Knox!

The hunter runs on.

Wait!

He runs fast, too fast for his companion to follow.

Stop!

Every word falls on deaf ears.

The night drips with an acrid air and the darkness takes over everything. This is not the night he remembered running beneath years ago now. This night is something different.

He is too reckless to cloak himself but not foolish enough to rid himself of a disguise; under cover of Zekiah he is quick enough to run from his companion and leave her in the dust.

At a certain point, Manhattan stops running. After what seems to be hours, after his days of journey have stretched into aching stride and long night rides, she cannot follow him further. She has begged him to cease, to consider his reckless derailment and his anger, but she can do nothing for him now.

Would you listen to Aylin, the dog thinks to her bonded, the distance too great for the message to reach its mark, would you stop if you saw the truth--that this is why she left?

Knox doesn't hear her. Knox hears nothing. He takes over the night with a horrible drumming song, a deadly clamor of hooves in frost coated dirt, hooves carrying him over great distances. He doesn't stop, not until he reaches it--not until he reaches the North.

And there, he changes. For the first time since the night he lost his light to his own darkness, he senses Dovev's mind and lets it turn his heart.

The moon has abandoned you, Knox

Knox looks up at the black sky. The empty moon, the barest sliver of its white arc left behind, and shadow overtaking it. Shadow overtaking it like the dark has conquered his soul. Is it true? Has she really left him, forsaken him, and forced him to live in this wretched world alone?

He has no one. He has nothing. And this time, Manhattan is not here to correct his greed. His body shifts without him even realizing it, cycling through his forms as the snow begins to fall. He is so utterly and completely alone.

The hunter's body appears as the first's, lingering on the rough, old, white coat of the perlino. Here, in this massive expanse of ice beneath the dark cloak of night, he seems invisible.

But the faintest of sounds at his back and Knox is someone else.

The hunter's eyes flash to black and the body threatens to change entirely. His face snaps back to find the source of the sound and the mind of Dovev whispers darkness into Knox's once loved heart.

It isn't her. It will never be again. She's left you alone, you worthless colt, he says. And Knox knows it is true, and he feels in his heart a rage for all he gave his Goddess, and how little she gives him now.

That bitch.

—

[[Muriel only. Full permissions granted by Brit.]]

So much more than cold will strike the mare tonight. Knox's heart beats with intention, faster than is healthy and harder, harder, harder than he has ever known.

The mare appears before him like a flake in the snow. She is a pretty thing, painted in feathers and innocence, but that is not what he sees when he looks at her standing there before him in the shadow--not for long.

When was the last time you ate? Dovev's sinister tones are brilliantly sharp in his mind. Knox finds himself regretting his actions. How long has he suppressed such brilliance?

And the ancestor's query leaves the hunter wondering. He realizes just how parched his throat is, now, from the long journey. And he feels, now, as the adrenaline dips for a moment, the hunger burning in his chest and shaking his legs.

The hunter feeds his ancestor an answer: Before Helovia, great grandsire.

Dovev snorts in Knox's mind. On the outside, the stallion's head flashes up and the long mane of Cem is tossed in the air. When it lands, it lands on a steel gray neck and its tresses have turned from silky to coarse. The shift is completed before Knox can even realize it has taken place. The stallion standing before this innocent mare, now, is the ghost of Dovev: the murderer.

When was the last time you really ate? the wicked one thinks as he steps forward, concealing no threat, refusing this strange mare an answer.

Knox does not need to consider the question. Dovev pulls him closer and his hunger rages in a flash of memory. He thinks about blood. He thinks about teeth and the tearing of flesh. Why, why had he ever given up such a taste? To separate himself from his family? To shun the memory of his mother and the years of training she cursed him with?

Your mother was a bitch, but she had good taste, Dovev whispers. Knox cannot bring himself to deny the fact. He stands before the mare and stares. He thinks about the taste of blood. He forgets the moment he was forced to swallow his father's last life and the seconds before he knew what it was to drown, the seconds where he thought he would drown in such an evidence of death.

