Beneath the moon, beside an ancient lake - Etro

[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

If he were him, he would have seized the opportunity – a butterfly stuck in honey.
If he were him, he would have worn that coat and mask – those fissures of fire and smoke – and he would have let her come to him, heart and soul and desire. He would have thrown his head back and drank deeply.

It needn’t always be a fight. He had let the teal woman come to him, stars and whip-like tongue. She had muddled him and fascinated him. She had tested him, stellar barbs and cracks of wit and wry sexuality like flickering matches. She had yielded to him, and though he would never see it like this, perhaps he to her.
He could be good.

But he is unnerved. The colt – he cries and reaches up through Pollock’s throat, towards the heat and solace of her emotion. The gift giver winches, fighting back retches. (There is no comfort, there. Kill it.) The boy wails, he scratches and bangs his head on his prison walls – rib and intercostals. (He is a more mysterious thing. He is shadows and strangeness; his motivations are not clear. He is cold and shivering; he is broken and bleeding from a hole in his chest. He is scared and angry...
—they are relics of weaker times – northern memories and baby moments.
Buried in a hole, deep down and covered over in peat and moss and stone, is a storybook. Bound in leather, recorded in hoofprints – single-toed and split like a goats – and in the strange, looping hand of man:

That he was not born a god-monster. That he was born tiny, slick with mud and pine needles, a lowly thing. A small, dirty, loathsome thing. That he was first fashioned by a trickster maker, who broke one wing clean off, sanded the shoulder smooth, and rent the other into a million peices. Who abandoned him to a sow and her muck.
And then he built himself up like a stonemason, an architect and an artist – he found his invisibility, and he thrived in it. But he was weak. 

He was bitter.

Until he fell through time and space, and in the polar kingdom, he earned his crown of horns...)

“How did you do that?” he demands again, too softly. He moves to flank her, to circle like a predatory thing. His eyes are slits of dark brown. They are not angry, they are demanding. They are fascinated and wild in their own way. When she bites out with her own howl he halts dead in his tracks, lip quivering. He searches her face (pretty, he thinks, with some rearrangements), his mouth fading to a queasy frown.
“...who did you think I was, woman?” his voice is strangely even, tempered by some genuine curiosity and antipathy. Who had driven her to madness? (Such weakness. Kill it.) He could almost pity her, but unlike his Rapt or his young things, she is too far gone. Whoever he had been, he had taken her heart and squeezed it too tight.

She is too damaged to be brought back. No gift he could give could change that. Only his mercy, “You were… sorely mistaken. We’re in my forest, now, Etro.”

POLLOCK
the gift giver