Fear was almost as sating as an actual meal—or at least, Anastasia liked to imagine that it was. She had never truly enjoyed eating and thus had no way of knowing its pleasure, but feeling the fear of prey was certainly pleasing in its own right for her. So when she sees the mare’s stoic face, feels the tremors of fear in the air, she shivers with her own joy. This was exactly what she needed; this is what she wanted.
“Come for you?” she echoes in her own broken voice, her tongue clumsy as it wrapped around each word—as if discovering the syllables for the first time. For all the ways that Anastasia was graceful (melting through the shadows of night, stalking her prey, bleeding from the portals), her tongue inherited none of it. Her conversations are spotty, jolting, broken from the beginning. She did not mind.
Moving toward Malis, she presses herself against the mare, breaking the seal of personal space. Her nose goes to the mare’s indigo neck, and she breathes in deeply, marking the scent down for future recollection. “Did not come for you,” she grunts, lips pulling back from her teeth as she contemplates sinking them into the other’s flesh before deciding it against it and putting them away. “Can take you though.”
Stepping back, she considers her newest toy, wondering what she wanted to do with it. Finally, she just gives the other mare a grin, lips stretched too tight. “Scream,” she requests, tail snapping behind her haunches. She takes another step forward and she can feel the acid bubbling on her lips, the sound breaking the sound of the silence between them. “Ana-sta-sia likes the sound of screams.”
like the moon, we borrow our light
{I am nothing but a shadow in the night}