like the moon, we borrow our light; chantale

[chantale]

my corrupt nature is empty of grace; bent unto sin, and only unto sin; and that continually. What is Chantale good at, prompts the shadow thing, and my corpse masterpiece wonders. She is good at everything and nothing – she is a predator, a thing defiant of nature (where Anastasia was born to hunt, slick and dark and sharp, Chantale was made so, by years and death and madness). She is a succubus, a thing with too-smooth skin and strange curves that draw them in like a whirlpool. She is good at making them think she loves them. (Though maybe she does, in the moment. When she is that self, a cool body wrapped around their warm one, she loves them so. But her love is as alien as the rest of her, fundamentally incompatible with them.) “Chantale is good at taking,” she tells her. She takes hearts, takes lives, takes everything she can and gives them her shell of a body in return. She lets herself be claimed, the rubbery lips warm on her crest. She has belonged to so many, to kings and queens, to a strangely wicked woman who once threw a heart at her feet. Nothing quite like her, though. Nothing quite so like a monster, full of darkness, made to hunt rather than be hunted. She tells the lie we all do: it is different, this time. (Besides, she will soon enough forget her name. She forgets all their names.) “And Anastasia is mine,” she confirms, tilting her head to stroke the stygian expanse of the mare’s neck, “all mine.” chantale how original a sin.