Knox steps closer to the mare. In the shape of Dovev, in the mind of Dovev, he tosses his head and reveals his scars, long, mythic gashes crossing his neck. The bridle slaps his features gently.

The hunger strikes as delusion. For a second, Knox sees the wings and thinks of the Goddess he has so long worshipped. Deprivation of food, water, and sleep cloud his vision.

This strange mare, this innocent creature, becomes a vision of the mistress of moonlight.

Knox does not hesitate. He feels the hunger and he feels the fire--the burning of moonlight and the twisting of his passionate anger. He rears on his ancestor's hooves for the first time in so long and aims at the mare's shoulders with precision.

He has given her no response. There is nothing to say. She is the unfortunate soul, the one standing behind his starved vision of a Goddess, and she is nothing but the one who has left him alone.

In that moment, what is left of Knox blames the stranger for everything. And as he lets his mind and insecurities strike the cold night wind, he thinks of all who he has lost, and screams into the night.

—

[[@[Muriel]]]

The crash of his hooves on her back is satisfaction incarnate. He feels the snap of her wingjoint and the twist of her fall, and the hunter smiles.

How rare it is, to see a killer grin. And rarer, still, to see a good brute fall to such wicked whims. But he has fallen and he falls still, deeper into a pit of unsearchable blackness. From here, he will not be rescued. From this ancestral commandment, this order, he can hear nothing but a need to create beneath his hooves a soul residing with the dead.

Thou shalt kill.

The white mare's fate is sealed when she falls. Knox's body, sharpened with the skills of Dovev's many murders, falls with her and his hooves aim for her tender nose. It is gravity's task to land the blow, now, for as the mare jerks and sputters, her wing askew and hanging crookedly from her flesh, he sees her head resting perfectly beneath him. And how much weight is in the body of a 10 year old stallion, bulked and bloodstained, bearing down with the memory of his own death?

But one blow means nothing. Should her features be crushed beneath his hooves--should the skull snap and the teeth shatter as they force themselves into the frost--and the beauty be wiped from her image, he will only have hurt her once. The murderer has more to do, more places to hurt.

There are always more places to hurt.

And through it all Knox sees a purple body at his feet, majestic and wicked. Where Dovev aims with accuracy for the face, Knox seeks out the horn of a God that does not truly reside against the ice. And when the mare lifts her body to fight back, Knox sees a Goddess rising and lifting in size. How starving he is, to be seeing such madness. How wicked his thoughts, to strike out at the one he so long loved.

Dovev's mind is present enough and Knox's vision clear enough to match the motions of the imagined Goddess with that of the innocent. Knox feigns forth like a viper, neighing to intimidate and clashing his teeth towards her neck. She is nothing compared to his size, nothing in the face of his power. When she bites she grabs the base of Dovev's scars, but the pain there is too known, too remembered, to cease the stallion's strike. How many days has Knox lain still, unable to move for all the pain of his ancestor's death and injuries?

This bite, this pathetic attempt at protection, is just one more scratch to keep him up at night.

She deserves this comes the thought of the wicked as he starts to turn his back from the mare in a practiced turn.
She has abandoned me, mourns the hunter in his rage.
Her blood will be your patience rewarded, commands Dovev as his back legs kick with force, striking out towards the chest of the mare and aiming to knock her back to the earth.

And Knox is too maddened now to know what is real and what is not--to separate the mind from reality. His words, a cry in his mind, ring out into the night. His voice is deep, his sentiment clear to him alone--surely madness to the mare at his back. "Tonight, we drink the blood of the Gods!"

Tonight is a night of murder, beneath the Blood Moon Dare.

—

[[@[Muriel]]]

Once again, the killer feels contact. Dovev smiles at what he has become: alive again. Alive and at last, once more, a killer. And he knows, too, that in the end he will go free. It is Knox who will have to bear this burden and taste her blood on his lips for the last of his living days. The descendant will live on, tortured. And perhaps it will mean Dovev's last moments in this state of half living are now, but still it is worth it. This prison break, this weak link in the chain, broken at the right moment, can never be mended.

