dogs of war

There’s neither fate nor chance, but causality. You turn a gear, and outcomes change. I’m too far gone to perceive paths of actions, phases of engagement, but close enough to know coincidence didn’t lead Vega into my airspace.

I open my eyes wide, I turn my gearwheels, and I witness the king’s chariot rushing on from a million angles in Testarossa red. Zoom in, pan close: he’s smiling a conquistador’s self-smitten grin, and I want to take him and break him, see what the pieces look like after they’ve shattered.

He speaks the language of war, and I listen when he greets me with a gladiator’s knuckle and I answer with the harrowing threat of my revolver’s muzzle. And the woman, the Lockhart woman rages like a wild dog, because that’s what we are—blood-mad dogs of war.

They’re saturated in the alchemist’s smell: Vega, yes, but especially the woman, Aden Brande’s otherworld scent clinging to her flesh through and through, the sort of baptismal immersion that arrives only when faith overflows and drips from the vassal’s pores like love, like hate. It colors her China-pure skin in a brilliant masterwork of fading bruises.

Thanatos’ magnanimity stitches her back together like a glamorously broken ragdoll. Venom spits from her lipsticked adder mouth, not knowing what I see, not seeing what I know. Pang of mirror recognition at the raven darkness of her hair and the poisoned violet of her eyes, the lashing edge of her tongue.

We hate within others what we loathe most within ourselves.

By the end of the night, I’ve engaged in another pact with a man just enough like the alchemist to trigger rapidfire déjà vu. War, war, and further war, from one edge of the world to the other: that’s what I offer, and what Vega accepts, and we grip hands bent on breaking each other with our vanity. My filth-black heart stirs with resonance.

Is this what I waited for? In perfect one-by-one succession, the elements fall into place to complete my mechanism, and piece by piece my siege engine begins to rise.