beloved

A gift?

Where was the gift?

Surely she hadn’t totally missed the mare toting a package up the path behind her? Sure, she had forgotten she was there entirely, swept away by the clandestine walkway and the towering behemoths in bronze, but there was nothing at the mare’s hooves that could be called such a thing.

Narrow, her eyes search for the metaphor at the hooves of the tricolored unicorn, nostrils thin and seeking the air for the scent of something other than their bodies, and the ones that lied within the land itself.

Was she the gift?

Her eyes become hard slits, a frown gracing her face she pivots back towards the land for this Lord Deimos. He’d see how much of a gift she was when she ripped his filthy limbs off for daring to touch her, when she slit the belly of the wench who had tricked her up here to be pawned off like some penny whore and supped on her blood.

He is a dark figure on the horizon, a moving beast of obsidian and rancor, and she watches his approach with ears pinned and lungs drawing deep, prepared breaths. She is no toy, no object to be handed from palm to palm an eventually broken and discarded, and that she has been titled a gift to her damned face makes her seethe inwardly, her ivory pelt a smooth caricature of innocence and collected wrath that belies the true maelstrom that flashes and churns within her core.

But when the Lord comes, he does not sweep upon her like a captor, a possessive beast, her stance too fierce or the brute too wise to attempt to chain her. An ear rises from its downward posture to catch his inquiry, the repetition of the names that Sialia summoned the devil with, and she drinks in the gentle roar that is his voice, the solemn clarity of words not often pressed through the thick, cold ice that guards his soul.

Who is this one, this man of death and shadow, he who stands bold and colder than the snows which frame him? She draws heavily from the cold, autumnal air his smell, the smell of pine and frost and dismay.

Perhaps he has not attempted to own her for they are kindred in more ways than the obvious spirals adorning their brows. A snort breaks her tension into pieces, her sweet and cherubic vocals sliding forth with more ease and respect than had been given to the mare that had brought her here. "We are Beloved," she croons, arcing her neck and sweeping her nose low and nearer to the malevolent ebony brute as a giggle ruptures the girly pitch of her words, drawn to his darkness as all wicked things are drawn to one another (at least before the blood was let fly), "does it suit you?"

die like God, on the cover of time