...but change came suddenly.

...the little death, girl.

Crawling, creeping, creaking along, she let the world ease beneath her. Grass and leaves, they littered the floor- the latter swallowing the former. There was a certain sort of irony to that, too - one that didn't go unnoticed. Soon, the world would be white, snow in thick drifts. Bleats would turn into beats, hooves stamping in the snow, and she knew it would only make them easier to catch.

The little lives here were nothing but figments of an overactive imagination anyway. Soon, it wouldn't matter one whit.

The snow would come and snuff out all of those lives.

It would have help.

She would stalk and slither after them, one by one, effective adversary to taking out all those little lives.

She wouldn't lose a lick of sleep over it, either. She wouldn't stay up and stare at the starry sky, wondering why, Gods, why? had she done what she'd done. Why had she ended such sad little stories before they got started?

Sad stories about a deer and a hunter, a picker, a perfect personification of all things wrong in the world. She knew it better than most, and even then, she didn't feel the need to stop herself.

A few feet away, a fawn was nosing at some leaves, searching for the barely green grass hiding beneath it. Just another day, another meal, another five minutes of fame it might have felt the second she snapped her teeth around its throat.

So much for playing in the snow.

...the life I've made.

Crows grow where dead things go.

Crows go where the lives come to blunt ends, bright beaks tearing out wide, unseeing eyes.

That is what she remembered of the blue-black birds. She had offered them a feast, a smorgasbord of flesh to strip from bones. She'd burned a city to the ground, and the crows laughed for days.

She understood them. She appreciated the simple way they worked. She grasped the ease in which they pulled pieces apart.

She hated what she'd become.

She'd never change, no, but as the crows had laughed? She'd watched the way all that she was had swirled down the drain, destroyed as easily as a candle snuffed out.

All of that bright humanity had burned out of her, pulled into some pit where there was nothing but sighs and shades.

Milton had had it right.

And so when she saw him, all of the possibilities came rushing back to her. What could she have been? What if Mommy and Daddy had loved her proper, hadn't treated her like trash?

What if she hadn't read that book?

And now, behind the glorious white of her teeth, the black of her tongue turned and churned, unspoken words dripping down the back of her throat, high-lighted by the cruel cold of her eyes.

Crows. What smart, strange birds they were.

And so, and so, having gone to and fro,
with nothing to show
for it all

she stalked towards the huge thing, a bird that was not a bird at all, but some sad depiction, some mockery of black and blue

bruises
on a young woman's face.

"Who are you?" she asked.

And he just laughed at her.

...how the Gods kill.

Subtle satisfaction, the way the blood wets the snow.

The way the bodies, still hot, started to steam in the winter's cold.

It's hard to understand the way a predator's mind worked, if you'd never hunted a day in your life. It's not easy explaining that rush, that spill, that thrill kill cult of having something die, all because of of you.

It wasn't evil, it wasn't cruel, it wasn't even malicious, but there was no denying the pleasure that came with it.

It was a sick, twisting pleasure, a bolt of electricty that shot through one's guts, the penultimate conclusion of a chase she'd known she was going to win the second it started.

And it always started so simply.

It always started with a rustle, a stirring, a tiny change in the way the world seemed to turn.

It had been a rabbit. The sound seemed to have come from miles away, but the next thing she knew, it was all fur and fangs, claws sinking and securing her in the snow, racing around trees, beneath branches.

Snow white and the seven fucking doves went scurrying in her path, quick to get away from the bolt of black that raced after the rabbit with all the surity of a greyhound around the track.

White powder had gone flying, something clipped her ear. She didn't notice. She never noticed.

All that mattered was the screaming of muscles and the way her blood roared in her head, louder than the way the Gods seemed to sing.

Save right now, there were no Gods. There were no birds, no bugs, no deer, no doe.

It was her, the rabbit, the winter cold that told her that if she didn't eat, she was going to die.

And Winter was a bitch of a mistress, she really was.

Teeth as white as icicles snapped.

And then there was blood in the snow.

...you creep across my skull.

The world had a funny way of working. It had a way of surprising you, shocking you, scaring the ever living hell out of you. And then, after all of that, after all the nightmares, the bad dreams, the stories we tell ourselves to make sure we know we're not crazy?

It pleases us. It writes us a story, gives us a present, a gift, a something that just falls in your lap and lets you know you're all right.

Maybe you're not different. Maybe the world isn't as bad, as terrible, as cruel as we'd all like to think.

He'd looked this way for a long time. He'd had these scars, these horrible marrs on his face for longer than he could remembeer.

And in a way, it had made him fascinated. The forest was a place of lies, falsifications, because everyone here seemed to have something to hide. He could hide the worst of his horrors behind a mask that seemed to suit his features, hiding that which was his visage from the world.

That suited him just fine.

