Astaroth
// i ride the edge, my speed goes in the red //
He’s fracturing so suddenly it takes him off guard, vibrating enough that tiny little cracks in his porcelain mask begin to grow jagged and sharp. He swore he told her, not the gnittt gritty details, but that doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter as one hand fists into his dark hair between the antlers and the other wraps around his chest and his lungs feel like they ache with the heat of the Climb and the hot blood filling it, throat so horse that he can’t remember how to scream.
It’s a rough voice that greets her after a few heartbeats, his tail tightening impossibly tight around his leg. “I was— Was exiled to the Climb.” He starts to say, back still to her and seeming impossibly small to the otherwise imposing figure he’s cut. “I didn’t know the societal norms of the time and was caught.” Each breath feels ragged and lancing hot. It was before he had learned that what he was taught growing up wasn't normal despite it being how they survived in the harsh climate of what Halo would come to be. “I was.. beaten. And cut. And broken. And— And tied down in the Climb. And feasted on for days by gore crows.” His voice grows quieter and his back hunches a bit more and if she looks hard enough she might see those ragged, tough scars on his back that can be visible in the folds of his shirt.
“Days.” A reiteration that leaves him without quite realizing, as if the blood on his tongue was the kind from back then, spiraling down into a panic attack that has the flames of the pyre no longer reacting to his anger now that it’s been replaced with panic. “I— I screamed and pleaded for so long for them to put me out of my— my misery. I screamed so long I could no longer speak. It– It didn’t matter, because by the second day my mouth was filled with so much blood.”
So despite having his fun, being a monster, the man that had attacked her had only suffered for the better part of thirty minutes before he granted him the relief of a quick death. It was better than what the townsfolk that had caught him had granted the butcher. It was better than the unanswered pleas and cries he’d asked of the gore crows.
It’s a rough voice that greets her after a few heartbeats, his tail tightening impossibly tight around his leg. “I was— Was exiled to the Climb.” He starts to say, back still to her and seeming impossibly small to the otherwise imposing figure he’s cut. “I didn’t know the societal norms of the time and was caught.” Each breath feels ragged and lancing hot. It was before he had learned that what he was taught growing up wasn't normal despite it being how they survived in the harsh climate of what Halo would come to be. “I was.. beaten. And cut. And broken. And— And tied down in the Climb. And feasted on for days by gore crows.” His voice grows quieter and his back hunches a bit more and if she looks hard enough she might see those ragged, tough scars on his back that can be visible in the folds of his shirt.
“Days.” A reiteration that leaves him without quite realizing, as if the blood on his tongue was the kind from back then, spiraling down into a panic attack that has the flames of the pyre no longer reacting to his anger now that it’s been replaced with panic. “I— I screamed and pleaded for so long for them to put me out of my— my misery. I screamed so long I could no longer speak. It– It didn’t matter, because by the second day my mouth was filled with so much blood.”
So despite having his fun, being a monster, the man that had attacked her had only suffered for the better part of thirty minutes before he granted him the relief of a quick death. It was better than what the townsfolk that had caught him had granted the butcher. It was better than the unanswered pleas and cries he’d asked of the gore crows.
// hot blood, these veins, my pleasure is their pain //
