To a strange night of stone - Bruise

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

The sun crests the bony spine of the valley’s pocked cliffs, their own shadows cross the land like long, violent bruises in the dust. (At this hour, their kingdom looks most like a monster—serpent-thing, encircling them like a mother does a nest; hulking and breathing dust like a dragon does fire.) Pollock has not slept. His eyes are heavy-lidded and sunken looking, but his lips are bright and red—taut in a grim, sated straight line. 

He moves with a stilted, deliberate gait. He limps. Of course he does. He had paid for everything they now enjoy—what had come free for his sons was exacted from a dark, cold place at a cost to the gift-giver.

It was a price he was happy to pay, time and time again.
It is a gait that should usher in horror like the limp ramble of an undead, for it means he has been busy.

(He had stood over her, for some time, making sense of the art he had created.

The sanguine lines he painted across her jawline and cheek; for a few moments, he enjoyed the way the colours seeped from her like a river flooded with melt, being pumped—right-to-left, right-to-left—from the fissures he traced in the canvas, brown and black.
Until that primary organ had failed and it slowed to a gurgle like the paltry stream that feeds Pangea;
He inspected the masterful rearrangement of her features; he had rotated and pushed and forced until what was left was an abstraction of Ohio.

He is not gentle, though sometimes when all is still, he draws smaller, more delicate strokes across their skin with his lip and pronged toes.

He had tipped his head back, inhaling deeply, the air somehow seemed fresher in her wake—like being back in the earthy tomb he once lorded over. 
He breathed and thought of Sinew, the sea and then, Bruise.)

He goes straight for his son. Hunts him down like the hound he has always been, searching the air for his familiar scent, and perhaps whatever plaything he might have dragged down into his den.
It is dawn and princes are known to laze-about, but his is an industrious one, and he will surely stir, if he is not already awake and hungry.
“Bruise,” he grunts, eyeing the young man with those stern, black eyes.

His forehead is lathered with drying blood, almost too thick to see the wide, white strip between his eyes. Down his nose it drips, gooey and glistening, in patterns of splattering and dragging; some has spilled over his jaw to his throat and down his sweaty chest—around the edges, it is beginning to grow rusty-dark and flaky. His horns, too, are sodden, bits of skin and matter hang on the rough ridges. “Let’s go,” he expects him to follow, turning his back to the rising sun and setting off first to the west, where the sea meets stone.

the gift-giver

@[bruise]