No matter how hard the hunter tries, there will always be a part of him that let the murderer win.

That smile crosses again upon the steel gray features. The last streaks of moonlight highlight Dovev's white markings climbing up his sides, but the red already on the earth, his blood and hers, seem to reflect and cast a shade of crimson across the white patches of the murderer's coat. He listens with old ears forward as the mare, this anonymous fool, speaks to him for what he thinks will be the last time.

And he turns back to see her just as he expected her: prostrate on the frost, her knees buried in the thin layer of snow beneath them and her expression brave.

Let her, then, die a protector. Let her then die as Dovev's son, Knox's grandsire, did. Let her die without mercy.

The steeled stallion lifts himself in a rear. Somewhere, lost and no longer a part of the waking world, Knox's mind swirls with a second of doubt. He sees the image of the Goddess he thought he fought flash away, but it is too late. One body lands and the other snaps.

Here, the stallion should stop.

And here, the stallion is just starting.

The process is a slow repetition. A striking once, twice, three, four, God how many times, even the hunter now cannot count. Dovev's hooves strike like an axe at the base of a tree, freeing the mare's wings from her body by the bones, bit by bit, until he feels the last one shatter into nothing.

With midnight eyes staring into the last moments of his victim, Knox leans down with the body of his ancestor. He looks into her gaze, seeking a sign, a reason for her fight in these last moments, and that small piece of the hunter that remains wishes he could take mercy.

It is too late, now, to blind the mare and hope her pain will be brief. She bleeds slowly and the red that stains the earth stains his lips just as red. For without thinking, Knox has pressed his face to the open wound where her wings, now resting in a pair, attached by a scalped section of the flesh once above her spine, once were.

And Knox drinks in this blood, this blood of the innocent, and feels nothing.

—

[[@[Muriel]. Permission to powerplay from Brit.]]

She is dead. Before Knox can even comprehend what he has done, she is leaves the land of the dying and submits to the world of the dead. He can feel her heart slow in the way the blood pushes out from her wound. First a pulse, and then, slowly, just a spreading pool. There is nothing alive in her now, he realizes, and he wonders if there is anything alive in him.

The hunter is only allowed a moment of horror. Dovev's mind is stronger, and paired with his own body restored, he dominates the dapple-necked stallion with ease. The body of the mare, white, red, pink and gold, is a joy for the killer to see. He has always been a killer and he always has been. But is the same true for Knox?

The hunter has managed, at least, to pull away from the body and look down upon her in full. He watches the white of her feathers rustle in the cold tundra wind, as if they were still of the living, as if they were still flying.

Congratulations.
No, no. I can't have done this.
Welcome to the ranks of the killers once more, descendant.
You made me do this. You did this.
No, the murderer speaks into the mind with a silencing, horrifying grip, this was you. And this was right.

And there is something about the hypnotizing way that the great grandsire speaks to his progeny that lulls Knox into submission. Is there not some note of Mandrake's voice, lingering in Dovev's? Is there not that same wicked hypnosis, beating in his heart as if a command?

Knox steps over and around the corpse, lowering his lips to brush once more against the outpouring of her blood. It is sweet and hot on his lips; it slides easily between his teeth when he sucks in like an inhalation, and gently coats his throat. It is the comfort of childhood--his only mother's milk.

This was me. This was right, he thinks, as if there is nothing else that could be true. And he pushes that horrible, lowered face beneath the canopy of the wings of a fallen angel, and slides his neck between the remaining portion of the stranger's back that connects them. And he bends and arcs and slides and maneuvers until at last the four wings, staining his coat with blood and being heavier than anything else he has ever carried (and carrying too, the weight of his crime,) lay delicately over his own shoulders.

The hunter looks away from the dead body and up to the sky. For a moment, he thinks the moon is gone for good.

And then he turns and walks from the scene, his body entranced even as the shadow of his cloak passes over it and carries him into the next land.

—

[[@[Muriel]. Permission to powerplay from Brit.]]