V A R A T H
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.

The satisfying and visceral crack that followed the dull thump of his hooves meeting his sire's chest elicited a feeling akin to sexual pleasure in Varath's youthful form, a giddy thrill stampeding through his nervous system like a wild and frightened herd of wildabeasts. His attack had connected and it had caused pain.

Beautiful.

This bastard was hard to kill, like a venereal disease that could not be eradicated once caught. The black and crimson stallion clung to this world, a miasma that could not be purified, an infection that could not be cured.

Not for much longer.

"All I feel for you is revulsion."

If my father hates me, am I not worthy of being hated? If I am rejected, am I not worth being rejected? Varath desired, even now, no pity for such painful realizations as a youngling, but the agony and blinding abhorrence that had sprouted forth from such dastardly fertile soil had now come to harvest, and the reaping could not be undone. Hurt deeper than canyons carved by roaring waters gave bottomless depth to Varath's heterochromatic gaze, threatening to consume Paladin's decaying body in front of him.

"Not one day of my existence has brooked your love, father!" the son spat, his words so drenched in venom they might as well have been weapons of their own. "From the moment I was birthed, you have offered me nothing but the gagging bile I found suckling at Hate's teat! You gave me weak blood and then blamed me for it! You showed me exactly how much you resented every breath I took and then put it on me for hating you in return!" The wound on his side burned like fire and made inhaling so very painful. "Never once did I have the chance to make you proud, make you love me, be a worthy son!" the offspring snarled, a twisted, almost demented sneer marring his scarred face soon after. "But, in the end, your utter failure to be a father to any of your children has set every one of us free - most of all myself. I saw you early on for what you truly were: a pathetic, weak hypocrite who could not reconcile the two halves of himself and thus made his children suffer for it!"

Eyes narrowed now, the abyss of pain in his gaze welled over with pure loathing. "You are the reason your family is so twisted, so it should come as no surprise, father, that your penance for destroying your family is to have it destroy you," he growled, digging his hooves into the dirt in preparation for another attack. If the old man was too slow to mount one while he monologued, then he was a fucking fool. Muscles tensed and his inertia shifted but an utterly crippling pain knifed through his entire body. One moment his heart was pumping loudly, blood running hot from battle, the next, his insides were being roasted as though he had been flayed open and set on the surface of the sun. A howl of agony Varath hadn't any idea escaped his lips clawed its way out of his throat and he thought he was losing his mind. His brain was melting, eyeballs turning to hot ash - it felt as though he was descending with unmitigated swiftness into irrevocable madness.

For a miraculous moment the pain waned, broken by a cry that came from elsewhere, and Varath could see again, see the perpetrator of all the pain and brokeness in his life, and he blazed like a demon. The blackness of his pelt bubbled and oozed like molten tar; the crimson of his mane and tail dripped with hissing blood, steaming like the sanguine waters of the Pthlegethon; the embers of his eyes blazing like hot coals. The father before him was father no more, only the horrifying monster inside Varath had always seen, the figure responsible for the annhilation of all that was good in his own filthy bloodline.

The demon drew near and Varath met his conflagration of violence and blood with the adamantium will of hatred bred from his first breath. Even the pain of being drowned in molten magma could not prise from this son his consuming need to cleanse his soul with the heretical blood of his sire and in the singular moment his mind still formed rational thought, Varath dropped to his knees. Paladin's trajectory was straight for him and the stallion was wounded. The dappled grey knew he could not run; his father's magic was too consuming. All he could do was fall, and hope he took his father with him. Neck stiff, eyes closed, horn pointed straight at his oncoming attacker's chest, Varath prayed for the absolution he knew could never come.

"talk."

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WC: (799) | (3/3) | Summary: Varath monologues angstily, gets boiled from the inside out by Paladin's magic and therefore cannot run away from his father's charge attack. Instead, he drops to his knees when Paladin gets close and aims his horn for his father's heart, hoping to have Paladin impale himself.

@[Paladin]