There’s No Sex…

…in your violence.

In the end, only one thing really mattered: Bylah.

For all of his tolerance of the doe, for Nine, for the fleeting moments that he saw Rev…they didn’t matter. He held to them no allegiance; in his court without jesters, without amusements or life, they did not amount to anything. He was the only king here. He was the only thing with merit. Everything else was a split second in time that carried with it no merit or passable fortitude.

When he cast his shadow across his garden, it did grow. Scurrying was the sympony of his glory, the rats and roaches, the maggots that turned, twisted, and coiled beneath his hide. Flies a cloud of his oncoming storm, he prowled from the bog-thick mud, the good topsoil that could grow near anything, atop the death of others.

When the fat of the moon, yawning and white, hung itself between his vast horns, when the near-silent breathing of Nine at one of his sides and two blessedly quiet fawns at the other reached his ears, Bylah afforded himself the same expression he always did. A smile, cut across his face by perhaps the sharpest of scalpels, the most scorned woman’s tongue, capable of flaying flesh from a man’s hide, was this expression, the one he wore best.

One does well to establish false senses of security, before rendering the execution of a well-formulated plan.