Their moment of confluence was imminent--her fingers outstretched for the cold, downy tufts of blue under his chin, his hesitation, which she could feel through magic alone--connected in the way that all things plagued with His magic were. She felt him, silky vanes on her fingertips, and for a moment the Lord was trapped in the fork of a divergent path. But even if these discrepancies were becoming more common, she knew which path she was always, eternally inclined to select. It had to be anger.
She listened, unmoving, as Tenzin delivered the prognosis that she had already known. With each word her eyes hardened further, and with each name her brain ticked again. She recalled the conversation with Astraea. She recalled the cat, too. Lord Dhracia found him clever, but in the end he was of no use to her. Whether that was a good thing was his to decide.
After he spoke of Jupiter's intentions to destroy the spire, she ensnared the down beneath his chin and seduced him closer, violently and indomitably. “Destroy it?” At least that aspect of Jupiter's recreation here had lingered. At least she'd held onto the right hatred. “I find it hard to believe she'd favor the old one over the new.” Some of them were always destined to rebel. It was a seed sewn among them long ago, and it would reliably grow over and over again, in every Coil, in every iteration. It was unfortunate that Jupiter was too fucking stupid to realize the necessity of the things Lord Dhracia orchestrated from the shadows, but not unfortunate enough for Lord Dhracia to grieve it. Or even care.
“I didn't ask you to tell me something I already knew,” Lord Dhracia continued, tilting her head as she peered down her nose at the phoenix, who, despite the advantage of his glorious size, still would be made to seem so small before her. “And I shouldn't have to advise you on what I expected to be told.”
Tamulus should have returned.
Tamulus should have never fucked off in the first place.
Now she had to play firefighter and pull him out of the burning building he was hiding in on the surface.
Wrath was the searing organ inside her chest that pinched her lips. It was another trickle of oil oozing from the gouges in her flesh. She did not have the patience for this. Lord Dhracia swallowed it down with the nuance of fresh composure, because she was always composed, even when her nerves were electric, Lord Dhracia was not an easy thing to crack, and she gave the bird a controlled smile instead.
“But perhaps,” she said finally, “I've been working you too hard. Such details lose traction on a slippery mind.”
Classically svelte and unaffected, her voice lifted to stroke the side of the phoenix's majestic crown; but if he were to listen close enough, which she knew he would, he would find her nails vying for his scalp.
“I think you're overdue for a break, hm?”
She gripped the arrow tighter. She could feel Tamulus' recalcitrant static desperately biting at her fingers. It coursed through her heart, through her abdomen, her arms and legs, daring to congeal on the tip of her tongue; this anger she harbored for him. For being so careless. For making this harder than it had to be. This anger for her Masters who did not do what they were told to do. Anger for everyone who thought they could break away from her schemes as if the roles they played lost their value somewhere along the way. Five million years could not forgive a single moment of selfish disregard.
Gritting her teeth was not enough to keep it at bay. It broke loose on the eve of her memories of that night--the birth of the Ninth Coil--that he would become so neglectful.
Something snapped.
The singularity of Lord Dhracia became a flare of zealous fury, because they should know, they should all know, but they couldn't, but they should; if only they knew what she was trying to accomplish here in the basement of her House of Chaos. She erupted, sinking the arrowhead into the jugular of the bird that she gripped in her fingers. She squeezed with one hand and stabbed and wrenched back and stabbed again, succumbing to her carnivorous rage that, in a split second, would proffer just a whisper of Lord Dhracia's raw interior to any unfortunate enough to see it. They would see how that interior was so glossy and red and only red, and bleeding and enraged and impatient and furious; they all thought they could just exist while she toiled day after day after day after day after day--
But in the End, she wasn't doing any of this for them, anyway.
Lord Dhracia unleashed her blows with relentless vigor until she felt the phoenix slumping in her grip. Until sharp scarlet gurgled out of the brand new wounds she opened up in his throat, until the colour stained his beautiful blues and specked out of his beak and pooled on the rock ledge at her feet. Then she dropped him. Then she dropped the arrow. And without looking anywhere else, she stepped over the carcass, still moving just barely, wheezing through his maimed windpipe. She kept him alive. She wanted him to feel this.
Her hands rifled through his plush overcoat of feathers. She found his longest, softest, shiniest adornments, and gripped them at their shafts, and pulled them out of his flesh. She wrenched handfuls of feathers out. Not just the beautiful ones; the ones close to the body, the ones that protected him, the ones that gave him his texture. She didn't care. Lord Dhracia ripped out clouds of down with an exorbitant intensity that was designed solely to make him suffer, to know the effects of her wrath, to know that she would do this to him again and again for every time he and his ilk disappointed her. And when she ran out of feathers to grip, she dropped onto her knees and searched for the nearest sharp thing, a rock, and used that to bash him next, forming pits of vivid gore that opposed his peaceful cerulean. Blood whipped against her face and arms. Holographic silver shone green. Shone red.
She would not be disobeyed again.
When finally she was done, and Tenzin was visceral debris that may or may not still be alive--she didn't care--she stood again. Breathless from her carnage, she wiped the blood away on the back of her arm, stared with pleasure that at long last set in at the sight. Then she dragged her gaze stoic toward the little lion.
“The nicest feathers, if you will. Have your Overseer keep them for me.”
But something in her voice was different. It grated. Shadow fingers around her own throat, husky, hungry.
“I'll be back for them later.”
Lord Dhracia stepped away.
“And Tenzin,” she peered at the ruins of the phoenix, “do not mistake this as the consequence of your complacency. That is still to come.” Lord Dhracia smiled. Lord Dhracia snarled. Lord Dhracia would shove thorny roses down his throat until he choked and died.
The darkness was quick to return to her feet, and she was quick to go with it.
This longer this took, the worse she was going to make this. Tamulus better hope it didn't take long.