06-19-2015, 01:10 AM
KINGSLAY
He can break her in ways that are worse.
He knows a thousand of them. He knows ways that will make her past feel airy, ways that would make her curl into the earth and wish that she were nothing any longer. He could peel her skin back and lay her bare. He could grind her bones into chalk, and breathe the dust into his lungs so that parts of her would always belong to him, to his cells, to his atoms. He could.
He could have her in a moment, and the thought stirs the creature in his gut; it wraps it’s claws round his ribs, and the muscle beneath Kingslay’s eye will quiver at the recognition.
She could run still. She could.
He comes close as she tells him her name (one that he will never bother to remember), until she can feel the heat of his flames, and the smell the rancid flesh between his molars on his breath. He wears the sticky sweet smell of death like cologne, but it’s an acquired taste.
‘Why are you on fire?’ she asks.
He twists his head in a way that should make her skin crawl, and he angles it as though he’s pondering an answer far more convoluted than the truth; that he is forged of magic and greed, of betrayal and vengeance, that he has been kissed by witches who carved their stories through his flesh before he burned them away, that he is made of fire because he is his father’s son. He could tell her he is a god. He could tell her that he is infinite. He could tell her about her bones, and blood, and the flesh between his molars. He could.
But the truth is so much simpler.
“Death,” is what he answers when he is ready, a hiss that escapes between two charred and cracked lips.
And so, he made the Gods themselves bend at the knee.