Off the edge of the map

I suppose I should have expected it; now that I think about it, the last time we’d run into one another, and things had escalated into violence, she’d thrown the first punch, too. This time, I’m as off kilter as I had been then: it’s not a dead dad, this time, though, but a dead homeland, including Gods and favorite places and people who I would never, ever get to see again. The only thing that keeps me from reacting exactly the way I did last time are the things I do have: their two gold marked faces come to mind, smiling, sleeping, sweet and tender, precious and perfect.

The suddenly scalding rain and the sound of her shrill shouts and scampering hoof beats draw my escape of her stupidity to a halt. Grinding my teeth together so tightly that my jaw nearly locks up, my ears flatten and warp shape with the pressure with which they are placed on my skull. Even the pain of the searing rain does little to delay the being of pure aggression which turns around to face her, a twisted smile lingering on his lips.

“You’re the idiot,” I tell her, Duir pivoting alongside me to stare pleadingly between the two of us. He’s quite tired of this game, the incessant brutality between two people he personally likes; he does not understand the deep set splinter at the heart of our relationship. He barely understands the one inside of me.

I meet her gnashing teeth with a forward strike of my horn, not caring if I maim her face, feeling hers clip the fore of my face slightly, clipping away the dark hair, and leaving a bruise.

She was ugly on the inside. To be mutilated would do the world justice, allowing them to see her for who she was. Narrow minded, hateful, unforgiving like everyone, it was people like her who made the world fucked up to begin with. Fools, who thought themselves more powerful than fate or the tempests which roared around them: bird-brained, ivory pure, overly justified morons.

I reach out with my magic now. I grasp at the tendrils of her mind and I bid it to force her body to her knees, where she belongs, and I do so while meeting her wild eyes, with my own, that are cold, distant: ruthless.

“What is wrong with you? You think that because he lied to you, it makes you any less a part of his world now? I’m not your enemy, either, but you’re attacking me, you crazed bitch!” I half shout, soon resonating into a fully booming one, accompanied with spittle and all, “You’re blindly an enemy to yourself!”

Panting, I bite back the urge to just stab her, and be done with it. Prove it, real quick, that she liked dancing in fire. Make her accept that part of herself, piece by piece, cut by cut, like I had, waking up on the desert floor, the man who would have killed me flooding life back into my heart, his daughter weeping at my side, or as I’d fled the grasp of my uncle’s dark malevolence that would have taken me too, if I’d dared to defy it. It still hurt, to be weak, to see my mother’s curved smirk as she shakes her head and walks away (never looking back), but I’d rather feel small and have to ignore it, every minute of every fucking day, than be dead and feeling nothing.

“I almost killed you last time, you moron! You’re reckless and selfish, and you don’t care who it hurts – your mom, your kid – cause yeah, I saw your fat ass, and just didn’t say anything, thought, "hey, I'll be nice," but who gives a fuck, I got assaulted anyway. I for one have a family to make it home to. I can’t afford to fight with dumb bitches like you anymore, ” is the wrathfully expunged maelstrom of my most prevalent thoughts, “just keep the hell away from me, from now on, and I'll do the same for you. I’m over being attacked by an impulsive mad woman keen on getting herself blown up.”