_{Some say you're trouble, boy Just because you like to destroy All the things that bring the idiots joy} Well, what's wrong with a little destruction?

He hears.

He does not care, at first.

To him, it’s naught more than the bleating of some brat, some lost little child who has wandered into the pits of hell, ignorant and vexing. Children die, especially in the grips of flame, he remembers; or, perhaps, he is the only one who brings a fiery death to infantile delinquents? The play of his thoughts amuses him; wring a chuckle from his breast. It is late, his eyes crave rest, and the peaceful island abhors him just as he abhors it. He would move on.

It is the blood that catches his interest; heady and sudden, iron and everywhere, familiar in a way he cannot allow. He stops, body going stiff, electric. The cries of a child pierce the night once more, and blood is there, somewhere, where the child resides. He cannot sanction the familiarity of the blood, the way it makes his gut twist, the thoughts that rush upon him in the night. He grits his teeth; cool fire races in his breast. He will go see this child, see the blood where it lays. This rumbling misgiving in the back of his mind will end, and he will have peace.

He goes.

He sees the child.

He sees his mother.

The world stops.

Noises cease; scents die; his vision fades to black. A child stumbles in the blood of his mother, stumps about the corpse of a mare that had eluded him so many times before. Everything ends; for the first time since the birth of the Grey-Eye’d prince, some icy blast of water has succeeded in dousing the flames that burble and boil in the kiln of his fiery spirit. The magma of his rage turns to coal and splintery rock; the fires of his passions drown in this cold something, and soggy ash is left in its wake. His blood freezes; it does not pump about the awesome power of his body, for it is meaningless, all meaningless, for the breath has frozen on his lip, and his mother is dead.
His mother is dead.

Some call this place a paradise--the place of the gods, something divine. What he sees is the mare who gave him life laying there, a corpse, a fucking bloodless lump of useless organs. She is dead the moment he catches her scent, after seasons of searching, moon-cycles wasted and gone in pursuit of a carcass. His eyes stare, inscrutable; his body is still, a golem; not even the wind stirs the tips of his mane, the feathers of his feet. He only stands there. He only stares.

He’s still staring when it brushes against him

It’s covered in his mother’s blood and her water, her heavy scent. It’s small, piteously small, delicate in a way that he despises. Its tiny cries pierce his ear; his numbed brain begins to spike in pain. He looks down upon this child, a child that bumps against him, ignorant and beseeching, looking for a thing he cannot provide, abhorrent in its weak, deplorable gender.

He looks down upon his sister.

The world tentatively begins anew; it creeps a cycle he ignores.

He can breathe, suddenly; it comes in warbling gasps as his sister nudges him, searches around him, tiny and helpless, a walking cry for hunger. He can see again, with eyes that unfreeze from his sockets; the wind begins to move and tousle his mane, to gambol about the cotton-like tufts of the child’s hair. The scents of other, lesser vermin are dead in his nose--for his eyes, his ears, all of him, every iota of his body are tuned only to his sister. His sister--he does not know what it means, for him to have a sister. He cannot tell what the world is trying to say, that fate has taken away his mother, and granted a sister of all things.

A starving sister, whose milk has been lain to rot.

Rotting in paradise.

“Come,” is the whisper from his maw, ragged and unsure for the first time in a long while. It comes to him--she comes to him, at his word. He does not understand what is happening, now. He knows that she must eat.


"talk talk talk"