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Admit you were toxic. You poisoned me just for another dollar in your pocket.

Now I am the Violence.

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There was a taste on his tongue, bold and austere as blood or bile, seeping through the cracks of his teeth. The taste of royalty.The estate before him was a gaudy piece of trash, uncoiling from the kudzu and brier, erupting like a shadowy gravestone to the bones that built this ugly place. The Palace of Teeth, it had been called from time to time. A gaudy monument to excess and greed. Now, it was nothing but an empty mausoleum, but to Umbra Krauss, it was home. Wrought iron spikes stabbed at the grey sky from atop it's fortress walls, shouting the foreboding message: Beware, for within these walls lives monsters. Where even Death fears to tread.

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Perhaps, one day he would return to this place with the intention of burning it to the ground, but instead he had a date with a ghost.

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The interior style was decaying, though he recalled the regality of it in its day. The walls were barren of portraits and every surface draped with a thick film of dust. Even with its host dead, the chandeliers still flickered to life, a lacquered pestilence descending on the long hallway. The hall was wide, leading out into a chamber, the vacant womb where seated at the head of the long dining room table sat the Demoness. The woman seated at the head of the table might have been a beautiful woman to many, she likely still was, but he couldn't see past her dead eyes and the way that she reminded him so much of the way he felt deep down, hungry.

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"Hello, Mother."[break][break]

The price of your greed

is your son and your daughter

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Umbra had never known hardship, not in the way others might have. He'd heard it his whole life, from people he barely even knew: "You're spoiled, you've never had to fight for shit. Never had to work a day in life, have you?" He had never been poor a day in his life, never gone hungry. Even with his father's temper, he'd never been beat. His parents went out of their way to not touch him or speak to him. It was a shallow, uneventful childhood (if one could even call it that). And perhaps that was just as cruel, in the end, to refuse him softness. The first lesson he learned was how to lie through his teeth, smile and pretend like there was nothing beneath the surface but a vacant empty ghost. He learned the art of war and to veil his emotions so to never give himself away to pain.


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In truth, he'd always known rage.

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His life was enviable, to many who didn't know the price of wealth. He had learned at a young age to decode the inflection of lies on chiseled smiles, guarded behind white teeth, and articulated with the slightest curl of their expression. Life was meaningless without a fight, without a struggle. An empire of wealth was force-fed to him from a young age. Why were they so surprised by the monster they created in the end? Without an empire to build, it was better to burn it all in the end, wasn't it?
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We'll never get free

Lamb to the slaughter

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There's nothing quite so daunting as fighting for superiority with thirteen foot venomous snake. That was of course how his parents had seen the relationship between witch and familiar, a sort of enslavement. Vee had taught him better of course. He never would have thought he'd love something quite so dangerous.
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And she knew him too well, she knew when he was being too arrogant, or too vulnerable, or too stupid. She was the whispering voice in his ear, his conscience. And though it was hardly necessary to protect a creature as formidable as she, he still would have destroyed anyone that so much as touched her.