and I pray to blades of grass

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

“Ooooh.”

He clucks his tongue and shakes his head. He watches as she curls back and lets the airy release that she had saved for her father choke back into her lungs like poison; her eyes dart around, golden and watery. Fear. Sadness. 
A carnage of hope and breath spent in vain – he had not come, pity – and now her heart beats fast. A dinner bell to a feast. Poor thing.

“Afraid not.”

He stays invisible. He’s risked too much already. He has too many enemies, even if he doesn’t know the half of it. Bloodhounds snorting his trail for a fix, fiending. Or at least, he’d like to think that is the scene playing out somewhere in his forest – wolves, dragons, measly girls gripping retribution to their chest as it were a shield that could protect them. Foolish. But scarier things, too. Monsters. More monster than him, at least in the way their meat can reshape into savagery.

Glorious. 

He envies them and admires them. They are all the pantheon of minor deities; they are the bumps in the night, though not all of them use their gifts for a higher, cleansing purpose. That’s a shame. He’d made the most of the things the northern magic had given him.

How many of them will actually muster the will to break their comfortable inertia and seek him out, when it comes to it?
He’s a betting man, and he hasn’t seen hide nor hair of a single one of them yet.

* * * *

He had paced like a caged elephant. Adrenaline spiked his blood, heady and warm.
‘Knowing of your capabilities, I think I may have a proposition for you.’ Demian’s words had been sweet. His proposition…

Oh.

How fun.

The palomino stallion stared at the wall, rising high into the sky – ash and smoke and the gathering darkness of evening. At the opening, dug deep into its belly. A hole to the tender place inside.
He had always pictured one of his things drying out. Desiccating and keeping some form, dry leather on bones. It would be beautiful. It would never spoil and it could be the centermost jewel in his crown.

He left a squall of sand in his wake, and the strangeness of his two-toed prints were not given enough time to form clearly at the speed he was travelling. He leaves leaving nondescript craters in the soft, giving ground and shallow, white scrapes in the stone tunnel from his horns.

He bellowed, a wild and guttural call, and listened to it bounce off the stone around him. The utterly unguarded pathway into the heart of their home.

* * * *

He places his lips against her ear, breathing down her temple. “Don’t be too scared. No point really. Just breathe and think of old daddy, hm?” 

He has her quivering. (The Oasis is dark, to her. Impossibly dark – darker than it really is, but just as dark and lonely as he wills her to see it – and strewn with shadows that move. Though she cannot see him as he is, she can see dark vapors where he shifts and stops to peruse the softness of her skin, or the hardness of her cheek, with his flexible lips. In that dark vapor, two eyes like white headlights blinks and turn over her. A monster.)
“I guess there’s nothing to be done,” he speaks sadly, pressing his bridge against hers – forehead to forehead, nose to nose and she is helpless to pull away – and closes his eyes, “once it’s there, it’s so hard to shake. Normally, I’d like to leave it with you, a little gift. But I don’t think you’ll get to unwrap it. It’s a shame, it really does just keep giving.”

She whimpers. He feeds on it. To him, it is erotic in a strange way, and the arousal he feels is a many-headed beast but tonight he’ll taste just one part of her. That end part. The bottommost place of life where she sees herself letting go and he releases her. They dance, bodies of flesh and keratin, until hers is heavy and there is nothing in her network of nerves and synapses left to keep her standing.
And he wins.

There is always a winner and a looser here.

He makes quick work. He has been sent here for younger morsels, and he must find them and their barbed cell before the dragons return to their roost, and see if he can’t pick them out like mice by their tails. 

She had been his.

He whips her head with his curved horns, his double scythes, cracking against her flesh and rattling the bones apart. (More than once, because skull are thick.) She falls, limp across the roots of the large oak tree, blood peeking from cuts on her face. Her mouth gapes open and closed, sucking in breath or simply giving to death shudders. The left side of her face is swollen, bruised and misshapen.
He takes everything and leaves nothing.

But this is war.

Okay, done talking to myself.
@[Tarnished] and anyone else. Pollock is gone, by the way. Definitely from the scene, and possibly from the Desert entirely. Possibly.