(Content Warning: graphic description of child abuse)

Idris Opaling had a glass of dark wine perched in her palm. The alcohol running through her blood left her mind sensitive, almost painfully aware, of how Harold Tarif lacked the buzz her welfling counterparts commonly developed because of how exposed they were to natural elements like sorcery and misery. She didn't realize how peaceful it was without that kind of noise.

"Heavens, is that a real bird?" Harold gestured with his glass over to the large white avian perched his stand in her living room.

"His name is Pax, he's a lunar phoenix. He owed a debt a while back and now lives with all the High Welves, keeping track of the experiments and picking up magic where we cannot. He looks nice but he'll bite if you aren't careful."

"Absolutely mad." Harold giggled.

"We should talk about tomorrow; I've alerted the council and they'll wish to get this ordeal over with quickly."

"My dear, you should have brought it up earlier if you wanted to talk seriously."

She let her eyes close, and let her hands drift along the cool stone of her table. "Probably true. You've found my only weakness Harry; I can't ever wait to celebrate."

"Harry?" He raised a jagged eyebrow.

Idris ignored him. "I want it to be you."

Tarif seemed to stumbled across that sentence. "You want me to do...what?"

"I want you to kill them, you're the only one fit to do it."

Tarif leaned over the counter. Idris remembered, just for a moment that one of the deadwings had been under his care for a long time. She wondered if he still felt a connection to it. She desperately hoped he was a strong as she thought he was.

"I am, aren't I?" His voice was dangerously sober. "I'm the only one to do it."

She took another sip from her glass, the taste of grapes and pride burned across her cheeks. "My champion."

"You think the boy is really going to be the key to it all?" His eyes were dark, she loved the way they looked like coals. There was so much potential there.

"It's the only deadwing that has never been through my residential. It has to mean something."

"Oh, I've heard so many rumors of that place. They're supposedly completely docile after a few weeks, how do you do it?"

A stained smirk unfolded across her lips. "You're asking about my proudest accomplishment Harold, my magnum opus. You should have asked earlier if you wanted to talk serious."

"Well?" His face grew ever closer.

She smiled like a forked tongue might slip out from between her fangs, "I can't touch them, that's a rule. Once they pass the walls, I make myself a punishment on sight, while that makes it impossible to train them myself, it makes breaking it open so much more fun."

His coal eyes were wide and so intoxicatingly fixed on her. She craved this. She wanted every single living thing to stare at her like Harold Tarif did. She wanted the country to be her residential.

"I control food and water, I'll train the older deadwings to go after newcomers for rewards, if one of them hears plans to escape and tells me it gets rewarded, therefore none of them trust each other. I train them so that as long as I'm within its line of sight it's eyes will always be on me. Then there's...extracurriculars."

"I'm listening."

Idris walked over to a small bookshelf stuffed with thin pamphlets. "I keep files on each of them, personally. I find out what hits home and turn it into a chisel for my hammer. You'd be surprised how many of them are twisted by the thought of causing harm to living things, I keep a hutch of small rodents on sight and pick a deadwing to kill and skin it for dinner. Sometimes I pretend it's a gift, I make it give the creature a name, I feel the gods smiling down on me when I tell it to pick up the knife."

"What if they refuse?"

Idris let out a barking laugh. "They don't. They can't. If it is being difficult, I will make them dream what I want them to do until it comes to me begging. Between me and anything else, I will always be less painful. I am the only door and I still hold all the keys. That is how I break them."

His eyes were wide awe. "Incredible, you have it all under your control."

"Of course, it's my purpose in life."

"I want it to be you."

Idris let herself sink into those eyes, into the rough skin of his weathered hands.

"Even if it means my side won't get our magic benefits anymore. No more bottled fireworks, instant light, potions of strength, they're all cheap tricks anyway. I want it to be you. You're the only one to do it. You deserve it."

"I do, don't I?"

His forehead pressed against hers. His hands were on her waist. She could smell his sour breath; it was cold on her flushed cheeks.

"Won't the council throw a fit if they find out, hic, you've been involved with-" his eyelids fluttered- "me?"

"There's no law against having a good time. Besides," She whispered into his ear, "after tomorrow, they'll be no difference between me and a King."

She saw a glimpse of his scapula underneath the unbuttoned neck of Harold's uniform. The only evidence of a backbone. The strongest part of her reminded Idris of how her teeth ached. An inaudible part of her wanted to run, it screamed of how she would regret this. She'd had to force herself to stop listening decades ago.

"You want to see where it happens?"

Harold's nostrils flared like a bear with its beady black eyes stuck on a small, helpless living creature. Idris reached out, Harold grasped her fingers, his hand was so much larger, rougher, it swallowed hers whole. He could have made a fist and broken her wrist.

Her finger dragged against the cobbled stone walls of her tower. The stairwell was torchlit and lined with tapestries of High Welflings that had come before her. Usually when a body came up these stairs, she was carrying it. Usually only one of the breathed. Usually the human blade was lodged in its heart not in a scabbard at his hip.

"It smells like strawberries." Harold noted, looking around in awe.

"Of course, I couldn't have the stench of decomposition stinking up my bedchambers below. I'm not...barbaric." The word caught in her throat.

He paused in front of her wall of surgical tools, staring at her countless knives, all different sizes.

"I've never seen so many fine blades, not even in the King's War Room." His jaw hung open.

"You're surprised."

"I don't think it's any secret our peoples consider the other...simpler."

"Barbaric."

"One way to put it."

He thinks the same of you.

"One of us is right."

Harold glanced at her in his peripheral. "I'm surprised you admit it."

"Oh please, your entire kingdom is stoned half the time on enchanted wypskie imported from us. Your society would collapse if my people stopping making pocket spells simply because humans wouldn't be able to bear the inconvenience." Her teeth ached; she was so empty.

"Ah, but..." Harold's grin flashed in the dim torchlight. "Where I'm from, we fight our own demons, darling."

"Where would you be without my demons?" She spat.

His smile faltered.

"Harold. This room, my job..."

"What about it?" His voice was stiff from the cold.

The only redeemable part of Idris Opaling finally had the breath to speak out.

Her hands slammed against the metal of her operating table. "It eats me up, it burns me from the inside out. It bred something horrible within me, something I haven't been able to get rid of on my own. I need your help."

He turned, "what is it, love?"

"Sympathy, for them."

Her mouth was full of pain. She touched her lips; her fingers came away with blood on them. The ache in her mouth became numb.

"For...the deadwings?" He didn't move.

She shuffled towards him. "They are hell in a skin that looks just like mine. For years I've searched for a remedy. I'm certain the cure is to take one's life myself. Tell me what's like to kill. Ease my suffering, I beg you."

His all-encompassing hand landed on her shoulder. Her blood dripped down slowly onto the metal table between her shaking shoulders.

"I don't understand."

Her hands curled into a fist around that small voice and ripped its head from its shoulders. "I want it to be you."