we are tethered to the story we must tell; cassi pony

[Elanor]

if brokenness is a form of art, surely this must be my masterpiece

The day is cold and grey, but these are the days she likes best, the days she can fade into nothing because she is nothing. She is the color of mud and dirty snow, she is invisible in her brokenness, and she is nothing. He reminded her of this every day, every time she opened her eyes to find his gruesome face staring back at her, every time she closed her eyes and found him again. Nothing, nothing. He showed her this in the way he broke her bones, in the way he twisted and pulled and pushed them through the soft grey of once perfect skin. He showed her when he flung her from a mountains edge, when he let her fall and let her shatter, when he tethered her life to a dying body so that she might not forget while he left, that she was nothing.

Never once had he told her that she was living an echo of another life, of someone else’s life. Her mother’s life. It is impossible to know if this would have hurt more, or if perhaps it would have been less lonely to live in an echo. But he barely spoke at all unless it was to give a command, stay, stand, run - and the last was always spoken with a chesire cat smile, it was his favorite. She doesn’t know how long he kept her, if days or months or years had passed – or perhaps no time at all – but the last command he gave her, the words he branded into the ruined flesh of a heart turned to pulp as he set her free were to never go home.

Never go home.

Even broken, even ruined and empty and all used up, she had looked up at him with confusion, with a face that bore every scar of every wound, constellations of the horrors she had endured, and wondered what he could possibly mean. He had stolen home from her a long time ago, stolen her friends and her family and any semblance of a childhood. He had broken all of these things, all of her, and she knew he knew this or he wouldn’t have let her go. But she was familiar with the obedience he expected, and silence had been the only answer he required before he turned and left her one last time. She had stayed there for days, quiet, waiting, obedient until finally, finally, she ran. Unlike every time before it, he never followed.

Rain patters on wet wood, it pulls at the pale green buds that fleck the nearest branches and she watches quietly as though nothing else exists. One, two, three raindrops collect along the belly of the branch and sway precariously, and she thinks of nothing else because terrible, terrible things happen when she remembers.

[violence]

violence

She scents brokenness like a wolf scents meat, with a savage sort of hunger. She almost resembles a wolf, her lips peeled back from her teeth in what may have been a smile. Beside her walks the bones, her constant companion, the menagerie of animal bones stitched together into her own wonderful creation. She loves it, as much as she loves anything. She loves it because it obeys, because it is a constant; it exists because of her.
The girl catches her eye – Violence is becoming adept at sensing a certain slump of the spine, a weakness in their eyes that beckons her, draws her in with their tragic magnetism; she senses them the way stones sense glass.

Rain has begun to fall, and she shakes her dark head. She doesn’t mind the rain, she supposes, but sometimes when it pours it interferes with her link to the bones, interferes with her constant search for new corpses to collect. She can’t awaken them all, but she takes select bones from the best things she finds, adds them to her creation. She has wolves and bears and bobcats, more teeth and claws than necessary, has crowned the thing’s skull with a pair of majestic deer horns.
Truly, a thing to behold.
She weaves towards the girl, and her lips are still peeled back. She is not as imposing as her mother or father – she lacks her mother’s magic-sharp features and her father’s alien form – but she does walk alongside a terrible creature of bone, and often that is enough to make their eyes widen, make them draw back from her.
“Hello,” she says, and her voice is soft, like she is a thing gentled, “what are you doing out here, alone in the rain?”

I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips