Moods of Blue VI

Iskra found herself perplexed, though the feeling in the afterglow of the kami's murder, the aura of her blood and the scent of her purity mixing with the vulgar stone below, quietly coagulating on her coat, kept her above the immediate gravity of the situation. The women were no more than prey, like deer or cattle, and with such a designation came her inability to empathize with them. She was designed to revel in their fear. She was a creature out of their nightmares, though she did not know what she was. She could only be herself. The emotion of empathy was something artificial in her. She had to make a conscious effort to relate to them.

Lethe, however, was a different sort of creature. She didn't consider him on the same level as the women she was ordering herded to their fate as products, their virtue, honor, and bodies traded off like meat at a market. No, he was as good as any hyena.

However, with that designation came a sort of meeting-halfway. She understood that what was appropriate for another hyena wasn't necessarily appropriate for humans. For one, humans didn't read any aggression into eye contact. Whereas his refusal to look at her might have constituted honor and humility in her own species, she did not understand what it meant in his.

So she stood up like a man, her tremendous frame shrinking and compacting until she was a woman, her skin speckled with blood alongside her natural spots. It wasn't necessarily because the blood had to persist through her transformation, but rather because kami blood was such an unexpectedly delightful substance. She wanted to wear it for as long as possible, though some of it had inevitably fallen off during the change.

She walked hurriedly, catching up to her sky-watching friend. "Why do you look away?"

[ EXP: 364 || +1 TEXP (2nd thread) ]

"My... behavior?"

She found herself somewhat disappointed at his reaction. Disgust in her mind was the emotion that one felt towards eating grass or humans who made pelts from her kind.

Yet, he felt that towards... her behavior? Which behavior exactly?

Then it occurred to her that kamis and humans were his kind, even though they weren't her kind, and his speech about treating them civilly returned to her thoughts.

Then again, what could she really do about it? He might as well have felt sorry for crack in the hands of an addict. It wasn't as though she could stop. Rather, she felt that she was going to be perpetually killing and exploiting his kind because it was in her nature. At the same time, she didn't want to upset Lethe. Even more, she didn't want to lose face in front of him over this, and she sincerely wasn't sure how to respond.

So for several minutes she walked in silence, thinking.

Only the soft sobbing of the women and the crunching of the forest path filled the space of several minutes before she presented a solution.

"Would you like to trade some of them off me?"

She assumed that Lethe would understand that these particular women belonged to her, but it might make him feel better to know that there was still a way to save them from what she had planned, or so she thought.

[ EXP: 277 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]

More walking. More grass crunching. He was plainly distressed, but she wasn't exactly sure how she was supposed to alleviate it. Rather, she thought he was being unreasonable, though she was sure in his mind he was making only the most minimal of demands. Humans were pack creatures like her, and she knew how she felt towards hunters.

In fact, thinking about hunters brought up the old enmity she felt towards Lethe's sire for so inconsiderately jamming a sharpened stick through the lungs of one of the exiles. In her mind, this was a far worse travesty than ripping something apart with one's fangs. When a carnivore killed something, that prey was forever a part of it. When a human killed something, it became a rug or a coat or a tent or some trifle that was soon worn out and soon discarded. Soon bought and soon sold. Soon used to gird the lions of some weak, disgusting human who providence did not see fit to give covering for their own flesh. Moreover, humans were perfectly capable of eating plants and herbivores, but they still chose to hunt her kind, a breed not meant to be hunted.

All death was violent. Everyone had to die, and the more she thought about what she thought Lethe to be referring to as civilization, the more unsympathetic she felt.

"You tell me to kill them first because you are what you are," she said, a perceptible coldness in her voice returning the spite in his. "You tell yourself that your way is better because you are human. You've always been that way."

She didn't offer to continue.

[ EXP: 315 ]

It seems that both of their moods had blackened. "It is physically impossible for me to kill something before eating it. You are asking me to starve or live on carrion. It is physically impossible for me to make sure that none of your cruel kind visit cruelty upon the females of their kind. You are asking me to either not do it or watch each one. You may as well ask me to fetch you the moon to make yourself feel better. You offer me no alternatives and no compensation, and yet you hold these things in your soul against me."

"I have never told you not to do something that would make life difficult for you to not do, and yet, you ask me, despite being under me. This is a situation that there is no good way for me out of, and yet, you insist on pushing it upon me." She growled low in her throat. "You would not feel sympathetic for them if they were wearing and carrying around human skins, but look there," she pointed back, causing quite a few jumps to travel through the company. The woman she pointed at had a fur blanket, albeit it was a silver one that looked like it came from some sort of a fox and not a spotted one like hers. Some leather accessories were visible as well, albeit they were primarily luggage and the shoes on their feet. "They carry around skins of wild spirits like myself and you can still find sympathy in your heart. If you cannot feel sympathy for those who are not your kind, how do you expect me to feel sympathy for those who are not my kind, when my entire purpose in this realm is to prey on them?"

[ EXP: 316 ]

At the mention of the word "lion", it was all the spirit could do to resist attacking Lethe. Lions were the simple most backwards, perverse, idiotic creatures on the face of Terra, whether in the form of a mystic beast, a kami's alternate form, or a demon. If there was anything on Terra that she hated truly, madly, and deeply, it was a lion.

The rest of his words fell primarily on deaf ears. Wanting her to be more human wasn't such a terrible thing, but wanting her to be a lion -and that's what she heard, him promoting a lion as a good example of anything- was simply too much.

She wasn't accustomed to demonstrating self-control, but for once she found it in her, and her voice remained steady despite the tremendous force of anger behind them, like a small channel allowing water to pass through a dam.

"You're dismissed. Do what you wish."

With that statement, she intentionally took a sharp turn sideways down a narrower forest corridor. She no longer cared what happened to the women or anyone else, though the only sign of her great rage was an aura of frost that marked the ground she walked on and the grass and the base of the trees as she progressed. She struck out at one of the great, wooden trunks, and the massive sentry of the forest fell over with a horrible moan that displaced much indignant wildlife, its heart splintered.

As she walked further and further on, the quiet incubus crept up behind the barbarian leader. "You do know she's a demon, right?"

[ EXP: 305 ]

"Jack?" the incubus questioned briefly before realizing that it didn't matter. He knew the breed that Lethe was referring to. Rapists... murderers... mindlessly chaotic beings who sowed discord for the sake of sowing it and reaped evil.

"You're right in not wanting her to become like the hellspawn. She's definitely different from them." Whether it was right or wrong for him to hold her to a certain standard, however, was a more complicated question.

Run moved his arms about the other man's shoulder comfortingly without aiming to be intrusive. "You might have hit a sore spot by asking her to be kind to the kamikonjou. I've never seen a demon who was able to entirely contain himself around one of those. It's something older than them. She probably can't control it, and that might be why she got so defensive."

The masked man took a few steps to the front of Lethe and knelt down, attempting to gently offer eye contact. "I think you'd do better if you didn't try to group her treatment of the angels with her treatment of the women, for their sakes. After all, the kami is already dead, but those ladies clearly need the influence that you have with our master. It'd be best for them if she didn't think of the kami every time she looked upon them."

[ EXP: 256 || +1 TEXP (1st post) ]