She's ****** a *****? Ahh, how quaint, how quaint. How despairing. To not kill ghouls out of some thing like honor, as if it has any meaning.
"A joke, yes?" I smile at her, with too many teeth and all of them are knives. "You say that they broke me. It is a joke, yes?"
To be broken by the hounds of war is a lie, a statement that is an impossibility. The hounds cannot break me, for that would imply that they did anything to me.
Let me paint a scene for you. There is a girl in a house, filled with family. Ah, but she is unloved. Ah, but she is alone. Ah, but they are all there. Her father looks down at her. Her mother ignores her. She is caged. She is empty. Her sister pities her - not for being caged, not for being hopeless - but because her sister believes the girl to be useless. She talks to the girl through the bars of the cage, pitying her. Her father comes in every now and then. He speaks at her. Decries her. Mocks her. Touches her. Demands respect, order, authority. Her mother enters the cage. She does not speak. She merely looks. Sad. It's sad, the look on her mother's face.
And one day, the door to the cage opens. Ah, weeks ago when it opened! How she cried, how she wept, fell to her knees tears running down her face as the cage doors opened. She exited carefully, gently, not sure if she could trust it -- and she saw the smiling face of her sister on the other side. "Hello Alice," her sister says, opening her arms wide. "You did it. You're better then the cage."
She falls asleep crying into her sister's arms.
She wakes up and her sister is on the floor. Her head is gone. It's gone. It's gone. She cries at the corpse, and pulls herself up. She walks up the stairs. She looks at her family, at the sneer of her father and at the emptiness in her mother. And then she ******* ****.
****.
********* ******* ******** ********* ************! ****** ***** ********* *** * ** * * **********. * **** *********. ****..... ******.
When she next wakes up, she is alone. She does not remember anything. All she has is the quiet voice of her sister, whispering into her ears. And it told her to eat. To eat. But to **** a ******? The girl had never done it before, she'd never touched one before. She finds a corpse, a corpse, a corpse - and devours it. It looks vaguely like her father. She cries.
The girl walks, covered in blood, and knocks on a door. Someone opens it. It is a woman. The woman shrieks, and slams it shut. The girl is confused - and then she remembers something her sister told her.
"If you see a human, run. We're not like them, you and I."
She runs.
She's chased.
She runs.
She's followed.
She fights, feathers wildly slashing and dancing through the air, steel falling and rising with a roar as she tries to win, as she tries, and she succeeds. Someone falls on the floor, crying out. She yells an apology and runs away.
She's hungry.
She's so, so hungry. Her stomach aches, it begs for food, and there's nothing, there's nothing, and she just wants to eat. Her sister whispers into her ears, and she sobs at the words. She has to kill her own kind to eat. She can't **** a ******. So she finds a ghoul. The worst of the lot - a child-killer. She stalks him. She waits. She waits. And then she smashes feathers into his neck, watches him fall, and eats.
She gets a moniker. The hounds scream it at her as she runs away. She ignores them. She doesn't care, she can't **** a *******. Her sister tells her not to, so she does not. She's frightened, so frightened, and she runs.
She walks into a scene of blood and slaughter, a month later. She is good at rationing, she has only killed four ghouls. When she walks in, there is a man drenched in blood, surrounded by a slurry of flesh. He looks at her when she shrieks, and he says two words with a smile -
"For you."
She eats.
She eats.
She eats.
And there she is found by the hounds, eating and laughing and crying all to herself.
"Punch you?" I tilt my head with a smile. "Why? You're trash. You can't even kill a ghoul. The madness touches them more then humans, you know. Do you walk among child-killers and seductresses and think 'Yes, this is where I belong'? Arrogant. How arrogant, to attempt to provoke me. You're not even worth the time it takes to speak to you. How did you ever survive your prison, Miss 'I've never killed one of our own'? Did you sell yourself? Did you plead with your betters? Did you sit quietly, meekly, and watch as others fought and bled for you?"
It's all knives in my mouth as I flick a strand of hair out of my face. "Even the fodder is more then you are. How sad."
