#some part of them resonates with that pain and misery however warped they have become

[paragonrobits]

“I suppose one question to ask,” the Slayer says, in a quiet voice. “Is why the Yozis chose people like... us.”

The battlefield is silent. Everyone is dead; everyone but her.

She still talks, nonetheless. She speaks to a body, not too far away. It’s hard to recognize as having been a person, though; the green flame had poured from her body, and into the world, and they had all ended. Their bodies were... calcified, now. Loops and piles of crumbling viscera, bones and flesh and more turned inside out and dessicating beneath the day sky.

Their shadows had all been burned into the walls. She might cry, later. She thought she’d left all the pain in the world behind her, in the dark and terrible days before the green light bloomed on her brow.

She forced herself to look at it. To feel the sick nausea and horror lingering in the world; ‘make yourself remember’, she told herself. ‘Do not close your heart to it.’ So. She would remember what she had done to this army, to this person who could have been a hero, one day.

A shining golden hero, so different from her.

Her light was not golden. It flared green, blazing out like the light of Malfeas’ own raging, broken heart. It rose to the sky, leaving mildew and rot on the ground it touched, and would perhaps fade away in a few minutes. Every time her heart beat faster, it felt like it was dimming. It was easier to think about that, and not how good it felt to hurt them.

She clutched her hands, so hard that her brass nailed nearly penetrated the skin. She spoke again, to ward away the thoughts plaguing her. “You were a hero, okay? You were lucky. You didn’t know what it was to be...” she stopped, for a moment. The words hurt. “To be someone like... me.”

(She doesn’t talk about what happened to her before Malfeas chose her.

None of the Althing do.

There’s some part of them that hears the screaming of the god-titans, the broken and tormented remnants of the creators of all that was... and some part of them understands.)

“You were a prince, I think,” she says, noting the melted jewlery upon his brow that had so recently shone like the sun, the excellence that had met her rage in battle, and had not been enough to survive her. “I guess you wouldn’t know what it was like. To hurt so much you’d do anything to make it stop. Even breaking the world, so no one could be hurt like that again.”

She looks up. She tries to let go, to leave the past behind. But she cannot.

She is an Infernal Exalted. She is a Green Sun Prince.

This pain, and this rage, is what makes her what she is.

“So, back to what I was saying. About why the Yozis chose me, when they could have made the deal with anyone in the world. Why they pick people low in the gutter. The forgotten, the people who hurt so bad that it’s like a prayer being answered.”

She sighs. Alone amid the carnage.

Softly, she says what weighs on her heart. “I think the Yozis pick people like me because, in some way, they understand.”

Even demons can be a blessing when humanity had been so much crueler to you.