I call him the devil because he makes me want to sin
(and every time he knocks, I can't help but let him in)
Her laughter, her words—they roll off of him and he shrugs it off. He wasn’t powerful because he was a Prince. It was just a title. Certainly one that he enjoyed throwing down when he felt like it, but none of his pride was rooted in it. He hadn’t even known Pollock was going to lift him up as an Architect of the land, and while he was certainly pleased to have been given a favored spot by his father’s side he knew that it was a temporary one. Bruise did not anticipate living here forever. He didn’t need to for what he wanted.
Instead, he power comes from the very thing that chokes her words in her throat—
That very thing he can feel coil around her belly now, a snake squeezing and squeezing.
His smile grows, colder and flatter on his face as he pulls on it further. “At least you have a little bite to you,” he murmurs, even as he concentrates on manipulating the Fear, moving on from the minor fear to the terror, the horror. He didn’t want her to feel just the soft brushing of it; he wanted her to feel the very root of it, the cold, belly of the beast unfolding within her. He was almost never this aggressive with it, but she had annoyed him and so he pulls deftly on the threads of it, bringing wave upon wave over her.
Were she susceptible to it, the landscape around her would change, morphing to his whims—the cliffs around them growing taller, the sound of voices nearby growing muffled and then disappearing. He himself also changes in this illusion, growing larger, spine cracking and stretching, his jaw distorting to reveal jagged teeth, gore and spittle flooding between the spaces. He becomes a monster as he stares down at her, black eyes hard and unreadable, never relenting on the threads of the Fear, never stopping—
Not until she respected the land, even if it was just a little.
Not until she respected the Fear.
