sorry about the blood in your mouth; any

[charnel]

I’ll eat you up, I love you so

It
(she!) 
has escaped. She was not imprisoned, not in the traditional sense – there were no walls, no razor wires, no cages to speak of – but she is too often prisoner of another, a dark girl who makes bones dance, who can stride into Charnel’s mind and make her do things.
And sometimes, really, it’s comforting, because Charnel is strange, with her armored body and metallic wings, with her beaked mouth and trilling language (she can speak like them – she can - but it’s slow and stupid), and when Violence is in her mind everything makes sense, there’s an order to the world that does not exist without Violence.
But.
(There’s always a but.)
But sometimes she wants to know what things are like on her own, she wants to grow and talk and be, and Violence finds that boring, Violence does not like others unless they amuse her. 
Charnel is different, more curious. There is a word - friend - that she learned but does not say, because she said it once, to Violence, but Violence only laughed and laughed, said there’s no such thing. And Violence is never wrong.

But Violence is gone, today, and Charnel walks a path she half-remembers into the meadow. It’s strangely crowded here, and there is an overwhelming smell of meat that makes her salivate, but she pushes the thought down. She is not so feral as her father. She is not here to hunt.
She knows she is strange, here, achingly so, an alien in their midst. She tries to smile but her lips can’t quite obey. She shares a similar form to them, but not quite.
Almost, she thinks. This is another word she knows. A word for being close, but out of reach.
Almost almost almost.

Charnel