i am the vanguard of your destruction

“Have you ever enjoyed it? Drawing blood that is.”

Lips twitched humorlessly as the wind threw his forelock about his face, white hair snapping before his eyes. And what do you say to that? When you have lived your entire life a warrior, mercenary, and witch-hunter (executioner), when you have been fueled by nothing but pure, raw hatred, when you have been at the forefront of your own crusade—

"Yes," he simply responded, the small word nearly lost to the low roar of the world, ocean and storm, the thunder of his own heartbeat. Yes, I was once something else than what I am now. If your horn was your pride, your superiority, your advantage, was not stabbing someone to death the ultimate proof of how much better you were..?

“Teach me,” the fox-boy said as Mauja tucked away that little piece of his heart, a leather satchel with a few odds and ends d'Artagnan had left him. His ears angled back as his muzzle brushed over the worn leather, heart treacherously imagining it could still catch the faint whiff of his scent (—but it was long gone). Sacre kept blurting out his reason—his justification, all wild youth and innocence, his dark locks tangling in the wind. "Perhaps," Mauja simply breathed, before his teeth latched onto the crystal length and he left all those things behind him: words, reasons, lectures, visions.

All he took with him to the center of their arena was pain.

(It blossomed underneath his skin like a flower, a wave of heat, something surging up from the lowest, darkest corners of his heart; a wound too deep to have healed yet.)

The empty space where so much love had been.

It didn't matter where he stood (what he did), because there was no light to blaze into his eyes (because he's not coming back). It didn't matter which way he turned, for the fickle wind threw the forelock into his eyes anyway. His jaw clenched around the staff.

At least he was not kept waiting; Sacre billowed out of the deeper darkness, muscle rippling under a fine, relatively unscarred coat. There was no light to highlight the contours of his body, and with his storm-whipped mane he seemed oddly ethereal, as if he wasn't quite of this world—

It surprised him each time, how much he just wanted to stand still and take a beating.

But what would that teach? Defeat? There was no glory in martyrdom, nothing for Sacre to learn if he didn't fight back—so he broke the ice, started to swing away to the right, but it was a little too slow, a little too late. Dark hooves collided with his retreating haunch, smacking solidly into his left thigh; and there was that brief, sweet sweet moment in between the impact of the pain, less than half a second when it simply reverberated deep into his body, pressure and—

—pain. Like a fire lit beneath his skin a deep ache spread within, and—he blinked rapidly as he began to throw his head to the right, fighting down tears he had no business shedding (—but it hurt, like he was brittle, had turned to glass over the years). The storm roared around his head as he swung the length of the crystal stick towards Sacre's hocks, hoping to give the nearest one (—his right?) a good smack from behind.

Because if there was one thing Sacre had on him, it would be speed and agility, so if there was one thing he could do to bring him down a notch...

[ 1/3 || 596 words || @Sacre ]
PETRIFICUS TOTALUS this sucked lmao