Demonchild, sing to me, sing your sweet song and let me fall beneath the spell of your wicked toxic gaze. You killed your mother, little one, turned her to nothingness with a grin upon your lips and a lust within your eyes. Tell me little one, if you hated she who gave you life, do you despise life similarly?

---

All his life he'd despised her, the sickly grin of her jowls, the cruel clamp of her teeth. Bitch of birth. One might wonder, why had the demonchild done this? Why did he gaze upon the broken, sickly body of a disgusting mare far too weak to go against him, all in the name of blood and loyalty? Had he not spilt the blood of his dam upon the searing stones of the Heart, so fitting as she had never had one herself? Did he not despise that same blood bearer once upon a time? Why change how he felt now?

There is a darkness to his gaze, despite the beautiful glow the color used to be. Summer pastures and comforting boughs, ivy and emerald. Now, he does not show that side. Shows it only in the company of those he loved, the few he did, those he trusted. He is a son of Mandrake. A devil, a demon, a murderer. The same tainted blood that had corroded her veins now shore his to tatters similarly. Like acid it burns him, sears him, destroys him. And at the center of it all? What pumps that acid to his living hollow confines? A heart, one that holds a dwindling amount of emotion, for it has been shredded into bits that he watches fade and grow and fade and grow with little interest or care.

It had been a simple fight, though she had fought with the fury of a thousand angry badgers. The demonchild, however, was not a fool. Had tracked her like a wolf an injured elk. Watched as her health declined, as winter made her form sickly and gaunt, as illness hollowed her cheeks and sank her eyes into hollows. Underhanded? Oh of course, but Kipp was a devil in a lamb's skin, one he'd ripped from the innocent naive animal himself. Drake sons didn't play fair. Though he had emerged bitten and bruised, aching and beaten in a few areas, it was she who had fallen.

And in her sleep he bent his crown, a wicked dagger upon his brow, and hissed into her ears. "If you touch him again...I will kill you, slowly and painfully, and dance in your blood."

Nobody touched his brothers.

Isn't it funny how it's usually the devil who wears the angel's face?

---

She awakens, mucus sloughing from her nose, and she croaks a growl into the air. Princely, he stands collected and passive away from her, orbs half-lidded as he watches her silently. Beckons him. Dead leaves and moist earth silence his already light steps, emerging into the platinum moonlight, letting it shine upon his features. Watching her as a scientist might a specimen. Gravedigger? A quirk twitches his lips, barely noticeable. Hmmm. He had not the respect nor the time for digging the resting places of his victims but he supposed it was a fitting title. Not only in general but in her sickly mind as well.

Why, why why. They always asked such foolish questions. Poor little things, how weak and lost they were. Was Kipp not doing them a favor by ending their agony?

From his throat, a soft velvet voice purrs, at odds with the personality he wears like a mask. A demon, and a child, he is caught between the two. For now, he is content to show her only the demon. It is a calming sound, his lyrics, for he'd been silent the entirety of their battle. Much like an earthly fae, wise and fatherly. Oh how the devil loves to play tricks with those he clasps within his paws. "I come for you, lupus, because you have wandered too far from your den. Come too close to ah...something that is mine." A kindly smile is mocking upon his lips, eyes squinted as his crown tilts to the side, deceivingly happy. Slowly he rights it once more, face sliding into nothingness, eyes a cold toxic green. "You attempted to steal away my brother, lupus." His voice is low, a rumble of threat, of anger, a storm waiting to be unleashed. She had weathered it once already, surely she knew just how violent and all-consuming it could be.

"Nobody harms my brother." His chest vibrates with a canine-esque growl more befitting the title he has given her in return, teeth flashing in the pale light. Then he shifts again, like moonlight through tangled boughs, and his visage is cool and calm once again. "I do not wish you physical harm, yet. Let us keep it that way. I have stolen you away out of love and loyalty, lupus. Do not turn this into a personal grudge match. You will follow me to the lands of my brother. He shall decide your fate." No muscle moves, nothing so much as twitches, an archangel frozen into stone as the feathers of his freedom flyers burned from the fires of hell that reached up hungrily to consume him. Toxic gaze continued to glow beneath the moonbeams, awaiting her own words.

Gravedigger and Lupus.

He wondered where this mingling of paths would take them.