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You think that there must be something wrong with you. What other reason is there to be as cursed as you? You have been cursed to live while they die, to laugh and smile in the warmth of the sun while they rot six feet down. You have been cursed to run, to have escaped the shackles that chained you and have lived for so many years after. You feel a kind of anger; flaming, hating. You are the thing you hate the most.
To die, to sleep – to sleep, perchance to dream. The beast that finds its home in your guts growls with every lost one, every person you’ve saved. The acid burns its way up to your teeth. Blood stains everything. You, wings on your back in a mockery of an angel’s, force yourself into something tender. Something compassionate, and kind. Something that when it sees something down helps it up. You make an eye in the storm of yourself.
Whenever you see an injured bird, your first thought is how vulnerable it is. How easy it would be to break it, to tear the flesh and bone and feathers, to wrench its wings from it’s body. The part of you that is still a war slave catalogs the weak points, the places to find as to tear if more easily. The beast thinks about how to use the flesh, the bones, the feathers. How to take every part of it for yourself.
You don’t listen to your first thoughts often.
You are called many names. Few you hold close to your heart. They call you a hero. You know that you have saved so, so, many lives. You make sure they never think about saving your own. You let the beast in your belly roar through your ears, lets its howls wash over you like white noise. The beast is hunger, and violence. It is greed incarnate.
It eats away at you, the acidic hunger, the voice that tells you to paint the ground red and to paint them red too, to crush everything that dares take away the ones that try and take the ones you love. It burns in your throat, a constricting band around your lungs, vile and venomous. The anger you hold is toxic beyond belief, soaked in blood with a gore-covered muzzle, a feral beast.
You scare yourself. You know your power. You know what resides within you. And it terrifies you. There is an anger that is not your own that burns your chest like acid does. Beast and blood and poison – a trio of anger, words that have tried to emulate the world you live in every painful day. You fight against yourself; your body, your nature. (Your hunger.)
You embrace yourself; your body, your nature. You follow the path of the Hunt, follow in the footsteps of Lan. You rise through the ranks. (Sometimes, you wonder how you didn’t end up on the path of Destruction. How you managed to contain yourself to the Hunt.) You go from a scared child, lying in a medbay with a doctor hovering over you, away from all you know, to a general, leading the charge against the enemy. They call you the Merlin’s Claw. To you, hesitation is more terrifying then death.
The doctor follows you. The assassin too. The doctor tries to help you, to heal you. To silence the beast, to shackle it. You welcome him, even though you know its a futile cause. You let him cook for you, let him feed you medicines to shape your body into how you like it; make you softer, calmer. You let him help you.
The assassin follows you around on feather-light feet. He’s silent. He would be undetected, but you catch him every time. Whenever he tries to kill you, the beast claws its wal from your bowels to your lungs to your heart to your throat, acid and burning. You taste bile in the back of your mouth, a tachycardia in your heart. You let the beast have its fun, indulge the part of you that longs for the adrenaline of the battlefield, of surviving every day by picking the lesser poison.
When the borisin come, you dash across the battlefield, carrying yourself on the wind. You are the Hunt. You are a hurricane, a tornado; a vortex, sucking inwards. Voracity. You take only enough. Wind dances along the edges of your gunblades, your version of claws. Your back has wings in it. You are the storm and you force yourself to widen the eye. You are a bow, arrow held taut.
The trip to the Xienzhou Luofu isn’t long. You entertain yourself, ignore the bitterness that rises in your throat the closer you get to the planet. Ignore the rising hunger, the rising need. You talk — mindless chatter. You meet the other generals, and their protege's. Their battle is amusing. Two children, fighting for an honor neither of them posses yet. You see yourself in the young boy’s eyes. You see yourself in the young girl’s hands.
When you were a child, you saw the blinding arrow of the hunt streaking across the sky. You saw the carnage it brought, as well as the salvation. You become that arrow, the Sky- Shattering Lux Arrow. You keep the streets safe, as quick as the wind in a tornado, as viscous as a hungry wolf. You see a face you haven’t seen in many years, hair a soft teal, eyes the color of a sunset.
You do not indulge yourself.
You fall into a trap. You fall into yourself, leaving your body to be solely inhabited by the beast. You stumble on your self appointed path. You fight. You are presented with a choice; drink down the crimson moon, drink down the madness and let it become part of you, or be consumed by it. You are not very appetizing. You win and you gain. The voracity gets held at bay.