violence
She knows many of them have turned craven, have gone to the land begging on their knees. She is not so repentant, hence why she fell in with the dark god, hence why she now resides in the wasteland amongst the other bloody-mouthed misfits.
The ingrates.
“Before,” she says, and the word is weighty - before - “before the lands shifted, I was magic.”
She wasn’t, in truth – not in the way magic is conceived of here.
“A necromancer,” she clarifies, and ah, she aches for that old power, for her bones.
“The land took that away from me, left me empty.”
A hollow she fills with madness, and with savage grins, and a wayfarer met uncouthly on random day, where she left bloody and he left dead.
“Entirely different,” she says, answering the girl’s question. She thought of inviting her home, to present her to the dark god like some quaint present, but she does not.
“I made something,” she says, “a bone-creature. It was a masterpiece, always walking beside me. Like a pet. I miss it dearly.”
She thinks of the bones – left in a pile on the mountain’s borders, rotting.
“I’ll get it back, though,” she says as if she is sure. As if she knows the future. Truth is, she doesn’t know, only hopes.
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
