Of everything that stands, the end - any

[Pollock]

Monster. Yes. She isn’t the first to think of him like that.

And if he had not always been a monster by design, he has always been a monster by intention.

(Always? Oh. No, that must be killed dead. No, that is a forgotten thing. That long and bruised colt – new minted gold, soft-bellied and wide-eyed.)

His mother had been a monster-thing – a sad, ruinous, whorish thing, but monsters come in many shapes and sized. She had made him, with forceful hand and scathing tongue, the bitter slug he had been as a younger man. (All things in good time, he had spent those youthful hours watching, hips and copulations and meaty feasts – perhaps it was then that he showed his penchant for learning.)

As he matures, he has come to realize the things he has to thank her for – so he does so by the sea, now and then. He baptizes near the shore where he had found her already perished (unfair, but such is life), and lets it run pink off his forehead and horns. And he remembers the many more he has left to despise, to feed on, deeply and wolfishly.

From the moment he had been brought forth – messy, unkind birth that is was – he had been destined to be this. Maybe not for greatness, but for shadow. Perhaps not a master – he had always been a monster, he had not always been proud – but a malignancy meant to be excised from healthy tissue eventually, just not until he had knotted a few vital systems up, choked them out. Made them black and oxygen-starved,

He serves a purpose. A thinning.

A wolf among sheep – a shepherd of those sheep who come bowed.

There is a strange, subduing up here. Perhaps the thin air, but though she rankles him (about that, there is no doubt – as far as he is concerned, they are both enjoying a small bask in their own self-righteousness), he is content to stand and hope she leaves. Exertion would only shorten the time he has. “Ah, how <i>very</i> noble of you.” No, it will run thin. He has only ever had so much patience for this – little brother Chessur, if he was not busy flagellating himself, had from time to time fancied himself similarly virtuous.

“But I am afraid your arrogance might get you smote on his very holy of all mountains. I believe She,” he gestures over-emphatically with his great horns, all around them, “would not take kindly to the idea that you think you know what I can or cannot have back. No,” she shakes his head, “not your call. You’d be wise not to assume you know all of this damned Land’s intentions.”

He could have felt sorry for her, because what she has lost, unlike him, cannot be recovered.

Not here.

Nowhere.

But he is past that. He has buried the colt and the boy and all the worms in between that stirred up the silt. He had weighed them down and sunk them deep, unrecoverable and <i>forgotten</i>.

“It took me many years to get these things. I traveled – long and unforgiving miles... And,” his lip curls and he scrapes a pronged toe along the craggy stone. (No, these geese cannot be chased in daylight. That is for the night). “They, most of them, are the products of work,” (he knows this, only by intuition – he had awoken with them, fastened to his head as if by string, his scapula, his feet split and his mind a claw in search of Fear – but all the rest, buried deep) “not <i>birth</i>. The wing is a momento. That I was <i>so</i> graciously given.”

He shifts out, feeling the cold, wonderful plunge between the sensory plain – invisible. Ah. “This is how I survived my whore mother’s ineptitude at being a satisfactory broodmare.”

He slips back into view, still unmoved. “You have nothing here. That is your fault. Or, perhaps your parents. Or both. Or nobody's fault <i>at all</i>, but I’ve come for the things I earned and the things I bear beside them, to remind me. You seem to have a problem with this. So honestly, is it envy?”