart; a jigsaw of skin and bone that fit together so perfectly. So brutally. So wildly.

(She made him forget:
‒ indigo;
‒ green;
‒ gold;
‒ lavender)

Earth-red and bone-white. That taste lingered on his tongue as they circled one another, as much like feral dogs as paramours; as they coupled and decoupled. As he held mastery over her, but only as long as she would allow it. That taste, which bloomed most vividly in his mouth when she left, slinking off into the shadows and leaving him bellowing and destructive; a monster made from the tattered rags of his being ‒ mother-things, contusions left by the souls laid bare and breathless by his hand and horn; the untenable grasp Sinew has over him, as he has over her.

(She always comes back.
She always comes back.
She will come back.

She will find him,) A wildness in his pit-black eyes that was not here before ‒ a parting from the stone-emptiness that always befalls a fat and contented man. For this monster is hungry, again. This monster is beset upon, on all sides, by the achingly hateful degeneracy of his mind, sundered completely from the outside world for so long. 
The sough of the winter echoes. Moans. 
(She moans for him! 
Of course she does… 
Welcome.)
His split hooves furrowing the golden leaves between stands of pine and pale, naked birch ‒ the invisible man ‒ a giver of great gifts, you see! ‒ passes back into Beqanna.


Pollock,
The gift-giver.

[bruise]

I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin

He has waited for this moment.

Patient, mostly, his dark, shadowed eyes studying the horizon, waiting for the telltale sign of crushed gold and cloven hoof. He has spent his time well, letting the hours pass, letting them swell around him. He has learned mastery over the Fear. He is no longer the knobby-kneed, thick-fingered boy of his youth. He is sharper now, his abilities more refined, having learned the ability to pluck a single thread instead of breaking the whole instrument. It’s done more than benefit him, done more than help him.

But none of that matters now because he sees his shark-eyed father and everything else melts away. Everything that could have even conceivably mattered fades and he’s just the young boy at his father’s knee, learning the lessons that has molded him into the man that he has become.

He doesn’t bother pretending to wait.

Doesn’t play his typical games with the ultimate gift giver.

Instead he weaves his way through the rabble, picks his way through the masses until he nears the golden stallion. There are so many things that live on the edges of his lips, so many truths and questions and things that he wants to say—things that he wants to confess. Things he wants to bend the knee and offer.

He wants his father’s approval. What a pitiful thing for him to admit. He has always wanted his father’s approval, he thinks, and he loathes that weakness in him even as he dips his head toward the elder Krampus. When he lifts his gaze again, there’s something feral living in the depths of it, something that thrashes against the bars, something that he barely contains with a violent flick of wrist.

“I remembered to wash the blood immediately,” is finally what comes.

And he thinks of Lucrezia bleeding out into the ocean as he baptized himself in the saltwater.

He thinks of her and he waits.

(and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)

[cringe]

how to be a monster: 1. learn the taste of dirt and pain. 2. teach it to others till your knuckles bleed. 3. see if that makes it easier to breathe.   There’s a saying, about sins of the father. They follow, see, haunting the bloodline. Stalking from one generation to the next. He was born, then, already weighed down with them (do twice the fathers equal twice the sins? we don’t know, yet. Perhaps.). He’s too young still, too sheltered to know the exact nature of his sins. And he only knows one father – the one who birthed him, impossibly. Rapt loved him and Cringe was a good enough son, but it was obvious there was more to him – his body healed from damage wantonly, and, when he concentrated, he could make the air about him shimmer black, make his father shake and stumble, see things that weren’t there. Monsters, or something like them.   He’s young, and thus he’s stupid, but he’s smart enough to know there’s a missing piece, something he has yet to uncover. His father doesn’t tell him stories of his making. Of his blood. When Cringe asks, father goes close-lipped and glassy-eyed, and refuses to utter so much as a name. Which makes Cringe want to know all the more, of course. He’s slipped off, though he’s old enough that it shouldn’t matter – half-grown, body and legs still mismatched, but adult enough, or so he thinks.   He sees the convening of the monsters, and instinct mutters run and Cringe ignores it, he moves closer, admiring the men, with their curved horns and cloven hooves. He does not know his father has knelt before them, has served them both and would do so again in a wretched heartbeat, he only knows that they are powerful, more powerful than he, and he is drawn to the power. He calls forth his own fear aura, a shimmer of black around him, some modicum of protection – he recognizes that they are dangerous, at least – but he does not send it out, does not touch either man with it. (He wonders if they fear anything at all, monstrous as they are.) “Hello,” he says, uninvited, unaware this has become a family reunion, now, three generations of fearmongers come to rest in the forest.   cringe bruise x rapt

i am SORRY i could not help it

[Random Event]

@[Pollock] has been infected by the plague (rolled a 1).
He will show symptoms (rolled a 3).
He will not express a trait (rolled a 1).

@[bruise] is safe from the plague. For now. (rolled a 6)

@[cringe] has been infected by the plague (rolled a 1).
He will show symptoms (rolled a 5).
He will not express a trait (rolled a 2).