Nestled in your hollow shoulder - Sinew

[Pollock]

(‘Jealous?’ Yes. Avarice.
It knots and it grumbles—it is not like that creature, Anger; it is one of his liegeman. A lesser, aching instinct that he despises because it is weakness draped in green. In a perfect world, nothing was supposed to stay—everything was to be used, and then laid down; nobody was supposed to last, and so nothing was to be held onto. And yet, here he is, grinding his teeth over things like:
‘Tarnished’ and
‘I liked it…’

It had made itself a home in his head when she left, many rabbits dug a twisted warren in his brain; when he gets a quick glance at that scar again—that marked place—his eyes narrow)

‘There is always more to them than meets the eye.’
He makes a small grunting sound of concession in his throat as he watches her affectionate, motherly touches. (To this day, they repulse him.) He cannot deny that—not a universal truth, for some are meant to stay in the mud. But certainly he had been passed over for worm’s meal more than once in his life. Never quite as pathetic as this one, but all the same, a different creature entirely.
(The boy. The colt.
They’re dead.)

“So what are they then?” Bruise, too, had come to him naked but already knowing of his own potential. He stares at them, but of course he can see only the sad cloaks of feathers (cleaner now than his have been for years; that will change) falling from opposite shoulders: that one is on him. Pollock’s had been a source of great shame for him for so long, until he realized it was as necessary as the curved horns or the split hooves. It was a reminder of all his labours.

So, this is what they build. From brick and mortar (seed and soil) they build more leviathans—they build more predators, breathe them into an already strained ecosystem. Sinew—by some miracle, because she is burnt and he is too feral to know the difference—has given him two more Pangean princes…
(such a queer turn of events—father and king;
‘Mother—whore, pig, bitch—eat your heart out.’)
one day, of course, they will have no choice but to devour each other; one day they will come for him and together they will rend him limb from limb; he has seen it in his dreams, time and time again
—such is life.

“What have you called them?” The gift-giver takes a step closer, examining them again with those grim, black eyes—Famine stays silent. He sways on his feet, bolstered by the bodies of his mother and brother. He looks neither up nor down with his own flat, black eyes, but straight ahead, eyelids drooping.