In my monster’s eyes I do not feel pain but only see the millions of ways that we (that I) might cause it. Each shard of moonlight looks like a million caught stars reflecting on the ghosts cast up in the sea mist. The sand, and spit, flying into the moonlight as we hunt glimmer more like blood than bits of earth and wolf.
In my monster’s mouth I can taste the brine of the unicorn’s sweat and ice as she runs. I can taste the sweetness of ice that to anyone else, anything else, might have tasted like salt instead of sugar spun. We have forgotten the taste, the flavor, the euphoria, of all the things that come before the hunt when the lamb’s bellies are still whole.
Novus has made us tame-- tame enough that we talk to mean instead of devour them by sight and sight alone.
But I have been corrected, we have been corrected, and now (now!) we will not forget again. And perhaps I understand the brutality of mother more than I had before, as I watch the stallion run into the sea as it will save him.
Tomorrow I’ll ask Fable to take me swimming. Tomorrow I’ll ask him to hunt with me. Tomorrow I’ll hunt as a young unicorn and not a wolf.
Tonight though, as my Wolf froths and foams at the tide, as he licks the taste of the stallion from his lips and his claws, I will remember each way I saw to cause pain. I will remember how to felt to run, and bray, and take flesh between my jaws and bite down.
Tonight I will, because the darkness is starting to thicken to oil, dream of vengeance and a hundred needles of pain that are not my own.
@Amaroq
