_{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?

The tentative whirl of the world around him is meaningless. It is grey, lackluster, tasteless on his tongue. He breathes; the air is stale. He hears his father as though from nowhere, moaning and lamenting, the tears of the great obelisk doing nothing to stir the Grey-Eye’d prince’s deepest recesses; he does not remember his father approaching.

It begins, little by little, the beating of the earth, the tiny, imbecilic rhythms that guide life through all its mediocrity. It buzzes around him, stupid and infuriating—but he cannot feel the fury that should surely be rising within his gut at this time. He cannot feel that passion, the frozen things within, the stirring of his perfect wrath that had never been tamed in living memory. It is not tamed today—it is subdued, defeated by whatever he feels as he looks down upon a fragile thing, a glass-spun filly that carries his mother’s scent, her likeness and her blood. He does not know what this thing is that he is feeling.

It causes the beating of the earth to become stupid; infuriating. Grey, lackluster, tasteless.

He is helpless before the spell of this curious creature that nuzzles him hesitantly, gentle in its smallness. He is consumed within the amber eyes, imprisoned in the glint of her miniscule horn that buds from her forheead; he is ensnared by the graceless legs that tremble beneath her, enchanted by the tiny tufts of hair that that adorns her short neck, the promise of his mother’s graceful lion’s tail that she sports. She. His sister.

His sister.

Even when she stumbles her way to the shadow of his—her—their father, he cannot tear his eyes away; the Dauntless’ warning goes unheeded, unneeded. He is utterly stupefied by the creature’s tragic beauty, that absolute perfection that he finds hidden in every over-large joint that bends and creaks. He does not know how far he’s fallen in such a short time, the fall of his mother, the fall of a sister that he did not know was possible.

Then….the bubble begins to fade. Not pop, but fade.

They begin to swarm. Creatures, vermin, ingrates, the lesser--he can smell them, their greasy sweat so much like the odor of swine in the mountain passes. They begin to crowd around them, his mother, his sister. Ah, but there it is: the pulse of fury rises quickly within him, buzzing and without restraint, for the spell of his sister has broken all and every defense he has built within himself, against himself.

Everyone here will die.

Everyone.

Every….

*”Maybe... I could help?”*

His eyes snap upward and away from the dazzle of his sister—his sister-- and they settle, wild in their anger, upon a poppet of a mare, barely any size to her to speak of. It is cold, this fury, glinting in flint and jagged daggers—he is insane with his rage, his chest heaving, his nostrils snorting, quivering, a roar clawing up his throat—he hates, he hates, he will kill them, all of them, for intruding upon his devastation.

His sister.

He closes his eyes; he breathes. It is some moments before the anger recedes—not forgotten, but shut away someplace that had become unhinged. He pauses; the wind stirs, he hears his sister squeal as she falls to the ground. He thinks.

He thinks.

He opens his mouth to address the tiny mare—but he is stopped short by another one, a black and blue wretch who is barely any taller than the previous, one whom he faintly remembers—the faint recollection pulling at him somehow, tight and miserable that he can’t fathom at that moment. For his thoughts are locked on his sister, and something else this black and blue mare had said as well.

He cannot remember why the Dragon’s Throat is important to him. Nothing is important to him, not now.

Not before M a c a r i a.

“You…you smell of hills, and grassland,” his voice rasps—so different from the rich, handsome thing he has been tuning these days. This voice is dead, and so very nearly gone. “It is further from here than the lands of the Dragon’s Throat…And my si—my sister is hungry now.” His eyes cast to the black Pegasus mare, gazing at her briefly. He knows her, somehow. He does.

He turns to his father—sees his sister laying at his feet. The world very nearly stops. Nearly. “I will go with her,” he says to his father. It is not a challenge. It is not a question.


"talk talk talk"