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.]]