violence
She is no stranger to monsters.
Her own mother is not quite a monster – in form, at least – though she used her night-bound magic to give herself odd and unusual shapes, to form herself into something more, a thing that hurts the eye even as it draws it in, all sharp angles and strangeness. It’s the kind of transformation Violence begged for, as a child, the kind her mother refused.
Her father, though – there is a monster. A creature with its alien clicking language, its barbed tongue and scaled body, who hunted and knew so little of their language. She’d envied him, too, and the sister who came after – the one who inherited father’s more monstrous qualities.
Violence is far too plain. Black, and beautiful enough, but so idly equine in her form. The bones are all she has, and she makes creatures – not monsters, though, alas – from them, makes do with what she has.
There is a cry, and the sound of running. Violence thinks of hunts – she’d been in her sister’s body and made it hunt, took great pleasure in the body’s instincts as prey came into view. She wonders what is being hunted. She goes still, and listens – for the scream of prey, or the victory cry of the predator. But there is nothing.
No, not nothing --
A flicker at the corner of her vision, a growling voice, and oh--
She beholds a hideous and brilliant thing, a monster of a different sort, slick and strange and god, she wants it, she wants it. Her bone-creature buckles at the knees as her distraction wanes from it, and the clattering causes her to turn back for a moment, to set it right. And then, she looks at the creature again, a sweet smile on her dark and hungry lips.
“My name is Violence,” she says, then flips her head at her bone-creature, who ducks its own head in a mechanical bow, “and this is my companion.”
She takes a step closer. She is unafraid of monsters – in fact, she covets them.
“And who,” she says, voice practically a coo, “are you?”
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
