The blonde man pinned to the floor beside me by a magic seal gurgled.

With a pai
r of sharp cutting pliers, I snipped another knuckle off of one of the fingers o
n his hand in my lap. He bellowed in agony.
"Of... course... you'd win... the Blood Games," the man choked. He peered up at
me hazily with icy blue eyes.
<lj-cut>I smiled. "Yes, because I'm special," I murmured. "But you had just as m
uch of a chance as anyone else." I closed the pliers gently around another knuck
le, then clipped that half of the digit off, too. The man screamed. Blood squirt
ed a moment, then pooled out of the opening down along my hand, warm and wet. "W
e could have did this before the games, you know," I said to him. "The Dark Moth
er could have given you to me to play with before even giving you a chance to ba
ttle with me."
"I'd..." The man paused to swallow. "I'd never... win.... regardless..."
"Probably not. Not against me, no... but"--I stopped to glance down at him--"you
were given a chance. It's a shame you failed. You put up a decent fight, I gues
s. Fate gives us all a chance, yes? You, me, all the others. We're born, miracul
ously, and then we are left to Nature. Nature gives us a chance also, yes? You h
ave had many chances, including this one. Just like the chance to fight on the o
pposing side. That led you here, in our prisons, in our games, and now..." I sni
pped another tip from the man's finger. His scream echoes off the walls.
"I believe... your chances... are not--" the man started, interrupted by saunter
ing near the far doorway.
When I looked up, Roderick was teetering uncertainly at the entrance. I smiled a
nd reached out a plier-holding hand to beckon the boy. "My pet," I cooed. "Where
have you been?"
The void-eyed boy skittered quickly to my side, his little hands curling into th
e leg of my pants. His lip was still bruised purple and black, a stark contrast
from the dead-white of his face. One of his fingers looked just the same as the
lip, neither newly attached pieces of flesh had healed into its deadened state.
Glancing down, I noticed that Roderick's breeches were not clasped as they shoul
d have been. My Roderick is a zombie. He does not urinate or defecate as the liv
ing do.
A certain snake-man's name was written all over this. Nahash.
A flare of almost fatherly possessiveness rose in me, then died away like a stro
ng wind blowing out hot embers. I would deal with the pedophile snake who took l
iberties with my zombie later.
"Here," I said, my sudden voice in the silence causing the blonde man to jump. I
offered the stumps of his fingers toward Roderick. "A snack."
The man groaned, and then groaned again in pain when Roderick greedily shoved th
e wounded hand into his mouth to suckle.
"You are lucky," I told the man as I stood. "Sometimes the Dark Mother forces pr
isoners to play the games without any clothes on." I straddled the man's torso w
hile standing, so I could gaze down at his face. He looked so tired and pained.
He looked hopeless. He was rather young, young enough to be new to armies, to wa
rs, but maybe he still had a family of his own. He was at least a son, at least
a brother perhaps, maybe an uncle somehow. "Think of what would have happened if
you had no armor when you fought me."
Smiling, I bent to jerk the pliers up through the man's shirt and tear it away.
A warrior's body, tanned and muscled. Scarred. "It's a shame you are mortal," I
said. "It's a shame none of this will ever grow back. None of it will regenerate
. That is so mortals do not become greedy, so they know the value of loss, of lo
ss of themselves." Lowering myself, I straddled his waist.
"But," he said at me through gritted teeth, "you were mortal once, too."
"You sound so very sure," I breathed near his face, sneering. "What if I was nev
er mortal? What if I was birthed as a monster. What," I said in a low voice, "if
I'm a god?"
The man hardened his pale and dirty face once more. I laughed.
"You will make a nice raised skeleton," I mused. I dragged a black nail down the
middle of his chest. I dragged it over the rippling tide of his muscles, then c
ircled one of his nipples. The man, like the human he was, moaned in spite of hi
mself. "I would make you a zombie, but... that, unfortunately, is too much work.
"
From my boot, I pulled a serrated stone knife. Onyx. Glittering and deadly. The
blonde man tensed, but instead of chopping readily into him, I placed the jagged
edge of the knife against the underside of my forearm. A forest of cuts littere
d my grey-ish skin there, yet I made one more with a quick flick of my wrist. Bl
ackish blood pooled out of the wound, dribbling down the length of my arm toward
the elbow.
"It'll only hurt a little," I whispered with a smile. "But I can't make any prom
ises."
I passed the fingers of my bleeding arm over the taunt flesh between the man's c
ollarbones. A heavy tension rose up through my chest from my stomach. Power boil
ed for the surface of my being before bursting out of the tips of my fingers and
latching onto the other man's skin. The power felt like weight, like being naus
eated and itchy. It throbbed like pain, burned like fire, curled like an insect
under the skin. It felt like famine, like having no sleep, like being cut or pri
cked with a thousand tiny needles. It felt like decay.
The flimsy, white flesh of the man's chest began to turn brown in a growing spec
k. It broke open like dry skin, peeled back away from the bones and organs, reek
ed of death and musk. The man gave a cacophony of noises, agonized screams of bo
th terror and pain. His skin continued to twirl away from the frame of his body,
like fern leaves. The tightness in my groin had me scratching to remove myself
from my pants. I was hard and eager, aroused by the destructive power flowing th
rough me as well as the man's breaking body. I swirled my free hand down through
the crevice made in his chest, scooping the blood and organ there, bringing tha
t coated hand out to stroke myself with it, with the string of intestines follow
ing it.
The more I watched, the more I ached. I burned with pleasure that only caused my
hand to work harder. The man's shiny white bones went from bleeding red with mu
scle and organ to liquid-less and yellow as the decay set. The farther I dragged
my fingers, the more the power of decay spread, the faster it consumed his scre
aming form until nothing was heard from him but a puff of dusty air and then sil
ence.
He was left mostly skeleton with the forearms, hands, legs, and feet of a human
man. A few of his organs drooped against his spine and along the floor. The deca
y slowly fizzed those down, too, but at that moment he was like a twisted artwor
k of life and death. I came on the bony ribs with my head back and a stutter fal
ling from my lips.
Roderick was still chewing on the stumpy fingers, eyes staring at the adjacent w
all. I slumped down with a sigh of satisfaction to kiss the grinning skull affec
tionately.
"You will be quite beautiful," I said.