And there was one around here that he'd always wondered about. He'd always wondered what hid behind that mask, what could possible be beneath it, to make it look the way it did.

It was not easy asking. It wasn't some simple task. Because one didn't just march into Mordor, as the saying somewhere went. You didn't just strut right up to a throne like that, and you certainly didn't pitch perfectly innocent questions that way.

But he did it anyway.

It took him days. Days of working up the courage, summoning up his guts. Not to mention turning them to iron: that particular patch of the forest just smelled wrong. It was a wet, rotten, fetid smell, too many corpses collected in a pile.

The last stretch of it had been done on his belly, eyes watering and the bile trying to creep up his throat. By that point, it was a matter of pride that drove him.

Bylah has been a character in TEF for 2 & 1/2 years. It's a little mindblowing, when I think about it.

Because part of me wonders, 'have I really been here this long? Have I really wasted this much of my life on a deer, a character, that is not real?'

And I realize that's a rather fatalistic way to look at things, but above all else, I am a realist. I see things for what they are - not what they could be, not what they shouldn't be. Just what they are.

This is the way it is. Cut, dry, simple.

Fitter. Happier. More productive.

And then I realize that 2 & 1/2 years of my life have been spent with most of you people, in some way or another. And I know that in that time, we haven't always gotten along.

I tend to be upfront, honest, and downright blunt. Alexsander once said about me that she found me intimidating, that I wielded my wit and words against hypocrisy and unfairness. That I often called people out that others wouldn't. I can see where that may have made people unhappy with me, where I probably made enemies because I did that.

I suppose I just wanted to say though, that despite that, I never did it out of spite, per se. I've never attacked anyone because I didn't like them.

Because for two and a half years I've been part of this community.

And so have all of you.

♥

...and let me love you to death.



We are all terrified of something. We can't help it. The second we step into sentience, into knowing right from wrong, the ability to form words, we start to learn.

Fear comes from memories, really. We start to become afraid when we can remember what it is that we fear.

Perhaps we are afraid of the dark places, the dark spaces beneath our beds, the crack of a child's closet door. Perhaps we are afraid of these things because darkness represents the inability to see, and when we cannot see, we cannot face the unknown.

We are all afraid of the unknown.

Or perhaps we fear the sight of the stars - no, no. It is not the stars that we fear, but the gaping, spanning spaces between them, the yawning darkness that we cannot perceive.

One might be afeared of dreams - because most cannot control that which takes place in that sacred space between waking and sleeping. It's all an illusion, but it has meaning, bearing on our lives. More often than not, we cannot grasp what that meaning is - and that terrifies some.

What if your dreams were telling you you were mad?

Many grow out of their fears. We fear things as children because we are ignorant - and with age, we learn that there are no monsters in the closet and beneath the beds. Over time, we are taught of the planets, the stars, the spanning universes - and while there's something to be said about the thought of all of that space, it's relatively fleeting, in the grand scheme of things. We accept the stars, the huge shapes made of ice, dust, and gas, filling the sky with beautiful colors.

And dreams?

They're just dreams.

And all of these things, they seemed unimportant to a deer like Wesker. He'd been through - and survived - so much worse. Nightmares and dreamspaces, the sprawling of the stars - even the monsters, the skeletons that hid in one's closets? Sooner or later, they all die.

...everyone falls for this, I knew it, I knew it.

Some of them were easy. Some of them were so trusting - and why wouldn't they be? They thought they knew. They thought they knew sweetness and light. They thought they knew a little innocence, a little naivety. A little song, a little dance, a play put on for them to watch while machinations were set in motion.

They really had no clue.

It started with Takeshi - a simple slip, a little accident, a little push, a fall, a sprawl atop a too sharp rock.

Oops.

And of course, there'd been the alligator tears, the consoling touches, the murmurs of reassurance.

It was an accident. It had just been a horrible, terrible accident. She could not be blamed.

From there, it had been nothing but child's play. A pied piper couldn't've played it better.

It was a dirge, a funeral pyre put on display.

The attention she showered on the skull of her once lover bordered on affectionate, for love had never once entered into the equation with him.

"You always thought you were smarter than me," she murmured in an ear that would never heard her again, "didn't you?"

The small doe straightened, looking at the long line of corpses, bloated bodies growing fat with gas. Soon, she'd be able to count the crows that pecked out their eyes.

It was enough to make her smile.

This time? She meant it.

...just like the old man in that book by Nabakov.

She had a horrible habit, a terrible tenancy of playing with pieces of him she should not. She tugged at his tail, bit at his beak, fondled his feathers. He tried to dissuade her, tried to persuade her, tempted to push her away. She kept coming back, a bad penny brought back by her own curiosity, her wiles, her womanly ways.

It drove him mad. It delighted him. She would be the death of him - the best death.

The smallest death.

...all I do is give; am I wasting my time?