Sometimes it feels as though there is too much inside of me. Like there is that jotun-bitch’s serpent still hanging over my head, but in place of my eyes the venom falls into my mouth and I have to swallow it. Sometimes it feels I am fit to overflow — never burst — bursting is something you do with things that aren’t your own. But I own this. This is mine. No one gave it to me — I made it myself. It’s mine. So I overflow. I just become myself a little too much. The lies start to blend and things become real. Really real. Not just the Trickster or the Mayhemmonger, but all of the individual motes of dust and air and water and everything else that makes me up.

I’ve overflowed. Feels like spittle running down your chin when you’ve got a woman’s ankles on your shoulders and have a pillow over her face to keep her from making any sound. Itchy and irritant and cold, you want to wipe away the sensation all at once, but ahh, there it is. And it’s savage and barbaric and glorious and you want it so much more because of that. Because you want to be disgusting.

I want to be disgusting.

And there she is, lying in her hole in the dirt. A man is a bitch is a bitch is a man and she’s dead. Quite dead. Tasted it on the soft little wrinkles underneath her tongue. She’s quiet, too. And I want them all to be as quiet as she is. And when I want, all those things that used to matter cease to exist. I am not a father. I am not a brother or a lover.

And more and more it has been speaking to me. Plaintive little whispers in the dark when no one is there to bring me around to listen to happy little tales of boyhood splinters where times happened to agree and smiles were had. These moments, I am here and it is now. And more than anything I want to see death and hurt. I want to feel it on my hands like a thick and loud mucous that refuses to drip because it is whole and vital and still struggling to belch life into pathetic and gasping faces of those of whom betrayed me or hurt me. All at once, I am so aware. Everyone told me of an overwhelming relief that existed in confiding in the sanctity of the truth. Hah. What utter and total tripe. Shit, I say. Perfectly contrived and rotten shit.

I am this. Overflowed. Disgusting. And rather than happy, I am content. How does someone feel happy? How does it feel? How does love feel? Do I feel it? Have I felt it? Am I feeling it?

All of these words that I can use with such glorious precision and eloquence, and for the life of me, I cannot tell you what they mean.

Maybe that is why I am so damned perfect. I am a creature of whole and round inquiry, a moebius question — hah! — there are never any answers to catch with this gaping mouth that spits and whispers and cries and vomits like some sick and twisted child, neglected and dejected and rejected and all things in between but never — no, never! — beyond.

And he is back, too. She leaves and he arrives, as if one accomplishment can only ever be dwarfed by new challenge. He speaks twice as well as I. I cannot keep up. Poetry lives on the tip of his tongue and sits to mock me there where it knows I am too coward to reach out and take it for myself, that I could tear its screaming head off with my front teeth. I want to steal it.

So then everything that has overflowed is quelled for a time — I need to think, need to play. It needs to be fun. I cannot be bored. I need to… to play. All the misery and imperfection and inadequacy, and I need to have a game of it. It needs to have a method. Does he know that sometimes I see what he sees and then I can’t see at all? Shards of glass in my hands and I want to do more, but there are people — stupid, careful people with their hands on my arms and taking all the glass out of the room. I like to bleed and I like to see them bleed.  I have seen warmbloods bleed. I bleed the same color. It’s comforting to see it happen because it means that despite all of their mockery, when you strip them naked and tear off their skin, they’re just the very same as me. Taste the same. Move the same.

I do not suppose that they know how blessed they are that they live so far apart from this terror within me. That plays sport as guessing what they would say before death — ahh, because that is the very moment that men are the very most honest, you see. Offer me gold. Offer me women. Offer me power. Some curse in my face, call me a coward.

But I’ve killed no one. All of the fantasy — Fandral’s blasted tongue all sinew and frayed at the seams as it is torn from his traitor’s skull, Sif’s beautiful body raped and beaten and cowed into submission. I do none of it.

Why.
Why, after everything, do I want to be all right?
It is, after all, just a game.
Just a game.
This is fun.
I enjoy it.
I enjoy myself.

Don’t I?